Interesting suggestions, William. While I get the trandy wide-stance thing, I'm still an old school mogul skier, so I'm no fan of the shoulder-width space thing. I have spread my skis apart a bit lately, however, but shoulder width isn't gonna happen

. About not making lead changes part of the turn though, that is horrifically confusing. I'm a fall-line skier by trade, so I don't get why one would want to change leads later in the turn. Maybe I'm just not understanding the description - I like to think of turns in terms of vertical position - you're at max compression at the apex of a turn, and standing straight up at the center point between turns - I would expect to be mid-lead-change, or have my feet side-by-side at that moment. Please elaborate (though it might be moot).
After a couple more days, I'm pretty much totally on top of it. I cut 4" off of my poles which made all the difference with hand position (BIG difference while alpine mogul skiing too). I've been getting all kinds of complements on my tele skiing lately, specifically regarding my level of aggression and violence, which makes me feel pretty good. The last day out I evidently made some kind of technique breakthrough, because I was able to do the complete (half) day without having to quit due to my legs wearing out (wife's legs wore out first - HAH). Unfortunately, I DID have to quit because my knee hurt so bad I couldn't make another turn (recently operated on - #4). I skied on my alpine rig the next day just to see if it was tele or skiing in general that my knee didn't like. I'll tell you - after becoming accustomed to the body position and relative sloppiness of the tele rig, I found myself near driving my shins through the fronts of my boots, with ski placement precision measured in millimeters, all while bumping up against the speed of sound all day. I ran a mogul slope with my wife doing GS turns on the flat next to the bumps, and absolutely obliterated her - f'n FAST. I haven't had that much fun in a long time, and my quads felt like I spent the day drinking (felt it a little in the butt though). My knee did get sore by the end of the day, but nothing like the day before on the teles. If nothing else, a week on teles makes me into superman on alpines

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SO - I'm glad I learned how to do tele and I think my technique is solid enough to look and feel good doing it. I will continue to play with the sport it for sure, but I'm pretty sure that I can't physically hang with telemark 100% of the time. I am missing most of the lateral meniscus in my knee, and I have advanced chondromalacia patella...I have NO hyaline cartilage on the back of my patella...evidently you need that stuff in there to do telemark. I was hoping that the increased quad work would help my overall knee function, but apparently I just don't have enough cartilage left to allow the load bearing required without hurting like hell. Dang.
Incidentally - I did a full test of the NTN Freeride release feature last week. I went with the system specifically for the release feature - given how bad my knee is, skiing w/o release seemed like a bad idea. Anyway, I was in the middle of a 'tuck-to-the-bottom' run (which you can't really do on teles - but whatever is closest), so I was hauling ass in a sweeper when I caught a patch of ice - I slid momentarily and hit a poof-ball of fresh snow, which threw me over the fronts of my skis. My downhill ski got sucked back behind me, and I ended up in one of those exciting high-speed cartwheeling ass-over-teakettle tumbling falls - on the second rotation, the tail of my right ski (bad knee side) slammed into the ground like a pickaxe - the ski released and ejected straight up no less than 30 feet into the air. I decided even before I stopped rolling that the NTNs were money well spent.