mallory

Also, y’all are doing a good job of convincing me to try hard boots anyway Any recommendations for a solid board that’ll be wide enough for my size 11 feet? My soft boots are just over 31cm long. For equipment, I’d like to get stuff I’m not going to outgrow immediately, and of course I’m happy to go with something used. And any recs on hard boots? I have fairly wide feet with kinda flat arches, medium volume overall.

Generally speaking, are liners similar enough between ski boots and hard boots such that using my ski liners in a hard boot might work for the first season (or first few weeks at least)? I only have a handful of days on my ski boots and using those liners would at least save some money for the hard boot experiment.

Thanks for the tips, friends! I had the genuine pleasure of meeting Martin last winter, he's awesome and has real passion for the sport and for teaching others. This year, I'd like to invest in as much instruction as I can manage...I'm one of those dummies who has too many years of baked-in, bad habits from casual riding. I'd like to think I was making progress undoing those habits last year, hopefully setting the stage for making some meaningful carving progress this upcoming season. @slaposI am hesitant to jump straight to hard booting because of two things: since I've never tried serious double positive angles, whether my knees will feel great is a big question mark, and secondly, I just really don't like ski boots. I have fully custom-fitted ski boots (Tecnica Mach 1 MV 120, punched out, custom insoles) that I use when I ski with my kiddos, and every time I use them, the discomfort after an hour or two is enough to make me wish I was riding. But if it turns out my knees can handle the angles, I think I'd give hard-booting a go. I guess I'd also like to be better at softboot carving before taking the plunge as well, so it's probably just a matter of time.

Howdy y’all. I wanted to say hi and introduce myself. I caught the softboot carving bug last season and caught it bad. So bad that I’m still thinking about it in the August heat. Because of my duck stance and size 11 boots, I’m stuck on super wide boards, my daily driver of which is a Donek Knapton Twin 157cm x 29cm with a 8.7m sidecut. At the end of last season, I added some Now O-Drive bindings which were amazingly responsive but I only got a couple of days on them before the resorts closed. This upcoming season, I want to try double-positive binding angles and I think I want to try to learn the Korean style of softboot carving. I figure if I can get comfortable with double positive angles, then I hope two things will happen: 1) I can try some boards that aren’t so stinking wide, and 2) I am one step closer to trying hard booting. So, why am I posting exactly? I am fairly certain that my technique will need to change substantially as I move from +15/-6 to e.g. +35/+15. Here around Park City, UT, there’s not a whole lot of options for local k-carving instruction, which means I’m kinda stuck trying to figure things out from the internet. I came across this set of k-carving instructional videos and I’d like to ask the wisdom of this board whether the techniques described are worth pursuing, or if I’d just be picking up bad habits I’ll have to unlearn. Anyhow, here’s to an eventually awesome winter, and I hope to meet some of y’all at MCC this February. cheers, mallory