Jamie Beauchesne is my new hero. Who's Jamie Beauchesne? He holds the world record in Slalom by skiing two buoys at 43 feet off. Yep, waterskiing. No snow, just boats and lots of liquid (including gasoline).

Water skiing is my new favorite way to train for the snow derivative of slalom thanks in part to it's similarity in principle: The boat equates to gravity (sidenote: my friend and I also picked up a faded, baby blue 1984 "Ski Supreme" in need of a new motor for nine hundred bucks... one crate motor delivered from Texas and many long weeks of futzing later and we had ourselves a worthy ski boat).

Anyway, gravity is both your friend and enemy when dashing down a steep icy course on snow skis. As giver of kinetic energy, gravity can accelerate you into the winners lounge (not a real place unfortunately) or accelerate your knees right out of their sockets. It's up to you the athlete to withstand the forces imparted by this Newtonian apple puller. 

Compare this to many other sports and one realizes that most forces an athlete experiences are generated by said athlete. A sprinter sprinting, a jumper jumping, a thrower throwing. You get the idea. Now don't get me wrong, a ski racer has to still be able to use his or her own ability to accelerate their center of mass away from the ski (and hopefully down the hill). To fail in this respect would be to add precious hundredths to every turn. This means a skier has a lot to gain from off season sports requiring sprinting, jumping, and... well maybe not throwing. BUT, ski racing in large part is an isometric and even eccentric phenomenon. Virtually every race turn has a phase where the ski racer simply withstands the combined forces of gravity and centripetal acceleration. This is generally the heart of the turn where the forces are at their greatest. This type of muscular stress is hard to emulate.  The US Team has a wonderful machine for doing eccentric squats in Park City, but that's a bit of a commute from Vermont (One of these days I'm gonna rig up a barbell to the bucket of my tractor and use the hydraulics to raise the weight between eccentric reps... a keen operator is needed). But low and behold waterskiing is a wonderful emulation of this large yet primarily static load (particularly since this load is applied in a very dynamic environment just as it is when racing on snow). The boat is providing all the impetus and it's up to the skier to use that power to accelerate themselves through a course.

Back to Jamie Beauchesne. He's also a New Hampshirite and applied the same idea of cross training as I am. Only he did it in reverse. In high school he raced (in the winter... on snow) for Guilford High. I raced for Keene High and thus competed against him. He had a reputation as being a bourgeoning water skier who liked to snow ski and so used high school ski racing as a way to train through the winter (he was quite a bit faster than me as I recall... you might say I was a bourgeoning-bourgeoning snow skier) Apparently it worked well for Jamie as he's one of the worlds best waterskiers now. I can't wait to try out my legs on some steeps!