Skiing at Les Diablerets

On Monday I was officially on annual leave while Linda was still unfortunately at work.

In order to prevent myself from distracting Linda, I bravely took myself out of the house for a day of skiing at Les Diablerets - poor me.

It hasn't snowed in a little while and the snow was quite hard-packed so I decided to focus on improving my turns.

Having bought carve skis last season, I decided it was time I got better at carve skiing (normally I make short, quick turns, whereas carve skiing requires a more dedicated approach to turning).

With carve skiing you aren't really pushing the snow to the side (which slows you down) so much as trying to cut a smooth line across the slope (which doesn't). Also, the skis I bought are quite long for carve skis (180cm), so they're built more for speed than pure carving. Consequentially I've been going a lot faster!

Lastly, in Australia the slopes are quite gentle in gradient, and short in length, so you tend to make the most of the terrain by doing jumps off rocks, etc. but in Switzerland the runs are steep and long so you focus more on getting up speed and making some big turns.

Then there's the accident insurance my work provides (a disincentive for caution), the fact that I'm not as fit as I used to be, and all this leads to an obvious conclusion: it might be time to buy a helmet...