Reflection On The Past Before Starting This Year’s Biking Season. With gyms closed to Covid, way back in August 2020, I started riding my bicycle five days a week as a way to get ready for the ski season. I live in North Texas where the terrain is relatively flat. We don’t have hills or mountains, we have rises. I[Read More…]
One Fun, The Other Not So Much. We’re nearing that time of year in New England and the upper Midwest where the snow melts a little during the day and freezes at night. The repetitive process creates tiny balls of ice. In the morning, they’re rock hard but as the sun comes up, they melt a little and turn into[Read More…]
DIY: Prepare And Repair Ski Bottoms. Here’s What It Takes. Way back when I used to drive to ski resorts, I used to slide a toolbox into the back of the car with everything needed to tune a pair of skis, fix a gouge in the P-Tex and wax the bottoms. The biggest and most important item was my Toko[Read More…]
[Please consider supporting SeniorsSkiing.com with a donation. We appreciate your help. Click here.] Seven Ways To Make Ski Tests More Objective. Way back in the late 20th Century, while running the SKIpp Testing program for SKI Magazine, John Perryman and I learned the most difficult problem to solve and the biggest variable was the ski tester. In conversations with almost every[Read More…]
Does The World Need A Custom Ski Just For You? [Please consider supporting SeniorsSkiing.com with a donation. We appreciate your help. Click here.] Way back in the winter of 2018, long before Covid raised its ugly head, I asked the heads of marketing (none of whom would qualify for a SeniorsSkiing/com subscription) from three manufacturers a simple question: “Has ski[Read More…]
What If Driving Is An Undesirable Or A Non-Option? The world’s COVID hangover is going to continue well into 2021 so obviously ongoing precautions are needed to keep from contracting the disease. For those who live within three to four hours by car of a ski area, you’ve got options. Your car becomes your transportation bubble and then while skiing,[Read More…]
A Military Epic Pass Discount Special Became A Big Motivator To Get Back In Shape. Last winter and spring, like many others, I watched the ski season melt away. For those who went before the big shut down, good on you. For, me, the only hopes I had of skiing was in late April or May or June at Mammoth. [Read More…]
A Fort Lauderdale resident asked, “Do you know where we Floridians go when we want to ski?” It was a joke. Her punch line: “The airport.” From the way things appear to be shaping up, fewer and fewer older skiers will be using planes to get to their favorite resorts. There’s a reluctance to get on planes until the virus[Read More…]
What Happened To Me And WhyYou Should Treasure Your Health And Fitness. As I get older, each ski season is more precious than the one before. I’m pushing 60+ years of skiing, and early in my life, I learned never to take one for granted. Except for being deployed overseas during Vietnam and Desert Shield and Storm, I haven’t missed[Read More…]
Make It A Good One. The last turn of the last run on any ski day is a bittersweet moment. If it’s the last day of the trip, it is sad if not melancholic. On one hand, I’ve spent the day or days enjoying my favorite sport and on the other, there’s no more skiing until the next trip that[Read More…]
New England Trails With Western Snow. I love skiing Solitude Mountain Resort for its wide range of trails for all levels and ages of skiers ranging from wide-open trails to steep, narrow trails that remind me of skiing Stowe, Mad River Glen, and Sugarbush. All the parking is right out front of the Moonbeam Lodge or Solitude Village. Management loves[Read More…]
SeniorsSkiing.com Correspondent Makes Presentations On Senior Skiers’ Needs and Wants. NSAA is the National Ski Areas Association, publishing the NSAA Journal six times a year. The publication’s audience, along with its competitor, the independent Ski Area Management, are those who manage and market ski areas. A growing topic of interest is the senior skier and how to bring them to[Read More…]
Step 2: Go Out, Do It. One of the joys of working at Ski Magazine was that I was paid to test skis!!! Ski manufacturers shipped skis to our lab for testing and when it was completed, the skis were covered with self-adhesive shelf-paper and numbered so the testers couldn’t identify the ski. Mother Nature dictated our location and we[Read More…]
Step 1: Inventing The Right Metrics [Editor Note: In this new series, former SKI editor Marc Liebman recounts how serious ski testing began as a way to provide consumers with objective information about ski performance.] In the early seventies, ski design was in the midst of a revolution that is still going on today. It started in 1959 when Art[Read More…]
How Many Readers Carry Chains And Actually Know How To Mount Them? Back in the old days, many of us had knobby snow tires even studded ones mounted on a separate set of rims stashed in the corner of the garage, ready for mounting. Tire designs and compounds changed over the years. Snow tires still exist, but all season tires[Read More…]
This is the first in a series about Ski Magazine’s 1970s ski testing program called Ski Performance Prediction or SKIpp. Its methodology combined engineering analysis as well as a structured series of on the snow maneuvers designed to bring out the best and worst of a ski under a variety of conditions. Part one of the series Determining How Skis[Read More…]
SKI Magazine Ski Testers Meet The Sundance Kid. Back in the early ‘70s, SKI Magazine (remember it?) developed a program called SKIpp that stood for “ski performance prediction” developed by the late John Perryman. He was a talented engineer who spent years in aerospace and worked with Howard Head at Head Ski Company. SKIpp had two parts, the laboratory analysis[Read More…]
A Community That Can Help You To Get Back To Athleticism. What if you suffer a life altering brain, spinal or physically limiting injury and want to ski again? Where do you turn? One place is the High Fives Foundation started by Ray Tuscany who was a ski racer who broke his back. After his injury, he founded High Fives[Read More…]
If You Haven’t Taken A Lesson In A While, These Questions Can Reassure You Are Getting What You Need. Last week, we listed five scenarios when you should consider taking a lesson. The next logical question is how do I figure out whether or not the ski school and/or the instructor can help me? The bad news is that there[Read More…]
When You Need “The Box” For Survival, You Really Need It. Most people think driving to a ski area is a routine trip. Before they leave, they check and recheck what they think are the most important items—ski equipment. That’s not the only “equipment” you should bring. Back in the good old days when the back seats of our all[Read More…]
