AdamCord

@Horton it's more to me about initiating the turn with your body. People have been talking about leading the turn with their COM for a long time, but we get fixed on the idea that our COM is at our hips, so we think we should lead everything with our hips. What happens is we end up leaving our upper body behind, ESPECIALLY when you try to also keep your shoulders level. If instead you maintain a more stacked position, like how a human is designed to stand, and lead the turn from a stacked position, you have more leverage to initiate the turn and you also can maintain that position all the way back to a stacked hook up with the line. For reference go watch Rob Hazelwood.

Looks like 5 broken ribs for @adamhcaldwell, and that was BEFORE he skied in the finals. I guess we can't call him a pansy anymore?

Jeff Surdej runs it and he was prettttty busy this past week running Nationals and US Open.

@Not_The_Pug .82 2.485 6.80 7 for 32 women. Boot 29

100% a wrinkle in the graphic layer. Very common. Nothing to worry about

@Nanu_Nanu wait till you hear what 1/100” fin change does to your ski ?

@Horton "Jeff called Bud Pennington who until recently worked at Chevy Performance - next gen Corvette development and such. Bud’s answer was unequivocally yes. Octane would impact how fast the motor could deliver another 100 RPM." This exactly. We need the motor to respond very quickly to an applied load that comes on in milliseconds. How it responds will help determine whether a skier digs in and gets overloaded or if they start accelerating early and can stay on an early line. This is why on the longer lines it doesn't matter as much. At the 38-39-41 the skier has 10 feet or less to get the swing going. If the boat responds slowly you will get overloaded, and because ZO wants to get a good time, it will have to keep accelerating as you swing into the preturn, making it more difficult to get high on the boat as it tries to run away form you. I understand the skepticism. For most older boats octane doesn't really matter much if at all. For most of the line lengths people ski at it doesn't really matter a ton. But on new boats at very short rope lengths? It makes a huge difference.

That is looking great! The two things you are missing have to do with intensity and timing. While you’re making the moves through center very well, your intensity overall looks very low. As the rope get shorter the loads WILL go up, and you need to be prepared to handle them. Get more aggressive on your 28 and 32 passes, because you’re going to need that aggression at 35. The second part is about timing with the boat vs the course. As the rope gets shorter you will necessarily be later relative to the buoys in order to stay in time with the boat. It’s just the geometry of the handle’s path around the pylon. You need to accept that you’re going to be narrower coming into the ball, and further down course on the back side of the turn as the rope gets shorter. Pay attention to the boat to keep the line tight and keep skiing!

@OldboyII email sent. Building skis as fast as we can, @Horton’s review has swamped us a bit

@jayski Nationals could add value by becoming more of an Expo event than just a competition. If we chose sites where there are more than 3 lakes, like Okeeheelee or Bakersfield, ski and boat companies could have time slots where people could check out and drive/try the latest gear. This would give the sponsors more of a reason to invest in the event. We could also make the US Open bigger and put more of a spotlight on it, giving people a chance to watch the best skiers compete in the evenings. Schedule the US Open so it's spread out over maybe 3 evenings, and especially make sure it's when the kids are there so they have something to get excited about and aspire to, and give them a chance to get pictures and autographs with the top pros. Lastly make it more of a social event, with food/beer served in the evenings when the US Open rounds are being held. Give people a reason to hang out and enjoy the spectacle of the events, talk about the skiing they did in the day, the ski they got to try, or the jump Freddy just made, all over a beer with friends. That's an event I would want to go to.

@jcamp how far did you have to drive to get to regionals this year? Regionals for me was 1,300 miles from home. You're right that states wouldn't work for a lot of places, if we are dead set on keeping a regionals style tournament then some of the regions are just too big and need to be split up.

@jcamp all the more reason to scrap regionals. It's a system that doesn't work in vast swaths of the country.

@lpskier I ski Open instead of MM specifically for this exemption. If it didn’t exist I wouldn’t ski regionals and nationals, I would skip them both. I have a full time job, a side job, a family with small kids, etc. When I lived in the eastern region and regionals was always 4 hours or less from my house it wasn’t a big deal. Now in the west I have to fly across 4 states to get to regionals. If on the other hand we got rid of regionals and just had states instead, or maybe groupings of states for you guys in the NE, that would be doable for someone like me and I think you’d see increased participation in both events.

@Horton paid tribute to @rico today

@Bruce_Butterfield believe me, it would have been much much easier to just ride a different ski and not bother with this whole Denali thing, the problem is I suck on those skis

@CsSkis I managed 5@39 a few years ago when I was still in M2 and my body worked better.

@Wish Correct I was on the fence about skiing 34 vs 36 this year but when I wasn’t allowed to enter the 55k Elite event, and then they announced the US Open at Nationals, I said screw it I’m going to ski 36 and see if I can qualify. As far as the cheers, the local tournament scene up here in WA is great, and everyone is super supportive. Really fun skiing when you have all the competitors on the shoreline cheering for you!

I might be a bit biased about the quality of the c85 so I won’t talk about it, but I did run a new 36mph PB this weekend. Bone stock Medium c85 ??? https://www.instagram.com/p/CRgTrtQgTWU/?utm_medium=copy_link

@kc Dave Miller is not human. Whatever he is ages more slowly than the rest of us.

@OldboyII at the moment it's about a week so long as we don't completely bury @adamhcaldwell in orders

@Stevie Boy right now lead time is only about a week

@Liamfm it's going to be tough to make this work well until your gate timing with the boat is better. You need to be pulling out earlier and making sure that you have a tight line when you turn in for the gates, and that you are able to build rope load moving into the 1st whitewash. That is what gives you the swing speed you need to stand up and ride the ski off the 2nd wake. Keep in mind that the rope load needs to remain high the entire time you've got two hands on the handle. If you find that you don't have line tension as you come off the 2nd wake into the preturn, it means you let the ski go behind you too soon, and you're no longer swinging. The goal with this is to create rope and ski load into the wakes, so that your angular speed around the pylon is high enough that as you come off the 2nd wake you have effectively turned yourself into a weight on a pendulum, meaning the rope load = centrifugal force, and the ski no longer needs to be on a cutting edge. This does not mean that the ski and your hips start to transition away from the boat while you're swinging. Your hips and ski need to stay under you or slightly in front of you in order for you to maintain your connection. This video of Freddy Winter shows really well what this looks like from a skier's perspective: https://fb.watch/v/2gk2MS5fG/ Again this all starts with a well timed gate, meaning you have line tension from a wide point and you have plenty of real estate coming into the 1st wake to generate swing speed.

@mrpreuss maybe I misunderstood what you were describing before… Can you describe what is it you see in those pics and how do you achieve it?

How on earth did it take you so long to write this ?

@gavski we covered it extensively in this thread /forum#/discussion/22661/connection-and-swing/p1