Francis’ Weblog

The 2006 season has started early in NZ! They were expecting snow early and they got it! Here are a couple of pictures of Snow Farm in the South Island of New Zealand. Ok one of them isn’t! Its of the Bra fence! If you go to wanaka and travel towards Queenstown from Wanaka to go to Cardrona or Snow Farm/Snow Park you’ll see this fense. I just went on the snow farm website to see if they have any pics and I found the true story about it: The Cardrona Bra Fence true story. Its quite long and kinda tradition to leave a bra on the fence

Well we had our movement analysis exam yesterday and for some stupid reason I picked the movement I was worst at, DOH! … “broken at the waist” so the rider was hunched over anyway muddled my way through that but then he gave me the same thing for my teaching exam the day after and I fluffed it. My riding passed, my MA passed but my teaching failed… just. Anyway i’m off to remarkables (another mountain) to retake the teaching so fingers crossed we’ll see what happens! oh and we’ve just had some fresh snow so things are getting a bit better snow wise…

Just a quick update… its really hard… and I’m totally and utterly mentally and physically tired, because the exam is a week long you are concentrating non-stop throughout the week ANYWAY … just done some revision with mike for tommorow, we have our movement anaylsis test tommorow evening after a day of teaching freestyle to our examiner, the teaching is only a practise the actual lesson exam is on sunday! … more info later on… once i’ve stopped taking the “go faster caffine tablets”.

ok just a quick update to say my exams start tommorow! ARGH!! … and the “moon man” (a guy go predicts the weather from the moon in Wanaka) says its going to snow over the next couple of days! yupiee… ok I admit all other weather forcasts say its going to be hot with maybe some rain but I live in hope!

well off to bed so I am ready for the swimming pool… I mean slopes at TC…

wish me luck… I think I may need it!

Things are getting a bit dodgy, the mountain is suffering a quite a bit, main street (one of the main runs) is very earthy at the bottom with only a metre gap of snow to get down on. The mountain has been closed for 3 days in the past week and we’ve just been doing more MA and lessons ready for our exam next week. Good news tho its been confirmed that were doing the exam at Treble Cone and not another mountain and we also have 3 extra days training next week which will be good (I need it).

All the skiers passed there exams last week (except one person who didn’t make it, another dropped out before the exams started) so its been a bit of a party atmosphere… they are now starting to concentrate on their BASI exams.

The mountain was closed today so I took the chance to dive over to Queenstown to finish off my medical which I need to do to get my Ozzy visa. Thats been sent off so should get something soon.

Today we got asked to stand by the trainers we wanted to teach us and infact it was quite evenly spread. I choose fatty because he hadn’t trained me for quite a while and he is one of the NZ examiners which is always useful before the NZ level 1 exam anyway i’m off to sleep… up the mountain tommorow teaching some friends of Mikals.

ok i’m supposed to teach people to do 180s, 360s, olies, nolies, nose rolls and tail rolls… oh and whats nolie anyway?! ok so i’m feeling the pressure, also my last part of my Australia visa came through which means I have to go have a medical (within a month), which also means i’ve had to take a day off snowboarding because the Doc has a day off on Wednesday… the rookie day off!! grrr… anyway I had mon & tue to practise my freestyle elements then I had to mess around in town finding passport photos, photo copies of things etc… There is one pain with having a mountain which is 40mins away, there is only one lift up in the morning and one lift down in the afternoon. If you want to go up or down at any other time you have to hitch which is not too bad, lots of people do it.

Anyway today I headed off to the Doc for my medical in queenstown. It was a lot more basic than I thought… blood test, urine test, answer a couple of questions… open your mouth etc.. oh and a chest x-ray, unfortunatly I have to go back for the results so thats another day off!!!! oh well.. got MA (movement analysis) tommorow and a practise teach. Gonna run through some lesson plans tonight with Mike before I hit the hay…

Mike was telling me about the conditions on the mountain today, he was basically wakeboarding on the beginners slope… hope the snow holds out for the exams! it was a nice 20oC today down in town, I was sun bathing in queenstown.

yupieee… I passed and just to prove it heres my certificate (and yes it is my certificate they just spelt my surname wrong!)

Overall its been a good week, it was good to get out of TC for a bit and try a different mountain at Cadrona. Its also quite good to see the examiner teaching in a slightly different way… quite good in that respect. The only thing that was a bit anoying was that most of the information we had been told before, so it was just re-doing the same things, but Rookie said they were going to put the CSI earlier next year which makes better sense.

We were introduced to how the board moves (as if we didn’t know them already), and we had exercises on each of the planes of movement. We then had to run a lesson that had nothing to do with snowboarding but fitted the lesson structure (Introduction, Analyse Students, Student Goals, Plan lesson, Present Information, Check understanding, guided practise, feedback & summary). So we did … “how to juggle with snowballs”, which was ok… and then we were given demos on the Level 1 progression (introduction, one foot orientation, skating, straight running and j-turns). We were doing so well we didn’t end up doing the evening session as we did it during the day instead.

The rest of the week we were doing rider improvement and the level 2 progessions. We were being assessed throughout the whole week on our riding and then on friday we had a mock test. There were 9 people in our group of which 2 failed their mock exam and I got a boarderline pass… Only one person got a really good pass.

The actual exam on saturday we were split into two groups and we won the stone, sissors, rock game so we got to choose if we went first or second. We wanted to get it out the way so we went first (it had dumped 12cms during the night so it was powder day!). We were expecting -19oC including wind chill but it ended up being a very nice +2oC. The examiner then picked decided what level the group had got too (ie “They have just completed J-Turns”) and we in turn had to continue the lesson for about 15mins.

… anyway… during this one of the other group turned up looking a bit shocked and he had just fallen off one of the rails and puncherd his leg which was a bit messy… five stitches! and before he had a chance to do his exam!!! anyway luckily the examiner had already seen him ride during the week so another member of the group did the demo for him and he just talked through the lesson… he passed Then Chloe from my group hit her knee on the boardercross track while we were waiting for our results… Dillon our examiner just thinks he’s cursed… every exam he does someone manages to break themselves…

Anyway here are my exam results… Dillon asked if we wanted to be marked as “Level 1″ rather than “CSI” so that we could get some meaningful feedback so i’m ok in the lesson side, just need to work on my riding. Two weeks to go before my Level 1 exam… ARGH!!!

Well its been a week since my last post. We’ve been doing mostly rider analysis and learning how to teach (and do) 180 jumps… great fun but my knees are now smegged we did some teaching as well, with some real learners rather than teaching on eachother which can get a bit boring sometimes.

Had a reading day today and i’m going up tommorow to practise my demos we have our CSI (NZ Certified Snowsports Instructor) starting wednesday the structure of the exam is as follows:

Day 1
AM: Introduce 4 movements and board performance concepts
PM: Introduce the teaching cycle & Level 1 Progression

Day 2
AM: Rider improvement (focus pedaling+steering)
PM: Introduce class handling/safety & Introduce level two progression
Night Session: Introduce MA formula & Introduce teaching children

Day 3
AM: Rider Improvement (focus pressure + edging)
PM: Introduce guest service elements & Practice teach levels 1 & 2

Day 4
AM: Examiners to present level 1 & 2 model answer
PM: Formal assessment (presentation of one exercise/drill to last approx 10mins)

Today I was back with Tony one of the examiners (or should I say: AASI-RM Chief Examiner, NZSIA Examiner- Snowboarding Trainer. Only the best at Rookie Academy! :)). I haven’t ridden with Tony for quite a while now so it was really good to get back with him. This week we are doing rider technique and instruction on how to teach the NZSIA progressions. Today was amazingly good for my riding. We worked on the plains of motion and how they interact with the board concepts. IE: The plains of motion are longitudinal (moving fore and aft of the board), lateral (moving over the toe and heal edge), vertical (guess!) and rotational (rotating around), and the board concepts being pivoting the board, tilting the board and rotating the board (I think). Anyway worked on these and how they inter-relate to themselves and did a number of complex exercises to demonstrate this. One of the simplest increased my riding by loads!!! and here it is:

Think of four points one under each toe and each heal edge. If you number them 1 to 4 so that your (if your a regular rider) left toes are 1. Right toes are 2. Left heal is 3 and right heal is 4. The range of movement when making toe side turn would them be 1, 2. Then 3, 4 to go onto your heal edge so your moving your posture/weight/centre of gravity over these points when you move down the mountain.

For me everything became a lot more stable as I was using the entire edge for the duration of the turn. I don’t think I’ve used any fore & aft pressure/weighting before to any great extent to it really did improve my riding. Anyway techno babble over (if you could understand it!).

SNOW INFO: The snow is getting very dodgy. It hasn’t snowed since the 31st and even then only 2cms. BUT it’s raining right now down in the valley so we are hoping were going to get at least 3cms up the mountain tomorrow… here’s hoping!!

Ok back into the NZ way of things, and it instantly made a difference. Jim incresed my binding angle to F4, this is basically the biggest angle you can make your lower leg go. When you increase your binding angle it pushes your knee down so you are “crouching” more, really painfull staying the that position all day but GREAT for my posture. My riding instantly became better. Jim also got us going through some teaching of the main progressions in NZ and we realised some things instantly clashed with the BASI way of doing things. We just need to find a way that satisfies both, which most of the time is quite easy.

SNOW INFO: Quite slushy today but it started to rain at the base station, and snow further up the mountain, all in all 5cms by 5pm.