BS
Thanks for the encouragement. Your 2 disclaimers are strong enough that I can use your enthusiasm and encouragement but not your experience. I know no skiing experts and I have never been a competitive athlete. I have become more athletic in the past 15 years and am trying to awaken my balance system, but it’s still really foreign to me. Group lessons at Winter Park 3 months ago did nothing great for me except keeping me busy for 3 hours and mostly upright, so it’s going to be individual lessons or nothing for me. I’m also going to stick to resorts with decent runout room at the bottom, enough room for a beginner to stop before getting tangled in the catch fence.
Depends on a person’s athleticism, I have taught plenty of adults who turned into excellent skiers, it also helps to have an excellent teacherBS
Then you must not know many skiers. There is at least one well known level three PSIA instructor on this board who didn’t start until much later than that.
And if memory serves, @KingGrump didn’t start skiing until college, and I don’t know whether you have skied with him or not, but if he isn’t a very good skier, I don’t know who is.
Skiing well is 90% attitude and desire, which begets effort.
Choose the individual lessons, and get started now. Why wait? You get older every day. Don't waste the time you've got. Just do it.
Will start as soon as it gets cold again
Side to side, skidded with some edge on downhill ski
Did you gain speed as you got towards the bottom?
Not if I kept doing narrow, side to side skid type turns. Well, the only turn type I can do is the “steer with outside ski plowing while trying to take more and more weight off the inside ski to keep it from dragging and maybe get it close to parallel”, severe version of that on steeper sections, gentler version on lesser slope, really focused on having more load on the downhill ski during this 2 day trip
Somewhere in between
I’m essentially starting my turns with one ski wedged to force the turn to start, then trying to lighten the inside ski more and more. It’s slowly getting better. When I took lessons at Winter Park in Colorado, the instructor tried to teach us the patient turn letting the slightly wedged outside ski start the turn with the inside flattened. Well, my attempt at flattening a ski. My legs still haven’t figured out exactly how to make that happen, mostly because my legs and ankles are still working on keeping me upright. Not trying to be a pain, just telling you that it’s not intuitive to me hoe to maneuver my legs/ankles to get the skis flat other than wiggling things until I feel that ski have no resistance, but it’s still a momentary trial and error each time. Every time I tried to release the inside edge, the turn never just magically started and I had to force it. I really tried to make that kind of turn work and it isn’t working yet. It’s hard to be patient and let the turn develop when I’m beginning to careen down a steep or green or shallow blue Hill.Even when traversing, I’m still mostly sliding sideways kind of like a car drifting. It’s still not comfortable for me to put the edges in during the traverse, though I know that it’s the key for me to get to the next level because you can’t release edges that aren’t set in the first place.
I did a narrow, steep enough blue at Granite Peak that I side slipped down the first 50 feet of it or so until I had more real estate to make turns. However, all I could manage was to keep myself slowed down. My rental ski edges’ quality or my skill quality could not produce a complete stop. I have to assume it’s still me and that I just need to do it more. Until I feel confident, speed is the biggest fear I have when trying to be patient in turns. I think I need to do tons more off-season work on my balance to be able to trust myself at higher speeds, then my turn patience will grow and the edges taking over won’t make me lose my balance and fall.
