But I have learned recently, as noted in the title, that tuning skis doesn’t have to be a grind or a grind. Skiing is an expensive enough sport without having to pay to get multiple pairs of your kids’ skis tuned regularly. Second, for parents who don’t have a racing background and, as a result, don’t know how to tune skis, the use of the word grind means having to pay up to $100 a pair to have a ski-tuning professional grind and hand tune their children’s skis. First, as I note in the previous paragraph, tuning so many skis can be a real grind, meaning it stops being fun after a pair or two. I put “grind” in quotes because my use of the word has two meanings. Now let me take a brief pause and explain the title of this article. It was taking me hours to prep their skis (and they still only have one pair of skis for SL and GS) and that was time that I was not spending with my family upstairs. Admittedly, my efforts at tuning their skis were still decidedly old school.īut, in the last year, I found myself spending a lot more time downstairs in what has become the tuning room in our cabin on Donner Summit. Then, several winters ago, when they decided that they wanted to get serious about their ski racing as members of the Sugar Bowl Ski Team, I got serious too, buying a bench, vices, files, stones, iron, and wax. More recently, when my daughters began skiing, I waxed my family’s skis periodically, but didn’t touch a file or stone. Back when I was a racer at Burke Mountain Academy, Middlebury College, and the University of Colorado (as well as my two years on the pro tour), I was diligent about keeping my skis as well prepared as possible.
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