Adam Jewell - Search & Affiliate Marketing

After an uneventful travel day to get here, everything kicked off very early in the morning for the fist day of the PSIA National Academy 2008. They had some kind of yoga or something that started at 6:00am or so and while I’m all in favor of exercise, 6am is to early for me. Doug set his alarm close for some ungodly hour which I slept through and instead relied on a wakeup call from the hotel at around 6:30 which provided time to snooze before heading up for breakfast.

I arrived at the Snowbird Tram pavillion where we all sort of self selected our groups based on level of difficulty. On a scale of 1 to 3, I self selected into a group of high 2’s. Back at 7 Springs, I’d go higher but out here there is stuff you can get to that is steep enough to fall to your death or close to it so I tend to be a little more conservative.

The group ended up being about 10 people. Steve Smart was the clinic leader of the group. A great guy, awesome skier and from Canada. I’m not what all of his qualifications are but he teaches in Canada, leads heli-skiing excursions up there (that start at $1,000 per day for unlimited vertical and including meals and lodging - gotta link to his website, cause a grand a day for that is amazing!) and then goes to New Zealand for a few months to teach over there. Between the ski seasons it sounds like he gets a few months off to kick back and relax.

As usual, I started the day out with boot problems. My skiing was off and I wiped out 2x when I lost an edge on the boiler plate that Snowbird is so not well known for. I felt a little ding in the hamstring but it just felt tight, not pulled or torn. I kep going and struggled through the day. By about 10:30am after a couple hours on the slopes my toes felt like they were on fire and it felt like there was a vice crushing my feet. A couple years ago, I was having boot problems when at Whistler, BC (despite what the ski magazines say, Whistler is a waste of money, a BIG waste of money) so went to the Fanatyk ski shop in Whistler for custom boots and footbeds. Very nice people at the shop but considering I paid full retail for the boots and even more for the footbeds, they are among the worst fitting boots I’ve ever had.

I struggled through the rest of the session until lunch and when skiing an agressive bump run felt the hamstring once again and had to come to a stop and just lay on the snow because I pulled it. Fortunately the afternoon was scheduled to be indoors and my feet and hamstring would get a break without feeling like I was missing out on to much.

The elective for the afternoon was an indoor boot fitting clinic type thing. It was conduscted by Jim __________ who has a business doing boot fitting in Aspen. It was an excellent presentation and dove into the physics of the equipment and how the human body (which varies dramatically from person to person) generalyl has to fit into stock equipment built for the “average person” which we all know does not exist.

Jim’s process seems to be to start evaluating the body - things like pronatation first instead of pulling a bunch of boots off the shelf to start trying on as many (especially discount) boot shops start the process with.

It seems like someone should be able to come up with a device or at least a piece of software a person could plug some calculations into to end up with better fitting boots.

Jim took the time to listen to my boot issues, but as expected it wasn’t the kind of thing he tends to work with, prefering instead to start fresh with boots that have no already been modified or mangled by someone else.

Following the boot fitting session, there was a little break and then the first dinner where they also introduced The Movement Matrix which is a series of videos that illustrate various skills at various levels. It’s $14.95 to subscribe to the site for a year which is very reasonable. It could be very useful on a mobile device out on the slopes.

Dinner was an excellent buffet. I ended up a a table with Steve Smart, the leader of our ski group, Mike Rogan who was a PSIA demo team member and the ski school director of Portillio, Chile.

Following dinner, this weary body retired and hit the sack to get some sleep and recharge for another intense day at the PSIA National Academy.