What does "ski the slow line fast" mean?

[Monique]

What are those ways? Do you use "Direction" as Kevin explained it or "Friction"(skidding)? Or some of both? (which is OK!)

Slow Line Fast is using Direction(line) with minimal skidding while trying GO there.

Both. I tend to use more smearing (the polite term for skidding) than direction. I've been working with direction on the groomers the last few days, though. I most definitely have the bad habit of getting too fast for comfort and then slamming on the brakes to slow down. Also a "dead spot" between turns, especially on steeps or scraped-off stuff, where I just kind of ride it out in a straight traverse until I'm comfortable with the speed.

The kinds of turns in Bob's trampoline video work for me in non-challenging terrain - getting into it on more challenging terrain is, er, challenging. Especially as I'm trying to work on flow (work on flow, what a contradiction!) rather than giving myself a bunch of specific actions and tasks to do. BUT - I have noticed in the last few days that if I use turn shape at the top of a scraped-off section, I'm much more in control than if I try to ski it my "usual" way. Duh, right?

 

[Monique]

I like my words, but they don't usually enhance our kinesthetic sense.

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LOL. I like to think I understand technical ski advice a *little* more than that. On the slopes with an instructor, I give any piece of direction the old college try, but if it doesn't make sense to me, I just shelve it for the while. Sometimes it comes back to me later and it suddenly helps; other times it just fades away. But online, I have plenty of opportunity to ruminate and pester.

 

[Kneale Brownson]

LOL. I like to think I understand technical ski advice a *little* more than that. On the slopes with an instructor, I give any piece of direction the old college try, but if it doesn't make sense to me, I just shelve it for the while. Sometimes it comes back to me later and it suddenly helps; other times it just fades away. But online, I have plenty of opportunity to ruminate and pester.

If it doesn't make sense, you should ask the instructor for clarification.

 

[SBrown]

Ski more, think less.

 

[Tricia]

I struggled with this concept for years as well, because I spent too much time parsing the words as opposed to studying the movement.

Like Binder, I struggled with the concept for a long time. I have a brain that seems to need steps to the process in order for me to get the feeling that seems to come naturally to others.
I recall some frustration on @bud heishman 's part when I was taking clinics from him at Rose. He'd say(something like) "when you do this, you'll feel that".

For me, I needed to break through a wall of not feeling what I think I was supposed to be feeling.
I finally got it on a random ski day when I was out skiing by myself and happened to run into a ski instructor friend. He asked me what I was working on so I told him and he said, "let me give you one pointer and then we'll just ski"
THAT WAS IT! It was almost like I had a puzzle that was almost complete but there was one piece missing.

 

[AmyPJ]

Both. I tend to use more smearing (the polite term for skidding) than direction. I've been working with direction on the groomers the last few days, though. I most definitely have the bad habit of getting too fast for comfort and then slamming on the brakes to slow down. Also a "dead spot" between turns, especially on steeps or scraped-off stuff, where I just kind of ride it out in a straight traverse until I'm comfortable with the speed.

The kinds of turns in Bob's trampoline video work for me in non-challenging terrain - getting into it on more challenging terrain is, er, challenging. Especially as I'm trying to work on flow (work on flow, what a contradiction!) rather than giving myself a bunch of specific actions and tasks to do. BUT - I have noticed in the last few days that if I use turn shape at the top of a scraped-off section, I'm much more in control than if I try to ski it my "usual" way. Duh, right?

You and me both!! I think you just described me to a T. On some steeper stuff, IF it's not hard/icy/scraped off, I tend to do a combination of skidding and actual turn shaping. If it's icy/scraped, I pretty much skid the whole time. Which frustrates the hell out of me. Because skidding does NOT work in powder or chowder or crud, as we all know.

 

[AmyPJ]

Like Binder, I struggled with the concept for a long time. I have a brain that seems to need steps to the process in order for me to get the feeling that seems to come naturally to others.
I recall some frustration on @bud heishman 's part when I was taking clinics from him at Rose. He'd say(something like) "when you do this, you'll feel that".

For me, I needed to break through a wall of not feeling what I think I was supposed to be feeling.
I finally got it on a random ski day when I was out skiing by myself and happened to run into a ski instructor friend. He asked me what I was working on so I told him and he said, "let me give you one pointer and then we'll just ski"
THAT WAS IT! It was almost like I had a puzzle that was almost complete but there was one piece missing.

I tend to do my best skiing when I am alone. The parallels between "that feeling" when skiing and "that feeling" when riding an upper-level show horse are so much the same. It's easy for me to get it on a horse--been riding my entire life. So I get frustrated with skiing because it doesn't come so easily to me, since I started as an adult and I'm not the most coordinated person on the planet.

SO sometimes it just takes one little tip, like you said, that sets off a chain of lightbulb moments.

 

[bbinder]

So - if the words don't make sense to me but the movement and the feel do, maybe I should just ignore the words?

No, don't ignore the words. Just don't get hung up on them. Thinking about the words reminds me to slow down my movements and be more patient in the turn. This has persuaded me to get on the new turning edge earlier so that I don't accelerate so fast when I hit the fall line. Then I don't have to skid abruptly to brake and slow my speed. Then I am carrying enough speed through transition so that my hips/center of mass will move across my skis using momentum as opposed to conscious/forced effort. And so on...

 

[SBrown]

No, don't ignore the words. Just don't get hung up on them. Thinking about the words reminds me to slow down my movements and be more patient in the turn. This has persuaded me to get on the new turning edge earlier so that I don't accelerate so fast when I hit the fall line. Then I don't have to skid abruptly to brake and slow my speed. Then I am carrying enough speed through transition so that my hips/center of mass will move across my skis using momentum as opposed to conscious/forced effort. And so on...

I have issues when there are too many words, so yeah, this. I absolutely know that I struggle to process words and "do stuff" at the same time. So I try to think about the words when I'm not "doing stuff," and hopefully the words have turned to intuition (? not sure if that's quite right) by that time. But when they are still words, they must be very few or they don't work so good for me. If I were trying to become a technically sound skier, I would need a lot more video than words.

 

[Monique]

If it doesn't make sense, you should ask the instructor for clarification.

Well, of course I do! But sometimes things just don't click, or the 15 ways the instructor presents it aren't the 16th way that I need for it to make sense. Also, I tend to ask a *lot* of questions during lessons, so sometimes the other students get annoyed and I need to shut up for a while ;-)

 

[SBrown]

Ski more, talk less.

 

[Jerez]

I'm no expert, but had the privilege years ago to attend one of Bob's Boot Camps where this was worked on a lot, so I am pretty sure I won't screw this up.

Here's another way to express it.. One can go really fast back and forth across the hill (turning) without going fast down the hill. Hence slow line...fast. It may feel like you are going fast, and you are, but you are not moving down the fall line fast.

Not to lose the idea of intent here, which is important, you intend to go fast in your forward momentum, even as fast as you can. (Sometimes I say Grrrrrr to myself as I go.) Yet, because you complete your turns almost going uphill, you will not gain speed down the hill.

Mind you, one needn't ski this way all the time. If you are in a place where there is no obvious slow line, like a chute or a lift line, or a crowded bunny slope, by all means brake!

 

[Doug Briggs]

I got better at skiing by doing and trying to keep up with someone better than me. Most of the time in the non-racing world, that was my brother. That is where I learned what @Pete in Idaho so aptly refers to as flow. Like some of you, the words are frequently more confusing than helpful. Funny, since I'm a geek and can be quite analytical.

Plenty of skill can be learned by drilling and listening to instruction. The slow line fast is describing a method of going down the hill. It focuses on carving turns and maintaining speed over the snow. It is a plan to be executed with skills already learned. It resembles, to me, a slalom without gates. High efficiency, high energy, big trampoline effect. It is a great demonstration of pretty advanced ability. Around this time of year I do a lot of it. It unfortunately gets the yellow jackets attention because while your speed down the slope isn't that great, your actual speed is pretty significant.

When the terrain gets more challenging (steeper or icier), the only way maintain arc to arc turns is to engage the edge more. How do you do engage the edge more? Higher edge angles. How do you get higher edge angles? You have to get your hips further inside the turn. Often times this can feel quite intimidating or unsettling. You don't trust your edge. You worry about landing on your hip.

I think the most frequent reason that higher edge angles fail is that the inside ski gets too much pressure, removing pressure from the outside ski. In the BB GIF, he is getting pretty big angles. If that were ice, he'd have to be 95% on his outside ski to maintain edge control. You can practice this on less challenging terrain, but you have to have high speeds to be able to develop the angles. So try to get extreme angles on the greens and blues so you are comfortable getting extreme angles and balancing on one edge, then take those extreme angles on to the tougher terrain.

Skidding, smearing, brushed turns all refer to turns that are achieved by allowing the ski to slide sideways to some degree rather than follow a single incised arc. There is nothing wrong with these types of turns. They have their place. Just not in skiing the slow line fast. Don't make apologies for brushing turns unless you are trying to carve turns.

 

[KevinF]

Skidding, smearing, brushed turns all refer to turns that are achieved by allowing the ski to slide sideways to some degree rather than follow a single incised arc. There is nothing wrong with these types of turns. They have their place. Just not in skiing the slow line fast. Don't make apologies for brushing turns unless you are trying to carve turns.

See, I don't agree with this. In my mind, skiing a slow line fast has nothing to do with how "purely carved" a turn you're making. In your definition, nobody has ever skied a bump run or trees with a "slow line fast" methodology

I'm far more familiar with bump skiing, so I'll stick with that description. The "slide and slam" technique of bump skiing uses friction (and impact) for speed control. Contrast that with actually turning around the bump and using the uphill sides of the bump for speed control. In the latter case, you are still making turns far too small to be anything close to "carved", so there is some element of friction-based speed control... but there is a much larger element of line-based speed control. So I still consider the latter to be slow-line-fast. You are skiing a slow enough bump line as fast as you can.

I have yet to find a bump field with such nice bumps that I can manage "slow line fast" the whole way through. I know my knees feel a lot better at the end of the day if I did more "slow line fast" than "fast line slow" though.

Same thing though on groomers, or anywhere. Slow line fast is a mindset, not a technique. A beginner in a snowplow turn can be either constantly braking (fast line slow) or be trying, in Bob's words, to "go there"... in which case, they're in slow-line fast mode.

 

[Monique]

When the terrain gets more challenging (steeper or icier), the only way maintain arc to arc turns is to engage the edge more. How do you do engage the edge more? Higher edge angles. How do you get higher edge angles? You have to get your hips further inside the turn. Often times this can feel quite intimidating or unsettling. You don't trust your edge. You worry about landing on your hip.

Hah. This almost perfectly describes the conversations I had with my husband today. We lapped Copperopolis all day except for two bump runs. He was trying to help me figure out this slow line fast thing and also how to get on edge. I apparently do not trust my edge, and I definitely worry about landing on my hip. I feel in control on scrapey stuff by intentionally skiing on my bases, not my edges; when I try to edge, I don't commit enough, and then my outside foot loses grip, and then I freak out and ski even less dynamically than before.

He said that I do use my edges, but he never sees the direction of my skis perfectly match my direction of travel; my skis are always at a bit of an angle compared to the direction of travel.

That being said, he took some video for me, and while I'm clearly not skiing like Bob Barnes, I'm actually pretty happy with what I see. Not that it's proper carving, and I do want to get there. But if I saw someone skiing like that, I wouldn't immediately be categorizing the ways in which their skiing sucks.

The thing is, my husband is not an instructor, and he has a lot of good observations, but maybe not the toolset to get me from point A to point B. I said maybe I should take a private lesson specifically on using edges and carving, because the lesson club stuff is going to be in the steeps, the bumps, the trees, and the powder as soon as possible, and what I really need is remedial work. I'm more comfortable on a 40 degree slope and crud than I am on a scraped-off blue, and that's just kinda messed up.

Don't make apologies for brushing turns unless you are trying to carve turns.

And there's the crux of it. I enjoy smearing and have gotten pretty darn good at it, but I don't want to be doing them just because they're all I can do. The habit of skidding is so ingrained that I can't quite convince my muscles to tip the skis without also rotating just a bit. After half a day of trying, I felt like I could start to tip confidently on the section between the top of Excellerator and the top of the actual run - ie, where it's pretty darn flat. When I was on a blue slope, and hey it didn't help that some of it was pretty scraped, I couldn't do it.


I think I'm getting a pretty good feeling of what is meant by "the slow line fast", even if I can't execute it (and I can't, not yet). So all of this discussion is maybe another off-topic that we can call "things wrong with Monique's skiing" ;-)

In my mind, skiing a slow line fast has nothing to do with how "purely carved" a turn you're making. In your definition, nobody has ever skied a bump run or trees with a "slow line fast" methodology

I have had the trampoline feeling; but as described above, I'm almost certainly not carving.

 

[bud heishman]

I agree with Kevin, this is an intent rather than a technique. It is a psychological thing not a technique thing. We all have an internal speed limit, which when we hit it, our intent instantly changes from "Going" to "braking". The challenge is to increase the threshold where we switch from GO to Brake. Imagine skiing a steep narrow pitch and being quite comfortable making hop turns down the pitch. Now imagine skiing the same pitch but rather than hopping from one edge set to the next, trying to finish a turn with the skis moving forward thru the finish rather than sideways and keeping the skis on the snow while steering the skis lightly around the top of the turn to a rounded turn finish. The intent is to ski around a slow line as much as possible realizing the turn will not be carved but that, as much as possible we keep the skis moving forward rather than sideways.

Ron LeMaster talked, in his last book, about steering angles and that when the skis steering angle was greater than 45 degrees to the direction of travel the skis were braking more than they were turning. Less than 45 degrees and they are turning more than braking. Think about this on a continuum and you can see two polar different intents at each end. When the ski's steering angle is minimized toward the pure carved turn the skis are moving forward with the intent to GO, conversely when the ski's angle is 90 degrees to the direction of travel there is zero turning and the intent is to BRAKE. Everything in between is some degree of braking and turning. Our intent should be to brake (or control our speed with friction) as little as possible and control our speed as much as possible with direction and gravity. Understanding that many times we will not achieve a full carve, but remaining as close to this end of the spectrum as possible is our intent.

 

[Monique]

Understanding that many times we will not achieve a full carve, but remaining as close to this end of the spectrum as possible is our intent.

... Why should that be our intent? Knowing how to carve is intrinsically good because having more tools in my toolbox is intrinsically good, but why should my intent be to always carve instead of smear? I hear a lot of people talking about how fun carving is, but - so is smearing! I had a few incredible runs last spring where I would do these big power slides down corn bumps and it was just glorious. I don't see why I should feel like that was somehow inferior because I wasn't trying to carve.

 

[Doug Briggs]

Skiing the slow line fast entails using gravity to the fullest and controlling speed through turn shape rather than using friction from stemming, pivoting, scraping, skidding and all the other adjectives that create friction.

Along the continuum between these two extremes is: Turning. Where you control your path by actively guiding the skis with minimal skidding. Slow line fast.

See, I don't agree with this. In my mind, skiing a slow line fast has nothing to do with how "purely carved" a turn you're making.

The two quotes from Bud and Chris are where I interpreted their definition of Slow Line Fast as actively trying to skid less and carve more with pure carve the ideal as more carve is less skid, thus more GO.

I agree with Kevin, this is an intent rather than a technique. It is a psychological thing not a technique thing.

That is what I was getting at when I said: " The slow line fast is describing a method of going down the hill. It focuses on carving turns and maintaining speed over the snow. It is a plan to be executed with skills already learned."

This is why I usually stay out of tech conversations. I'm not strong on debating. I initially commented because I got the impression that some of the posters that were having a hard time taking the Slow line Fast felt that it was wrong to be brushing their turns.

 

[Kneale Brownson]

The main point is completing a turn to the point of getting where you want to be at the pace you desire, regardless of the turn "technique". You can be in a wedge or railing a carve if it's meeting your intent at the speed you want.

 

[LiquidFeet]

Can't wait to see where this thread goes.

From the posts above, it sounds like "skiing the slow line fast" means skiing faster is the preferred intent of skill-building. Is that what people mean?

In my world, "speed control" means keeping oneself in a psychological space that feels safe. What counts as "speed" and "fast" is relative to what's going on in the skier's head. There are some skiers who are uncomfortable with fear. For those skiers to have fun, they need to have a feeling that their speed is under control. (Let's leave out of the conversation for the moment those who are comfortable with fear and seek it out.)

So with those skiers in mind I'm thinking that building skill may not mean intentionally going faster (in any direction), but going something-elser. I guess what I'm saying is that maybe "skiing the slow line fast" may be the perfect thing to aim for with some people some of the time, but not all people all of the time.