It's not very often that you meet someone this big, and I think the only really big guy I've ever seen ski is Juha Mieto.  A few months ago I got a call from someone in Aspen asking about a size 48 (US 13) boot and which manufacturer makes the longest pole.  I was intrigued and I got excited when he said that he wanted to come into the shop to try on some boots.

I got the largest sizes possible from Salomon the next day, but our schedules didn't work out and our meeting kept getting postponed.  So today, in walks Scott with a ski bag in hand, excited to try out some new equipment. He filled me in on his skiing background and we went to town checking out the equipment he has been using.  Scott's existing quiver of equipment includes:

180cm Exel (?) skate poles (the largest he had been able to find)
170cm Swix CT1 classic poles
194cm Infinity custom skate poles that he received today in the mail.
207cm Fischer RCR Crown Classic skis
192cm Fischer RCS Skate Skis that were broken in a crash
192cm Salomon Equipe 10 Skate skis
Euro 48 Salomon Boots

Needless to say, he needs some special equipment and fitting him is a fun challenge.  We started with boots and as he tried on the S-Labs in the largest sizes, I showed off the new Force 10 pole from Swix.  I had the opportunity to ski on these beginning in January of 2006 and loved the poles at first because of their revolutionary stiffness.  After a week of skiing on them, my impression cooled as the grip was interfering with my skiing and giving me some trouble in my hand.  A lot of us advised Swix to slap a straight grip on it and call it good, but unfortunately they kept the same design and left the radical angled grip on the pole.

Comparing the Force 10 at 175cm with the Swix CT1 at 175cm was amazing.  I figured that if anyone would appreciate the stiffness of this pole, it would be someone who uses 175cm poles for classic.  He was really excited about them until I told him about the issues we've found with the handles.  Since he is skiing daily, and he is putting a lot of force on his hands each time he poles, it didn't make sense to mess with the grip issues.  Those poles are very frustrating because they are absolutely the most revolutionary thing to come out in pole technology in many, many years, but  the handle just does not work for extended periods of skiing.  There is some hope that we may be able to modify the handle and put a traditional straight grip on it, as I've seen a prototype, but we'll see how that goes.

Scott loved the S-Lab skate boot and we discussed what he wanted for a classic boot.  He has always struggled with traditional low-cut classic boots as they just don't provide enough control for him.  This is probably due to his size - connecting 260 lbs to a 44mm-wide board requires a pretty rigid structure, and a size 13 classic boot is not exactly what I would he liked the idea of having a torsionally stiff sole that would still allow him to bend the foot forward to kick.

After we played around a bit more with the Force 10's and the remarkable difference in stiffness between a 175cm Force 10 and a 175cm CT1, we pulled out his brand new custom 194cm poles from Infinity.  I was expecting them to be flexy, but they were surprisingly stiff and light.  I hung off of them and they hardly bowed at all.  Very impressive.  I looked ridiculous because my arms were fully extended above my head to reach the grips, but they were very strong and stiff.  I could probably use them for pole vaulting.  We sized the poles for skating and determined we should cut them down to 185cm.

Once we had boots and poles out of the way, we put his skis on the flex tester.  Not surprisingly, we discovered that they were a bit on the soft side for him.  The RCR Crowns went on first and we found that one of the skis in the pair fit somebody who was roughly 185-205lbs, while the other ski in the pair was 200-220.  For someone his size, the entire waxless pattern would be pressed deeply into the snow, even when gliding downhill with weight distributed evenly on each ski.  Especially with a waxless classic ski, it is really important to get the kick zone off of the snow when half of the skier's weight is applied to the ski (as in gliding down a hill).  My assessment surprised him because he always uses one ski on his left foot and he thought he had noticed that one ski was a lot draggier than the other, but he thought he was crazy for thinking it.  The flex tester confirmed what he had been experiencing and gave us a way to explain what was going on.

Next up were his Salomon skaters.  These had been hand-picked by Igor Guziur at Snow Mountain Ranch, and I expected that they would fit pretty well since Igor knows what he is doing.  The skis were very stiff and gave good response from full weight to overload, with an appropriate wheelbase, although it would be good to get him a ski that is slightly stiffer.  The real challenge is that they just don't make a lot of skis to fit 260lb guys.  I got a little bit scared when I was running the flex tester and realized that I was going to have to take it up to 120% of his weight.  I quickly did the calculations in my head and was relieved to know that his overload was still 100lbs shy of the maximum my flexer can handle.

So, the flex test showed us some interesting features of the skis and made it obvious that we could do a lot better on the classics and if we could find something really, really stiff, perhaps we could do better with skate skis as well.  We recommended grinding his Salomon skis because every pair we've put through the stone grinder this year has needed flattening pretty badly.  The bases definitely looked like they needed some work even though the skis were almost new. 

As we were explaining to Scott how we would try to find some skis to better fit him, in came Holly, who is about 5'1 and 120 lbs.  She had just come in with her boyfriend, Brian who had dropped off some skis to grind.  When we took his skis in we noticed that they seemed really soft for him and we put them on the flex tester to see if our hands were telling us something or not. 

Sure enough, once on the flex tester, the skis were more appropriate for somebody in the range of 120-135 lbs.  So, her boyfriend was really bummed out because he had a relatively new pair of Atomic RS11's that were now going to be a present for his girlfriend.  Holly ws trying to mask her excitement about her unexpected gift by acting very sympathetic to her boyfriend while Peter was explaining to him how it could happen that he was sold skis that don't fit him.  Our guess is that he bought them from an alpine shop where they looked up his weight on a chart and matched it to the model of ski without checking the flex of the individual pair of skis.  The difficulty with skis is that each model and length has a wide range of possible flexes that can accomodate a fairly broad range of skier weights.  The confusing part is that a 160lb skier fits into the range covered by 182cm Atomic RS11 Hard/cold skis, but that does not necessarily mean that every 182cm Atomic RS11 Hard/Cold will fit a 160lb person.  Whoever sold him the ski, looked up his weight on a chart, looked at what they had on their rack, checked to see if the skier weight matched the weight range for that model of ski and sold it to him without matching the individual ski flex to the skier.  What they missed was that ski was in the softer end of the range for that particular model and size, while the skier was at the heavy range for that model and required a ski that would be relatively stiff for that model and size.

Despite the bad news, Brian was a good sport and he even bought a stone grind on Holly's new skis for her.  Very impressive.  We had a lot of fun with this crew and I think we helped them figure out some tricky challenges.  We took a picture of Scott, Holly and the 194cm poles for posterity and it sums up the day very well.