SunSurfer

The World Masters Winter Games will be held in Innsbruck in 2020. There are no snowboarding events. To me, that reflects the overall focus in snowboarding on youth, and the degree to which older boarders are ignored.

Freeride/freecarving in hard boots with stepins. Snowboarding for grown-ups! That's how I often describe it to those who ask about the equipment on chairs and gondolas. The manufacturers are missing a whole marketing demographic with significant discretionary money to spend.

The body position relative to the board on heel side is an area where there are at least 2 distinct approaches. Most of the racers I see in videos use the style that SG describes and Nevin G uses. Vic Wild and Ester Ledecka are a little more + on heelside than many. Others advocate and ride in the + position both toe and heelside for freecarving. This is the approach I prefer. Both ways can be used to carve effectively. And the extreme carvers are different again, + on heelside and - on toeside.

You carve pretty well, certainly well enough to attract the attention of people you pass. In the video sequence the turns gradually get tighter and the speed control better as the years pass. Your arms still wave about, and touch down for balance more than might happen if your balance over your edge was more secure. Does it feel at times as if you fall into your turns, rather than smoothly remaining balanced over the edge as the board angle changes? When you get off balance coming into your heelside the arm on that side tends to the rear of the board and you lose your forward facing upper body position. How does the edge feel under your feet? Are you happy with the steadiness with which the edge holds on both sides? That's something subtle that a video doesn't necessarily show well. How would you answer the question you have posed? ---------- Like you I watch slow motion YouTube videos for clues and guidance. Different boards expose different faults in my riding and have taught me different things. The little video that I have of my own riding lets me see how others see me. A recent video confirmed that I was letting my heelside arm drift back a little and that I should work more on getting my shoulders square across the board in heelside. A more experienced rider I rode with (Larry Castruita) had offered that critique and I had not believed him until I saw it for myself. I ride gates in NASTAR at Snowmass when I am able to visit the USA for the same reason you do, it forces me to make turns when I may not be ready to do so. Gradually falling NASTAR handicaps provide an objective measure of progress. My goal is a smooth, balanced, controlled and aesthetic style. Different riders, different goals. What is your goal?

That said, and any orthopaedic surgeons present gently teased, I have 3 stainless steel screws in my dominant hand index finger where a colleague repaired a fracture that included the joint surface. The finger has full range of movement and no arthritis. This anesthesiologist's hand works well despite recurrent abuse and I am very grateful. Now I just try to persuade snowboarders and skiers whose hands are their livelihood to adequately protect their hands. Edit: Hand armour was a game changer for me. Didn't worry anymore if I got low enough that the snow came to meet my hand.

Yes, orthopaedic surgeons are just "warm" carpenters, and bone, unlike wood, regrows so they don't have to as precise as a joiner/furniture maker would be.

If you're anything like me, finding you are making progress in your riding gives a great sense of satisfaction and pleasure. I am enormously grateful to the people who have shot video of me at the various sessions I've been to and then made it available to me. Been trying to pay that debt forward recently.

Both of these qualities are technique dependent but also have equipment dependencies. Speed control on steeps is achieved a) by friction e.g. extreme carving body drag, or by deliberate skidding/slarved your turns or b) by continuing to carve, tightening your turn radius and making a turn with more degrees of arc by turning more across or uphill. To do this needs either a tighter SCR and/or higher edge angulation. Edge hold at high speeds is better at larger turn radii. Research on line for details about the "ideal carving equation", but the essence is that for any given sidecut radius there is a maximum speed where a clean carve can be achieved. Once that speed is exceeded then the carving groove will break and increasing degrees of skidding and snow spray occur. The smaller the SCR the lower that maximum speed. So the 2 qualities you seek are at odds with each other. You will need to compromise, or find a suitable balance point in performance in your discussions with your board builder. That said, I have a 2017 Coiler Nirvana Energy Torsion + 174cm, SCR 12-14m, that gives me great speed control on steeps, and feels stable to me at speeds of up to 70km/hr. I also recently rode a Thirst Superconductor 175? which if I didn't already have my Coiler would have been a Buy Now!!! because it had those same qualities. It's only in the last 2-3 years my skills have got to the point where I can make really good use of the performance differences in different boards. In my experience good equipment is important, but technique is utterly crucial to both of the qualities you want in your riding.

There was an online SCR calculator built by a guy called Nate ??? which if I remember correctly also calculated the effective SCR as the boards incident angle to the snow changed.

Used belt sander to - a) put canting angles on the F2 lift blocks? b) put canting angles on the soles of your UPZs? c) ground off the protruding screws in your ankle????? d) something else again???????????

What about outside of your boots? I'm imagining you looking like the Michelin man on a snowboard at those sort of temperatures!

Sticker post has reached New Zealand. Thanks Jack.

Lower body: Agree with @Gremlin , your back knee looks tucked in, and you seem to be very knock kneed relative to the placement of your feet. Can't tell if that's just your anatomy, or due to boot cuff canting, or TD3 binding cant, or a combination of any/all of those 3. From your reply above you'd benefit from going through a revision of your boot binding setup, from boot insoles out. http://beckmannag.com/hardboot-snowboarding/hardboot-binding-configuration and/or Your whole body (upper and lower) looks tensed and relatively rigid, not tensed just enough for control and relaxed enough to aborb the bumps. Checking for issues around binding setup and stance distance may help with the lower body and give you a more effective platform for board control and bump suspension. You look to be relatively tall, judging by the your height versus board length, and your stance a little short. Measuring from side of sole of heel to midpoint of kneecap seems to be as good an anatomical guide as any for a starting stance length. Myself, I ride a little longer stance, to the top of my kneecap @ 56cm (approx. 22 inches), bindings (62F/58R) centred on the inserts, with equal 6 degrees of toe and heel lift (using UPZ RC10s, not Raichle/Deeluxe) i.e. centred rather than tending forward, and a relatively upright trunk. A modern design board, like your Donek "Secret", shouldn't need to be ridden "forward" to get it to perform. Your arms are held in front of you and relatively close to your sides. You appear to be using them more to cue the orientation and angulation of your upper body. I find my arms are really useful for helping with fine tuning balance side to side as the board goes edge to edge. Like you, I use the knee on the outside of the turn to help set the edge cleanly, but most of my edge set is now achieved using a sense of tilt/pressure felt through the soles of my feet. The recent video of my own riding below (unlisted on YouTube) is provided as a contrast to your own, to illustrate what I mean in terms of knee and arm, position and movement. It was shot on a very shallow Green slope, similar to the one in your video, so the carves are not super deep, under the chairline at West Buttermilk, on a 2017 Coiler Nirvana. The differences will be most visible when the video is played at reduced speed.

Agree there's no shame, but my Coiler Nirvana allowed me to carve it with poorer technique. It took riding, and trying to cleanly carve, an old board last Southern hemisphere winter to open my eyes to the next step of progression in my own carving skills. @TVR above thinks that occasionally going retro makes him a better rider. Plenty of posts where riders are searching for the "perfect board" to actually solve what is most likely a technique problem. What I know from personal experience is that both my new and old boards all perform better as my technique has improved over the years. It ain't just the length(tech) of the wand, it's the way that you wiggle it!

Older boards force you to use technique, not technology, to carve well.

Fresh snow in Aspen and a full plane meant luggage had to be offloaded to have a safe power to plane weight ratio for takeoff after de-icing. Lady in the seat behind me decided she would get upset about this. Her husband tried to tell her it would make no difference, but she was having none of it. I think he would have preferred it if they'd offloaded her. My bags must have been amongst those offloaded because my suitcase arrived home in NZ 4 days after me, and my boards arrive tomorrow. Pilot did his job and got us out and safely.

I was using already the Specialized insoles in my cycling shoes and, as far as I could tell, they were providing effective support. They were available and a fraction of the cost of getting a custom insole set made.

Using Specialized Body Geometry cycle shoe insoles chosen to support my relatively high arched feet, trimmed so that the arch is supported, the insole doesn't protrude beyond the foot silhouette, and the insole fits inside my Intuition Pro Wrap heat moulded liners. Specialized make 3 different Body Geometry insoles to suit different arch heights. https://www.specialized.com/us/en/body-geometry-sl-footbeds/p/130590

If you're in bail bindings rather than stepins a quick fix to get you riding again may be to see if someone can rent you some Dalbello Kryptons or similar cabrio style shell/cuff design. Others may know of other ski boots likely to be able to be hired that might get you going again.

Saw the photo in the linked gallery and thought immediately that it belonged here. Love it!

@Beckmann AG Thanks for the much more accurate and detailed explanation above of the distinction between boot cuff and boot sole/binding canting.

I need your cameraman. He did a sweet job of capturing you in action.

The whole aim of lift/cant, or using flexibly set bail bindings that allow your boots to move in the bindings, is to achieve alignment of your legs that allow you to effectively and comfortably ride your board. Hard boots are "hard", so that changing the angles underfoot will alter the alignment of your lower leg up to the knee. Adjusting the boot cuff canting, that is the angle of the cuff relative to the foot shell does the same thing. Everybody's body shape is different, so that someone saying that outward cant on their front binding worked for them, without understanding all the other variables around stance distance, binding angles, boot cuff alignment, doesn't mean it will help someone/everyone else. Comfort and function are the goal. I've gone through Erik Beckmann's approach in the past to my benefit. I recently developed an alternative approach which can be found by searching YouTube for "binding angle secant curve".

34.05, a Platinum, 2 years ago but it was a one off. I've been running the course at Snowmass every time I've come since 2012. My normal pattern would be bronzes/silvers/mixed in with DNFs as I crashed out of the course. A Gold was an occasion. What was good today was a) the consistency, no crashes, 4 Platinum run's within 0.6 seconds of each other, on both courses, progressively getting faster as I tightened the line. No gates were even touched. b) Snowmass is not a straightforward course. It starts relatively flat for the first 4 gates (the fast skiers pole propel through the first 3), then it veers to the right and steepens with 2 successive gates that need significantly tighter turns if you're not to be late in the line for the entry to the last 7 gates. I've always struggled to get the carve really working for those crucial 2 middle gates with the tighter turns. Video above is from a couple of years ago. You can see me slow as I muck up those gates. Today it felt consistently easy, like I had all the time in the world. My Kessler 162 worked really well for those 2 gates. To make further improvements in time I need to tighten my line and get closer to the gates. A chin bar on my helmet might make me braver, but I have the body and hand armour already.

Just finished the last day of my Aspen visit. Objective evidence of improvement, Snowmass NASTAR Platinum x4 runs today, 2 in each course, lowest handicap 29.30. Very happy boy. http://skiracing.nastar.com/index.jsp?pagename=results&page=comp&compid=830957&year=2019