Every time I stand at the top of a black diamond run that I’ve never skied before, I have the same thought: “I know I can get down this, but at what cost to my dignity?”
Sometimes you just don’t know how things are going to go until you point your skis down the slope and tip yourself over that first edge. Perhaps the mountain will surprise you and you’ll ski with the same kind of panache you’re able to muster on green and blue runs. Or perhaps just around the first corner the incline is steeper, bumpier and icier than you’d anticipated, and you’ll be forced to shame-skid your way to more forgiving terrain.
Not all skiers have this problem, but many do. I’m stuck in what’s known in skiing parlance as the intermediate plateau. It’s common among people like me who’ve been skiing for a long time (nearly 30 years in my case) but go irregularly, and only ever for a maximum of one week per year.
Life on the plateau is comfortable and unchallenging. You’ve had enough coaching and experience to ski at a strong intermediate level, opening up most groomed runs in any resort. But your limited practice time holds you back from progressing to anything that could realistically be called advanced — those double black diamonds are none of your business.
That’s how I’ve been skiing for around two decades now. After recovering from the childhood trauma inflicted by the endlessly exasperated instructors at the Ecole du Ski Francais in the French Alps, I managed to reach a decent level that allows me to confidently navigate pretty much any piste. Aside from a few days of learning to float through powder in my twenties, this comprises the sum total of my ski tuition.
I just assumed this was how I would ski forever. How could I possibly hope to make serious improvements to my technique with my paltry six annual ski days and no instructor?
But it turns out there is a way. Enter Carv, a technology that feels designed to give skiers like me the help we need to identify our bad habits and break out of them.
Carv consists of two sensor-packed modules about the size of a standard matchbox — one for each of your ski boots — costing $250 for the pair. They clip onto your power straps and measure the movement of your feet, connecting to a phone app, which provides you with analysis and coaching. If you choose, this can even be in real time via your headphones. It plays into a wider trend of wearable tech that not only tracks our activity (the most common being steps and sleep), but also gives us actionable feedback that actually makes that data useful to us.
Given that a single day of tuition in the resort where I ski most regularly will also set you back $250, Carv feels like decent value for what it offers (although it should be noted that you do also need to pay a subscription fee to use it, which varies according to plan). That’s not to say Carv is a replacement for a human instructor. But if you want to improve without taking time out from skiing with friends, or if, like me, you bear the scars of childhood ski school, it can be a great compromise.
“Carv is a way for you to get feedback without really any sacrifices,” Alex Jackson, Carv’s co-founder, told me. What the team has found, he added, is that even tiny bits of feedback given fast and in real time can help change little things. “Honestly, if you can just change one thing, what will happen is… you’re going to unlock a totally new sensation that you didn’t quite realize was there,” he said.
I was excited to see if he was right.
Hitting the slopes with Carv
In January, I had six days to test Carv on my annual trip to Whistler, where I’d be skiing both with family and alone. The night before I hit the slopes, where fresh snow had just fallen, I charged up the Carv units ready to clip to my boots the next morning.
To my dismay, my first day on the mountain brought an unending torrent of rain. In spite of this, I managed to score a 111 Ski IQ on my first run, with Carv assigning me the title “peak pioneer.”
Ski IQ is a Carv-specific metric that takes your best eight consecutive turns in any segment of a run and provides you with a score ranging from 80 at the low end to 170-plus if you’re Olympic-worthy. I was pleased to be beyond the average skier who uses Carv, who according to the company’s own data has a Ski IQ of 100, but frustrated to fall short of a friend I know with Carv who has a Ski IQ of 124, giving him “line legend” status.
My competitive instinct kicked in and I was determined to beat him by the end of the week (spoiler alert: I didn’t). On the chairlift, I immediately started looking into the data to see where I might improve. I “nailed” keeping my skis parallel, the Carv app told me, but making smoother turns was “one to work on.”
