Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Becoming the All-Terrain Human




 Kilian Jornet Burgada is the most dominating endurance athlete of his generation. In just eight years, Jornet has won more than 80 races, claimed some 16 titles and set at least a dozen speed records, many of them in distances that would require the rest of us to purchase an airplane ticket. He has run across entire landmasses­ (Corsica) and mountain ranges (the Pyrenees), nearly without pause. He regularly runs all day eating only wild berries and drinking only from streams. On summer mornings he will set off from his apartment door at the foot of Mont Blanc and run nearly two and a half vertical miles up to Europe’s roof — over cracked glaciers, past Gore-Tex’d climbers, into the thin air at 15,781 feet — and back home again in less than seven hours, a trip that mountaineers can spend days to complete. A few years ago Jornet ran the 165-mile Tahoe Rim Trail and stopped just twice to sleep on the ground for a total of about 90 minutes. In the middle of the night he took a wrong turn, which added perhaps six miles to his run. He still finished in 38 hours 32 minutes, beating the record of Tim Twietmeyer, a legend in the world of ultrarunning, by more than seven hours. When he reached the finish line, he looked as if he’d just won the local turkey trot.
Levon Biss for The New York Times
Jornet “is not normal,” his mother says. “My mission is to make Kilian tired. Always, I was tired, but Kilian, no.”

Come winter, when most elite ultrarunners keep running, Jornet puts away his trail-running shoes for six months and takes up ski-mountaineering racing, which basically amounts to running up and around large mountains on alpine skis. In this sport too, Jornet reigns supreme: he has been the overall World Cup champion three of the last four winters.
So what’s next when you’re 25 and every one of the races on the wish list you drew up as a youngster has been won and crossed out? You dream up a new challenge. Last year Jornet began what he calls the Summits of My Life project, a four-year effort to set speed records climbing and descending some of the world’s most well known peaks, from the Matterhorn this summer to Mount Everest in 2015. In doing so, he joins a cadre of alpinists like Ueli Steck from Switzerland and Chad Kellogg from the United States who are racing up peaks and redefining what’s possible. In a way, Jornet says, all of his racing has been preparation for greater trials. This month, he is in the Himalayas with a couple of veteran alpinists. They plan to climb and ski the south face of a peak that hasn’t been skied before in winter.
But bigger challenges bring bigger risks. Less than a year ago, Jornet watched as his hero and friend Stéphane Brosse died in the mountains. Since then, he has asked himself, How much is it worth sacrificing to do what you love?
Chamonix, France, READ ON

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Where Them Girls At?


This story appeared in the September PowderMag2012 issue.

The most male-dominated corner of the ski industry isn’t the park or the bar at the Peruvian. It’s ski engineering. Women’s skis, the ones with the turquoise and purple topsheets, the lady-specific flex pattern, and the mounting point set for child-bearing hips, are all engineered and designed by dudes.

According to SnowSports Industries of America, women-specific gear makes up 28 percent of the products bought in the ski industry, and 41 percent of skiers are women. Despite the significant female footprint in the sport, ski engineering is dominated by men. A few brands, like K2 and Salomon, have women in lab testing, product marketing, or graphic design, but no major company has a female ski engineer or designer.

Read on...

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Super Tramp


New trampolines are pushing athletes to do bigger tricks, but are they making skiing lose its style?

Super tramp, Michigan. PHOTO: TRAMP SQUARED
Words: Olivia Dwyer
Last spring, two Woodward at Copper employees traveled to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to test a trampoline the sports camp had bought for its Colorado facility. They sessioned the 14×14-foot bed of the tramp. “This thing’s sick,” one of them said. His co-worker turned to Paul Hagan, the 51-year-old gymnastics coach who wove the trampoline by hand, and explained: “That means he really likes it.”

He’s not alone. Woodward Tahoe also installed one of the 14×14 trampolines made by Hagan’s company, Tramp Squared, and Sammy Carlson put one in his backyard. North of the border, Dave Ross, coach of the Canadian trampoline team, designed a similar 10×20-foot trampoline and helped Canadian freeskiers with aerial tips. Now, one of Ross’s trampolines resides behind national halfpipe coach Trennon Paynter’s house in Squamish, B.C. Both products are commonly called Super Tramps, and they offer a higher bounce and softer landing than Olympic standard 7×14-foot trampolines.

This is good news for halfpipe and slopestyle skiers, who can train more on the softer tramp without wearing their joints and muscles while developing better air sense for tricks on snow. Hagan says his square construction also creates a larger landing area for athletes who shift left and right while practicing off-axis moves. “They’ve got room to land and rebound and go into a series of tricks or combinations,” he says. “They can set up a complete run.”

Read on...

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Early season powder in Morzine with Salomon


Early season powder in Morzine/Avoriaz with the Salomon Snowboards UK team


Words: Sam at Whilelines
Photos: Sam/James Fuller

It’s with the giddy excitement of a 6 year old kid at a Barney the Dinosaur show that I hand over my boarding pass at the gate at Heathrow and amble aboard a plane bound for Geneva. UK summers are far too long and depressing for us snowboarders and try as you might to make the most of its wet unpredictability there’s no avoiding the long, drawn-out and overly graphic daydreams of stepping out into cool, crisp air, zipping your jacket all the way to the top, and floating weightlessly down naturally sculpted white landscapes. It would be downright wrong if your first trip of the season failed to rouse that kind of excitement.  Read on...
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Friday, March 8, 2013

2014 Snowboard Boots Highlights

Check out the second installment of onboards preview of the finest in snowboard footwear set to drop next season. Peep what Vans, Deeluxe, ThirtyTwo and Nike are cooking for next season, and have a gander at part 1 for more sick snow kicks.

Monday, March 4, 2013

British ski hosts banned by French court



A court in France has ruled that British Tour companies are not allowed use ski hosts to show clients round the slopes. It believes skier safety is compromsied. It is a test case and all ski hosting in France is now banned. The British are appealing.


Tour operator ski hosts offer their guests a service by taking them round the slopes on orientation tours of the resorts.
It introduces them to the slopes and is as much social as anything else. No instruction is given and the guests are not taken off piste or on difficult runs.

On Monday a court in Albertville has now banned the practice saying it breaks French law where leaders of organised groups on the ski slopes have to be qualified ski or snowboard instructors.

Read on...

Partying Hard In Morzine and Avoriaz

  Partying Hard In Morzine and Avoriaz ...