What was your biggest help in learning telemark?

[montrealer]

Interesting. I haven't put much thought into it, but I would say that my stance has been roughly like my XC diagonal stride stance.

Oh and to add to my previous response, in addition to over-edging, I was also going down too low on turns that didn't need it. For a while I did some very gentle turns, almost straight, and without dropping much. (your reference to telehiro reminded me about this)

[MikeK]

Yeah mine is normally that way too... it's just naturally what your body feels in stable and strong.

I find a couple things happen when my feet are too far apart in a tele... I have no idea why this happens, but it seems to be the case...

My skis act more like two skis than one. I get more 'wedge'. I think it has to do with the way your weight is spread out, or the rear ski not wanting to turn... I don't know. It looks more like this:

[video][/video]

Which is OK I guess, but the skis aren't really turning together. I'm not usually skiing on hard snow, so I can see it in my tracks. The skis take two different arcs. The front one turns tighter than the rear.

Then you have the opposite of a really skilled skier like Hiro, where it's almost imperceptible the amount of 'wedge' in his turn. The skis are almost taking the same arc, almost acting like one ski.

I can feel it, but if you look at your tracks you will see the difference. You'll either have two very tight tracks almost the same radius or if you skidded a bit more, it will look like a single track with a smear mid-turn.

Maybe I'm full of shit, but this is where I was talking about driving down into the skis getting into my telemark. When I felt like I was doing that, it felt like my skis were bending together and talking more or less similar paths.

I was just reading something, and it was talking about a fake-a-mark. This is apparently when you just ride your forward ski with all your weight and let the lightly weight rear ski drag behind. It's like what we are doing for our 'parallel' turns or stem Christies or whatever you call them but now in a terrible position having our legs spread out with no stabilizing weight on the rear ski.

I feel like when I'm doing those wedgie tele turns, I'm kind of dancing back and forth. I put a lot of weight on the rear ski, steer the front ski, then add weight to the front ski, and then maybe balance some back to the rear ski after the whole thing is going.

When I feel like I'm driving down into the skis I'm only doing that first step of adding rear weight, steering the ski a bit and compressing as equally as I can on both. I guess maybe having your feet closer together keeps your CM closer the geometric center of both of the skis, making it act more like a single ski. Just a guess...

I dunno... I'm still working with that. Seems like progress but I'll get back to you after I feel I can do it consistently.

[lowangle al]

A tight stance makes it a lot easier to weight and edge both skis. If you are having a problem tipping over towards the inside of the turn, open up your stance for a wider base and better balance. The wider the stance the tighter it will be. When I do open turns sometimes my trailing boot toe is about even with the heel of my lead boot.

The most important thing IMO is to find your center and be able to control how much weight is on each ski while remaining centered. A good exesize was mentioned above about traversing a slope doing lead changes w/o doing turns. This is good but I recomend doing it on a lesser slope where you can go down the fall line instead of across it. It is way easier to get balance when your skis are flat. When you get comfortable with this start doing very slight turns that feel more like you are steering the skis into the turn. A common problem is when your skis start to cross the fall line before the edges are engaged leading to skidding.
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