so much for ideal conditions

My first day on telemarks started out slowly. I had planned to spend the first half of the day just doing drills on greens, but the weather didn't cooperate. It was dropping tons of freezing sand-snow that made the green runs too slow to be usefull, so I had to head to the blue runs, and they were too heavily moguled for the most part do do the drills. So I just decided to start with turns and to take advantage of any flatter terrain to work on mechanics. my right turns were ok right from the start, but it took me a couple of hours to bet my left turns to stop shifting to a paralell finish.

My one big problem that I am going to have to work on next outing is to get the weight more into the ball of my feet on the rear leg. I'm getting good weight onto the leg, but straight forward into the toe for the most part. So next outing I think downward-dog feet and flex my ankles hard through the turn.

No surprises or let downs on the part of the telemark style. It's just about as subtle as I expected it to be. It's also got a very nice solid feel to it and a little more continuity. Parallell turns always felt much more like very sharp curve in terms of turning force. Telemark turns feel more parabolic. The effort still builds through the turn but the build is more even. I suspect that this is simply because in single-ski turns powering through the finish causes the skis to camber out even more and increases the turning power. the two-ski turn probably has a more consistent turn radius witout so much power-flex-radius-narrowing feedback.