It is not Your Equipment It is You

I can not remember when or where. I recall some ski instructor, or was it an author, or both? In any event, the fellow expressed disappointment that more people are not carving now that the equipment makes it easier.

Have you seen this phenomena anywhere else? I have.

Digital photography is another area where despite the equipment making it easier to perform at a higher level, people are failing to do so. A lot of pictures I see are poorly exposed. Why should this be? Digital cameras make it much easier to get the exposure correct and of course you can check your result before the scene (usually) breaks up. Plus you can store hundreds of photographs (even at high resolution) in your camera’s storage before you have to remove them. Despite all that, I see a lot of folks making the same mistakes they made back in the days of film. Learn about exposure folks and how the amount of light you let onto the exposure plane (aka the film or the pixels) affects the photograph! Never mind getting into composition.

However, this is The Wisconsin Skier and not The Wisconsin Photographer.

Similarly with skis, I see a lot of people with great gear but they don’t know how to work the gear. The problem is obviously not the gear but their inability or ignorance of what they should be doing. Inability is fine, ignorance is not so much so.

Buying better gear will only waste your money. Use that old gear and learn with it. When you KNOW you are working the gear well then consider upgrading. People going down a run, turning a significant portion of those nice boards perpendicular to their velocity is a waste of both snow and money.

Don’t go overboard with this notion though. If your skis come from Goodwill it is quite possible for the equipment to hold you back and to actually lead to injury. Someone I know who is just getting into skiing bought gear from Goodwill and my brother was adjusting the bindings to fit her boots and the bindings blew apart. Good thing that happened in his house rather than the hill.

What I am saying is, if you don’t ski in situations where the difference between a payday and going broke is measured in hundredths of a second then the gear is less crucial than technique.