bsmith

@mccowherd2006 You can minimize the hit on the wake by playing with both speed and your rope length. So first dial in the combination of speed and rope length that minimizes the wake and is also compatible with your current skiing ability. But even after that is done, you ultimately just have to gird up and hit the wake while holding your ski on edge. And you may take some falls as your body learns what position affords the best balance and strength needed to hold an edge through the wakes. You will also find that once you commit to holding an edge through the wakes that you will not get bumped as bad as you thought you would. As you learn to cross the wakes with speed, video yourself, and do your absolute best not to get bent over at the waist. Beginners do this a lot because it helps their balance, but it takes away greatly from your strength and the ability to create cross course angle. You will progress faster if you will just go for it like these beginners do in this thread https://www.ballofspray.com/forum#/discussion/23597/fun-video-of-me-and-a-buddy-learning-the-slalom-course

I like it! It wasn't too long ago that I was where you are right now. In my experience, it is beginners with spirit like you guys that progress the fastest. Your willingness to try hard and take crashes will lead you to smooth runs soon. Keep it up!

@Horton She mostly kicks with her left foot and every time you try the push test, she catches herself with her left foot. Seems pretty clear that she should be a LFF skier. It sounds like you are in denial on this. Why do you want her to be a RFF skier so badly?

@Horton posted this https://www.ballofspray.com/forum#/discussion/22751/free-skiing-is-good-for-stack awhile back and I have seen evidence of this phenomena many times now. Learning to stack correctly is very hard. Athletic new skiers can often run the course in short time but with very bad form. You can show them on video how bad their stack is (usually they are jackknifed hugely on their offside turn) and they quickly agree that needs to improve. And yet when they try hard to ski stacked, they can't run the course at all. That's why @Horton advocated free skiing so such skiers wouldn't be disturbed by missing buoys as they try to ski stacked. I personally am still in that phase of development myself. I can run a whole pass more (30 mph vs 28 mph) if I throw stacking out the window and just grunt out the strongest offside position I can which will have a pretty big jackknife (bending at the waist) in it. I imagined that I could keep going up the ladder and chase buoys and slowly improve my stack at the same time. But a post by @lkb here https://www.ballofspray.com/forum#/discussion/21827/for-those-working-perfecting-stack-position/p1 made me rethink that strategy. @lkb pointed out that he had once skied into 35 off and thought that his stack would improve enough along the way. But after many years, @lkb said he still had too much of a jackknife in his stack and that he was at a dead end on improvement. He advocated that all aspiring short line skiers go back to basics and make sure that they can stack correctly. I was amazed that someone could go so far without having a really good stack. And then I read here https://www.ballofspray.com/forum#/discussion/23082/what-separates-the-men-from-the-boys where @Horton says, "9 times out of 10, skiers who can run 32 but not 35 need to work on stack more than anything else." After all that, I became a believer that improving stack comes before chasing buoys. But it's hard to hold yourself back when you are already at a low buoy count and know you could get more. Its also hard to know when you have improved your stack enough to go up to the next pass. My god, if a lot of 32 off skiers don't have a good enough stack, then how good of a stack does a novice need before going up to the next pass? For us novices, I guess we have to muddle along on this and make some compromises on when to go up, but always with an eye on trying to maintain a good stack.

Stacking is such a ski related only term to me, that I have always taken it to mean the strongest position you can be in while under load. And of course you could take no real load in a vertical standing stacked position. I see your point, but I think most of us evaluate a skier's stack while they are leaned away under load.

@Than_Bogan I am not understanding your point on stack and leverage. I am thinking that whenever we speak of stack or leverage that we are talking about achieving our strongest braced position against load. And the goal of this strongest position is to be able to create as much cross course angle as possible during the loading phase. If you were stacked in your early skiing days, but not "leveraged", I would just say that you were not correctly stacked. For example, now that you can achieve leverage, aren't you also still stacked? I would say that any body position that does not provide optimal leverage or bracing against load, is not correctly stacked.

That's sad to hear. They had such a good foundation to build on in the late 70's and early 80's that I had thought for sure that they were bought up and folded into some current successful company like D3.

In the thread about inversion tables, @Horton mentioned that Roger Teeter was the founder and owner of EP skis. Before I took a 35 year hiatus from water skiing in the early 80's, EP was a major player in 3 event skis and was especially dominant in jumping skis. When I returned to water skiing, EP was long gone and despite doing extensive internet searches I could never figure out whether EP was sold to another company or just died quietly. Can someone tell me what happened to EP?

You can also get a good traction effect on your back by using a device that goes by various names such as captain's chair, roman chair, hip flexor stand etc. It's a thing where you support your weight on your elbows and bring your knees to your chest. You are doing ab work at the same time you are getting traction on your back.

@2Valve you meant to say "a public lake" rather than a private lake, right? And you said that because you like the diversity of activities that happen on a public lake versus the much more controlled activities that occur on a private lake. That's an interesting take on things, but I bet most of us would prefer to live on a private lake.

Congratulations! Running the course is way harder than most people realize. What do you think was the breakthrough skill you acquired that finally allowed you to make the course? As a beginner myself that ran the course for the first time this summer, the key factor for me was learning how to create enough cross course angle coming out of my offside turn.

@adamhcaldwell As a new course skier I read every post on BOS about technique and right up there with stay open to the boat and keep shoulders level and is the commandment to keep your head and eyes level at all times. This thread https://www.ballofspray.com/forum#/discussion/comment/113807 by @Bruce_Butterfield is a prime example of what I am talking about. Skiers lean at extreme angles in all directions so keeping a perfectly level head at all times is not really possible. But it does make some intuitive sense to me that your head should not just stay perpendicular to your shoulders at all times and that there would be some advantage to seeing things level as much as possible. Meaning that as much as possible one should try to keep their head up and level. From what you describe above, it sounds like you are just letting your head stay in balance with your overall body position and that means it tilts where it feels natural and strong and keeping it as level as possible is not a specific goal. That also makes sense to me because you don't have to worry about head position as a critical aspect of your skiing.

@adamhcaldwell I am getting from all this that we as skiers should not be concerned with exactly how open we are to the boat or how perfectly we can get our shoulders level, but rather how strong of a position we can get into such that we can accept direct compression forces with a slight knee bend while also staying torsionally rigid as well. I have never thought about being so stiff while skiing, but I guess while in the most intense load sections of a ski run that is the best way to resist loads and not get shifted into a weak position. Concerning trying to maintain a near level head position at all times, I am assuming that for better balance and vision that you are for that standard principle.

@adamhcaldwell I have always wondered how important level shoulders are when you can see so many examples of great skiers without level shoulders. And the same goes for being open to the boat. All skiers can be relatively open to the boat in the onside cut, but can never be very open during their off side cut. The instruction to ski open to the boat with level shoulders has become a platitude that isn't really what is happening upon close inspection of the very best skiers. Maybe it is fair to say that the best are skiing relatively more open to the boat and with shoulders more near level than lesser skiers, but I think that is as far as you can take it. What I am taking from your advice is that we need to seek the best leverage position possible when under load and that means that the skier needs to be as upright, linear, and as perpendicular to the ski as possible so that all the forces against the skier can be translated as efficiently as possible into movement in the right direction.

I had to go look up stylometry and found here, https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/introduction-to-stylometry-with-python Stylometry is the quantitative study of literary style through computational distant reading methods. It is based on the observation that authors tend to write in relatively consistent, recognizable and unique ways. For example: Each person has their own unique vocabulary, sometimes rich, sometimes limited. Although a larger vocabulary is usually associated with literary quality, this is not always the case. Some people write in short sentences, while others prefer long blocks of text consisting of many clauses. No two people use semicolons, em-dashes, and other forms of punctuation in the exact same way. So to any other so called "nice guy" thinking about being duplicitous on this forum, be aware that it is harder than you think because not only is there IP address tracking capability but your own writing style will give you away.

Someone who does this kind of thing is not a trustworthy person. It is very likely that his underhanded behavior is not confined to seeing if he can trick members of a forum. All of you who have to deal with Chipman in real life should be on guard. It is also likely that Chipman will try to breech this forum again. But it sounds like @Horton has his number and will be able to quickly catch him when he tries again.

@MISkier The reason it is right to limit skiers who are capable of and maybe prefer a higher speed than their division max speed is that the current ZBS adjustment for overspeed is too much of an advantage on the ZBS buoy count. Again, once you start comparing skiers at different speeds, things are no longer on an apples to apples basis and it is extremely difficult to come up with ways to counter that accurately. That's why it is best to allow ZBS to only work downwards where it imposes a penalty on the skier choosing lower speeds and not allow it to work upwards in an overspeed situation where it then provides an advantage. And while some competitors in a division might say, "Oh well, they are a better skier than I am", the rules must honor the competitors who are actually trying to win a division and be as fair as possible to them.

@BraceMaker I have understood your position all along as establishing 36 mph (not some unlimited number) as the top possible speed allowed for a division. The issue concerning the discrepancy in the AWSA max allowed speed and the IWWF allowed speed is independent of the point that advantage towards a maximum ZBS buoy count is gained when overspeed skiing is allowed. IWWF recognizes that fact and that's why they give no extra credit from the overspeed buoy count. AWSA should work hard to seek agreement with IWWF on division top speeds. To accurately compare skiers within the same division, they must be held to the same top speed. ZBS attempts to normalize scores between skiers at different speeds, but it is just an approximation with a pass of six buoys approximately equal to a change of 2 mph. Fortunately, this approximation works slightly against those who would attempt to use it for gain over a skier at the max division speed. For that reason, I think ZBS is a good concept in that skiers can choose to deviate down from their division speed, but if they do so, they actually incur a slight performance penalty. Take the example of a skier that can run 4 buoys at 38 off at 34 mph. If the ZBS principle held true for equivalent score for equivalent talent at different speeds, that skier should be able to run 4 buoys at 39 off at 32 mph and achieve the same total buoy count. And yet that almost never happens. The same talent skier slowed down, just can't match his higher speed ZBS buoy count. At the same time that skiing below a max division speed incurs a small penalty, if the option were allowed to ski above a max division speed is allowed, then an advantage is gained and that is why the ZBS concept should only be applied to reduced speeds from a division max speed and not be allowed for overspeed situations. If ZBS scoring is allowed in overspeed situations for a division, then all you have done is create a new max speed for that division as the best in that division will have to take advantage of the benefit gained from ZBS when used in an overspeed situation.

@MISkier The rule you point out only reinforces my contention that there is advantage in skiing at the highest speed possible within a division. If two skiers should tie on a ZBS total buoy count, the one scoring at the higher speed gets the nod for the win. Records show that not only is it easier to get a higher ZBS score for a given level of talent by skiing at the highest allowed speed, skiers at the highest speed also get the benefit of a tie break over same score ZBS buoy counts done at slower speeds. There is no doubt that allowing overspeed ZBS buoys to count would force all the top competitors within a division to ski at the maximum overspeed allowed if they want any chance of finishing in the top three.

@MillerTime38 What you mention about the differences between 58k and 55k speeds is yet another example of how ZBS has difficulties on always equating 2 mph with 6 buoys. If ZBS was perfectly fair, there would be no difference between going up or down from any of the speeds. Each speed change would always yield a 6 buoy difference in performance. But in reality, the buoy difference effect is variable from speed to speed and from the change in rope lengths involved. If you read through BOS and survey skiers that have gone through top division speed changes, you will find overwhelming evidence that when you have to drop speed you can hardly ever equal your previous total buoy count.

@MISkier Thanks for posting that survey question. But you know, that question was way too generalized to be of much use. It reads, "Do you think the AWSA Board should keep ZBS as it is currently written (all divisions, all classes, all speeds)? That encompasses a lot of things and includes some confusion on whether the current division top speeds are part of the ZBS issue. It seems to me that if you had doubts on any aspect of the overall question, you would have answered no. On the other hand, if you read it as, overall do you agree with the concept of ZBS, then you likely answered yes. I think AWSA should issue more surveys with much more pointed questions so as to better gauge what its members really want.

@MISkier Thanks for the clarification on that. I did not realize that the original survey addressed credit for overspeed runs. I can see how skiers quickly protested that point. I guess what I was sure of was that the survey didn't present @BraceMaker's concept that all divisions would have a top speed of 36 mph and that ZBS would make all the adjustments for that.

@MISkier I like ZBS too. It allows skiers to choose slower speeds than what their division allows and create an adjusted buoy count. Those choosing to use ZBS in this way are slightly penalized in that they could probably achieve a higher buoy count if they did their best at the top speed of their division. The issue @BraceMaker and I are discussing is about whether the top speeds of every division should be all set to one top speed of 36 mph and then let ZBS take care of all adjustments for those choosing to ski less than 36 mph. That concept has not been surveyed and I am definitely not for that approach.

@BraceMaker The rule you advocate would push all the top competitors in every division to run the super high top speed. Whether it is unsafe for any one of them is an individual question. If a skier has aspirations to compete at the top of their division, the top speed choice is essentially forced upon them in order to be competitive. This would impact how many skiers want to compete under those conditions. If we seek to maximize the numbers of skiers competing in each division, then we should seek to please the majority of skiers in that division. Ultimately, this means that good comprehensive surveys should be made so that the organization can make rules according to what the majority wants. It's theoretically possible that the majority in a division would prefer a high top speed allowance and let ZBS adjust for those choosing lower speeds. Based on what I see on BOS and in tournament results, I don't think that choice would win a vote, especially when skiers observe ZBS and see with themselves and their peers that for whatever talent level they have, they will score less total buoys under ZBS if they ski a speed slower than what their division allows.

@Jody_Seal I agree that the 6 flip rule should go away, but if you allow up to 36 mph for slalom in all divisions, then what you would see is the top three finishers in all divisions skiing at 36 mph. ZBS does not perfectly equalize buoy counts for changes in speed. There is a bias towards a higher buoy count when you can run the top speed allowed. This bias is very important at the margin and thus anyone wanting to place high would have to ski 36 mph to have any chance of placing. @JeffSurdej Yes, it's all strategy and every competitor wanting to place as high as possible would quickly learn that they have to ski the max allowed speed to have any chance at all in placing in the top three of their division.