The first two weeks of my Snoworks GAP course were essential in setting up the platforms for both friendships and the ski ability to develop from.
It still surprises me looking back on the huge change that occurred between standing in an awkwardly huddled group of strangers at Geneva Airport, to celebrating being qualified level one ski instructors.
The mechanics of the course run by Lee Townend were fluid and adaptable to everyone’s individual needs from the outset of the journey. Everything from enjoying our dinner at the hotel to racing and training on the Tignes Glacier maintained elements of solidarity and fun.
After settling in on the first weekend we spent the following week skiing intensely, getting back to grips with the snow and focusing on the quality of our short and long turns. The biggest change for all of us was speaking about the movements behind our skiing, explaining a process, which had become quite natural in a bared down and simplistic way.
My albeit hopeful expectations of being a great skier were soon put to bed with a solid brace of bluntness from Lee and warm but critical words from the somewhat boisterous Snoworks instructor Rupert Golding.
The glaring problem with my skiing was the act of “mincing”; a term associated with skiing with ones skis very close together, making ones way down the slope like a piece of Bolognese clad spaghetti in free-fall. Perhaps the person with the funniest skiing style of them all was Fulham bred Charlie Fairbanks Smith whose preference was to ski as if sitting on the toilet for an extended period of time.
However with the help of Lee and Rupert, improvements were starting to be made and most of us were starting to look more like ski instructors and less like over energised Duracell bunnies bobbing down the piste.
Off the snow Halloween was the big event, and a chance for everyone to experiment with their capacity to ski on a hangover. The themed evening took place at Tc’s bar, an intimate venue run by the enigmatic, toweringly built and constantly intoxicated Tc himself. This was our wake up call to the fact that people were actually living in Tignes and it was not just a ghost town, invaded by arrogant racers in the daytime and emptied at night.
After a weekend of rest and recuperation we went into our week long level one exam with a mixture of trepidation, self doubt, and subdued determination. Somewhat to our relief, bad visibility and huge snowfalls meant that the lifts were closed and we spent two days of our exam chatting about ski technique in a coffee bar at the bottom of the glacier and venturing out into the bitter conditions to make a small slope to practice and teach “central theme” on.
Central theme, which I personally refer to as central scream involves the practice of snow ploughing, plough parallel, and basic parallel turning – the basic components of skiing which essentially a beginner has to master to become an intermediate skier.
Finally, mid-week, the glacier opened and we were allowed to show our examiners, (Simon and John), our skills at performance skiing. The nervousness levels hit a climax when our performance and central theme skiing was filmed by our examiners and we all had to ski to the best of our ability under intense pressure. Later, back in the hotel, the video was put on and almost everyone was criticised heavily and put into huge amounts of doubt over whether or not they would actually pass.
Friday arrived and everyone was tense and self absorbed during breakfast, out on the slopes I knew that I had to ski to the best of my ability, and most crucially to stop mincing.
Throughout the week our examiners had kept us nervously at bay by not saying we were close to passing or failing, so when every single one of us learned that we had passed we were overwhelmingly excited. Our first 2 weeks ended with the daunting revelation that we were now qualified level one instructors, liable to teach on any artificial slope in England.
Thus we finished our first two weeks on the course feeling slightly overwhelmed but nevertheless reinforced with self belief and determination.
About the author: Becoming a ski instructor can be challenging, hard work and fun. Snoworks run a six week GAP ski instructor program to qualify as a BASI level one and two ski instructor, enabling successful candidates to work in several countries including Austria, Switzerland, Italy and Japan. Three pupils from the October to December GAP program in Tignes provide us with their stories from week one to six.