Dear telemarker:
Free the heel, free the mind?
Yours in the pins,
Muffin
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Dear telemarker:
Free the heel, free the mind?
Yours in the pins,
Muffin
Okay, to get the complete idiot question out of the way first: how does telemark skiing differ from cross-country or Alpine?
When you see a skier going down a hill and turning in a direction such that they are going diagonally across the hill, if the leading ski (the ski that is in front) is higher up the hill than the trailing ski, and both skis are parallel (pointing in the same direction), that is a christie turn. If the leading ski is lower down the hill and the skis are parallel, it is a telemark turn.Quote:
Originally posted by Zuul
Let’s try something. Stand up, bend at your ankles, knees and waist, arch your back forward and slightly hunch your shoulders, and generally take a very stable stance so that if you were a boxer you would not get knocked over if you were hit. That’s the sort of basic body stance you need for skiing down a hill, be it using christie or telemark turns.
Now lift one of your feet without changing your basic body stance. Move your lifted foot forward, put it on the floor again in front of the other foot, and without changing that basic body stance, put weight equally on both feet. That is a christie turn position.
Lift that same foot again, and move it backward, put it on the floor behind the other foot, and without changing that basic body stance, put weight equally on both feet. That is a telemark position. Note that when you do this, it is not possible to put weight on both feet without lifting the heel of the trialing foot a little. That little bit of heel lift is why telemark gear has a free heel.
Now try walking. It’s pretty hard to have any spring in your step if you do not lift your heel and bend at the ball of your foot each step. That is cross country skiing.
Think of telemark skiing as being in the middle of a continuum, with cross-country on one end and alpine on the other end. With mid-weight telemark gear, you can do both cross-country and alpine skiing, but not as well as folks on specialized cross-country or alpine gear. For example, I have used the same telemark gear for both the 160 km Canadian Ski Marathon, and for some regional giant slalom lift area ski races, but only finished in the middle of the pack for both types of events due to the telemark gear not being as good a specialized gear for either speciality.
Within telemark skiing, there is a range of gear. Light telemark skis are essentially cross country skis with metal edges to help you turn. They tend to be a bit beefier than ultra-light cross country skis, but are in the same general league, in that they are narrow at the tip, the waist, and the tail, and weigh very little. These are the sort of skis that work nicely if you ski hiking trails that are not regularly groomed for cross country skiing.
Light telemark boots tend to be light weight hiking boots with toes that fit telemark bindings. Good fitting walking shoes with ankle support.
At the other end of the range of telemark gear are the dreadnoughts, that are essentially mid-range alpine skis as far a weight, length and width dimensions go. At the waist, they are wider than cross country skis, they are a lot wider at the tip and the tail to make turning easier (if the edges of the skis already describe the shape of an arc, then skiing that arc is easier), and they are heavy due to the weight of the materials used to keep them stiff enough when under force while turning.
Heavy duty telemark boots tend to be similar to light-weight alpine boots, with the addition of a flexible sole that lets you bend your foot at the ball of the foot, as if you were walking.
Telemark bindings are similar to cross country bindings, in that only the toe of your boot is attached to the ski. With alpine bindings, both the toe and the heel of your boot is attached to the ski.
Telemark bindings tend to be three-pin rat trap bindings. The pins stick up from the binding. You step down on to the pins of the binding with the toe of your boot, which has three holes in it into which the pins fit. Then you clamp the top of the toe of your boot down with a hinge in the binding. There are other telemark binding mechanisms, but this is the most common type, and if you cross country skied thirty or more years ago, you would recognize them as being plain old cross country bindings (since then, cross country bindings have become more specialized).
To provide greater stability, often telemark bindings have a cable that loops from the toe piece of the binding out around the back of the heel, and returns to the other side of the toe piece of the binding. This does not hold the heel to the ski, but rather provides greater support by keeping the heel above the ski rather than letting the heel wander off the ski and onto the snow.
With that as background, let’s now get to what a telemark turn actually is. Back at the dawn of time, folks just tied the toes of their boots to their skis. As roughly four thousand years went by, skis with such bindings were pretty useless for turning, for the skier’s heel would slip off to the side and into the snow rather than turning the ski.
In the mid-19th century, a Norwegian furniture maker named Sondre Norheim added a heel loop to the toe binding, that helped keep the heel from slipping off to the side. That made turning a lot easier. He won a lot of races using two turns: the telemark turn, and the christie turn. The telemark turn was named after the region of Telemark, where Sondre lived, and the christie turn was named for the city of Christiana (now Oslo), where the national races were held.
With the christie turn, both feet stay fairly close together, in that the leading foot does not extend forward too much, and the following foot does not trail too far behind. This makes for quick turns, because you do not have to take much time to switch leads bringing the trailing foot up in front of the leading foot to turn your skis in the other direction. That’s why when it comes to ultra-quick turns in moguls/bumps, a skier using christie turns (i.e. World Cup mogul skiers) with do far better than a skier using telemark turns.
With telemark turns, the feet separate slightly further than in christie turns, and to some degree the skis work more independently. The distance from the tip of the leading ski to the tail of the following ski is greater in a telemark turn than in a christie turn, essentially given the skier more ski to work with during a turn and being able to vary the shape of the arc described by the two skis, and more ski to work with should the skier run into some slower snow (without heels being clamped down, a christie skier has a much higher chance of face planting upon running into slower snow than does a telemark skier who instead will simple switch the trailing ski into the leading ski position when the leading ski bogs down). Out of this, christie became more popular on hard packed snow, and telemark became more popular in deep snow, with the skier using the same gear for both, and switching between christie and telemark technique depending on the snow conditions.
Steel toe piece bindings were developed, but the problem lack of stability for heels still stood in the way of easy technique for both christie and telemark turns. By the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century, Austrian alpine skiing pioneer Mathias Zdarsky had developed a heel plate binding that acted as an under-boot stabilizing sole for the ski boot, that significantly helped turning technique that skiing down hills became much more popular.
In 1929 and the years following, Swiss music box maker Guido Reuge and his brothers Albert and Henri developed the telemark binding, which essentially is a steel toe box with a metal cable that loops around the heel – what today is recognizable as a modern telemark binding.
The most significant part of the development of the Kandahar binding was a pair of small tabs that screwed into the sides of the skis near the heel, so that instead of the cable going directly from the toe piece to the heel, the cable went from the toe piece to below the heel, and then up and around the heel. This essentially cemented the heel to the ski. For cross country skiing, telemark turns and gently christie turns, the cable was not slipped under the heel tabs. For forceful christie turns, such as those used on ski hills, the cable was slipped under the heel tabs to keep the heel from sliding off the ski. These little tabs under the heels into which the cable was placed made all the difference in alpine skiing, for the degree of control they permitted at high speed was unprecedented. Have a look at alpine skis from the 40s and 50s, and odds are that you will be looking at a Kandahar binding.
The big divide between telemark and alpine took place when separate toe and heel bindings replaced the toe and cable Kandahar type bindings. In the late 1940s and early 1950’s American mechanical engineer Mitch Cubberley developed the first heal release bindings, that did away with cables, and at the same time resulted in the requirement that the boot heel never be able to leave the ski except when the ski and boot separated entirely. The big benefit of this heel binding was twofold. It, when combined with a releasable toe binding, led to fewer injuries, and it permitted the skier to step into the binding with greater ease than fiddling around with cables. This is what is now recognized as the modern alpine binding. Boots with inflexible soles are necessary for toe-heel release bindings. Since flexing of a boot at the ball of the foot is required in the telemark turn, so it is no longer possible to perform telemark turns on alpine gear.
These days, telemark boot and binding design has been tweaked to the point that it is offers nearly as much lateral stability as an alpine toe-heel binding, so skiers on telemark gear use both telemark turns and christie turns, quite happily ski challenging alpine runs, and ski home at the end of the day.
Hi i currently croos country ski and if looking to go do some backcountry skiing and was wondering what would be easier to switch to telemark or rondondee ?
Hi i currently Cross country ski and was looking to go do some backcountry skiing. What do you think would be a easier transisin telemark or rondondee ski's?
Muffin! Come back! Answer!
Sorry for the delay. I was way too busy the last week before Christmas, and spent the time between Christmas and now without internet on a ski vacation.
What to do – tele or randonee? In the best of all worlds, you’d go both ways.
For a start, however, have a look at the terrain that you expect to be travelling through. If you will be skiing over lakes, hills and dales, go with telemark boots and bindings. If the only reason that you are shuffling along is so that you can climb big hills that you will be aggressively skiing down, go with randonee boots and bindings.
With tele gear, when you kick and glide, your foot bends at the ball of the foot, just as it does in cross country classic. It feels good. With randonee gear, when you kick and glide, your foot does not bend, but instead a hinge in front of your boot permits your heel to lift, which will not be a happy feeling for you since you are used to cross country. Randonee is OK for getting you up a hill, but when it comes to following a trail through the woods, it is slow and frustrating.
When going downhill, randonee is easier, for you don’t have to worry anywhere near as much about going nose over tips when you run into thicker or deeper snow. At the higher end of ski technique, the fixed heel gives you a bit more stability when dealing with ice, and makes it easier to lift your ski tails when making tight jump turns.
In short, tele is more versatile for it will let you move through a variety of terrain, whereas randonee is more dedicated to downhill performance.
You might wish to also have a look at the sort of skis that are most appropriate for the terrain in which you will be skiing. Cambered skinny (e.g, <55 mm at waist) skis work nicely on the flats, whereas soft wide skis are slow and sloppy on the flats. When skiing downhill, skinny skis dive down under the snow and cause you to fall, or are just plain unstable and cause you to fall, whereas soft wide (e.g. >100 mm at waist) skis float on top of the snow like waterskis. How wide and how soft you go is a trade-off between trail performance and downhill performance, which is why a lot of tele skis have a waist in the mid-70s, so that they can do a bit of both.
So what’s the bottom line? Here are a couple of suggestions. If you will be moving through a variety of terrain, go with telemark, use light to mid-weight tele boots, releasable tele bindings (don’t risk a leg injury when you are miles and miles from help in the deep freeze) that include a hardwire or heel cables for greater lateral stability, and soft skis with a waist in the mid-70s. If you are heading into the backcountry specifically to ski down big hills, get your hands on some soft and fat alpine skis and either randonee or soft alpine boots (the randonee bindings are lighter but not as safe and not as durable as modified alpine bindings such as the Marker Duke or Baron bindings that are true alpine bindings that also let you lift your heel when traversing or climbing. Note that most randonee bindings do not work with alpine boots, and randonee boots do not work with most modified alpine bindings, so take care to ensure that your boots and bindings can mate).
As far a technique goes, your best bet is to start with christie skiing (alpine parallel) before moving on to telemark skiing (telemark parallel), simply because christie is easier to learn. Pick a gentle slope with no ice or bumps, and try making some broad turns on your cross country gear – odds are that you will find christie easier than tele. Once you are into deep snow in the backcountry, the odds are that you will still find christie easier even if you are on tele gear, for with tele turns it will be more difficult to keep both ski tips up above the snow.
Have fun, and tell us about your adventures once you start skiing in the backcountry.