bsmith

Thanks @jercane The reason I think you are qualified to comment on this is that you are succeeding right at the progress point that many of us are and it is very fresh on your mind how difficult it is to implement all the good guidance that we get from coaches and BOS members. Elbows to vest sounds simple, but hard at many points of a run. Leaned away from the boat with both arms straight, I can get them close to my vest. But heading outbound off the second wake with all that centrifugal force on you makes it seem like one needs ultra strong lats to hold elbows tight to the vest in that situation. I am doing more lat work now to try and get strong enough to do that consistently. I am trying all the things you mentioned, but usually within the context of trying to make a run and then scrambling to make all the buoys blows my form. I think I need to do what Jay suggested to you and that is spend more time outside the course and see if I can make linked turns with proper form. And once I can do that, see if I can bring it back into the course.

@jercane I am a beginning course skier and struggling with stack and body position. I am bent over at the waist as I hit the wakes from either turn direction. While skiing, it doesn't feel that way to me, but video clearly shows it. Was body position your biggest problem, and if so, what did you do to improve it?

@6balls Based on your experience with TKR patients, is @cougfan an outlier in his ability to ski hard after a TKR? You mention that a shoulder replacement is an absolute no go for future skiing, but would you say that in general a competitive 60 year old 3 event skier would be able to resume 3 event competition after rehabbing a TKR?

@cougfan Your experience is very encouraging to all of us old skiers heading towards our own knee replacement. I get synvisc one injections every six months in my left knee. I lift hard 5 times per week, bike everyday, and play soccer once per week (I limp afterwards), but skiing 2-3 times per week is also very hard on it. I guess I am still not skiing front footed enough. Thank you for posting. It is encouraging to hear that when the battle is finally lost, a TKR (total knee replacement) can save the day.

@cougfan Are your knees as stable as they were before the replacements such that you can hit the wakes hard and leaned over with no worries? Or do you have to ski a lot more gentle now?

@Orlando76 Can you tell us what you were specifically looking for in these comparisons? As a beginner who just ran the course a few days ago at 26 mph long line, I studied Terry Winter doing "reverses" here where he runs the course all the way down to 18 mph on his 66" high end ski at 15 off. I also learned from @horton here doing 26 mph at 15 off. I took a tip from @escmanaze here http://www.ballofspray.com/forum#/discussion/12476/start-at-15-off-or-actual-long-line and found long line was easier to run the course than 15 off. Now that I can make 26 mph long line, I have resolved to clean up my form before progressing, but not sure whether I should progress with speed increases long line or go ahead and switch to 15 off. For me, the big differences in my slow runs compared to the experts slow runs was the ski angle out of the offside turn. They could get their ski around much more than I could. My long offside turn and pull looked like how a modern day jumper cuts to the ramp. I improved this situation by moving my fin way forward (ski became easier to turn on both sides) and I used a drill where I shadow turned the 2 and 4 onside balls so that I could approach every offside turn in the course with proper time and position. This gave me 3 realistic offside turn scenarios for every pass and my offside turn quickly improved to where I could then run all 6 balls.

@eleeski My left knee has oesteoarthritis and gets sore easily from lots of pressure on it. Since that is my rear foot in slalom, that situation helps encourage me to stay heavy on the front foot. But my left knee still gets loaded quite a bit so I experimented with rotating my rear binder clockwise (wrong direction from your perspective). Since I am a beginner in the course, my offside turn is much weaker than my onside turn so I was thinking that maybe I would get a double benefit from doing this, less pain in my knee and a better offside turn. I have skied twice this way and found some relief to my knee and also feel some improvement on my offside turn as well. I also felt nothing as regards my hips. I have never had hip problems of any kind. Do you think that maybe the issues you experienced with your hip using a "wrong way" rear binding rotation is specific to your situation and that for others it may be perfectly safe to do this?

@GZ22 As some of the recent threads on the status of the sport have pointed out, there are multiple reasons for the decline in interest towards water skiing and wakeboarding. Cost is always a factor but it seems to me that things that take effort and skills now lose out to easier things like wakesurfing and of course, tubing. Much fewer families own boats now than when I was a kid. And the families that do own boats seem to view riding a tube as the most fun thing they can do with a boat.

@BraceMaker yes, the videos @escmanaze posted are not demonstrative of the very best free skiers. The skiers in the videos would likely free ski the same whether they were on top of the line skis or traditional crossover skis. I think the main point was that they are skiers that try hard and want to push a ski to the edge. The funny thing is that once a free skier develops enough skills such that they look better than the ones in the videos, they often seek out a course like @escmanaze did. As they get better in those early days of learning to run a course, are they now free skiers or course skiers? A guess it depends on what percentage of the time they get to ski in a course. As an aside, when skiing in general was more popular back in the day, you could frequently encounter a free skier that had never run a course, but could link smooth low hard turns in proper form.

The free skiers I grew up with in north Louisiana were like @escmanaze describes. We all wanted a ski that would let us lay down as low as possible and really grip the water. That meant that we were all skiing on the best competition skis made at the time. We all thought we would be good competitive skiers if only we ever got a chance to run a course. For many of us, our first time to see a course was at a novice tournament that we would travel for hours to attend in south Louisiana. Most of us promptly made just one buoy on that first try. We learned that you really need a course to practice with to be competitive and that when first learning we had to dial way back on the intensity of our turns just to get some semblance of timing in the course. Free skiers who had a natural "hooking" style of turn learned to ski the course the fastest. Those of us who practiced high speed laid over but looping type turns took the longest to adapt. But as @escmanaze has pointed out, there are very athletic hard cutting free skiers out there that can use full competition skis to good effect while free skiing. If they ever get a chance to run a course, they would likely benefit from dropping back to a wider ski so they can slow down to learn the course more easily. But once they learn course technique and can ski the course using their best turning skills, then their full competition ski is once again appropriate. I think @escmanaze is correct in saying that all skis are crossover skis.

@Orlando76 when your lean lock accident happened, did you try to ride it out hoping to recover balance at some point or did you let go early? And if you didn't let go early, would you now recommend to us all to let go early whenever we detect being in a lean lock situation?

@Horton In order to discover the difficulty in finding a setting that is a balance between controlled tail slide at apex and excessive grip into the wakes, does that mean that you personally are one of those front foot heavy, aggressive 35 off short line skiers or was that potential issue learned from other skiers using the Whisper Fin?

@kfennell Thanks for the tip on the 600 hour TXI. Being new to the site and just returning to competitive water skiing after a long absence from the late 70's, I don't know the Gordon you are referring to. What is Gordon's BallofSpray username and could you PM me with his contact info? Thanks again!

Hi Kevin. I am in College Station, TX and in need of a good Zero Off boat like yours. Would you reconsider on selling yours?