The Athletic Skier

The Athletic Skier is a "how to" book for intermediate to advanced skiing. It focuses on tuning the "whole body" aspects of skiing. Starting with basic body mechanics to the details of boot and ski tuning. The relationship to ExtremeProgramming may be that the tuning processes (for advanced skiing) requires very careful attention to the details. A very minor change in the cant of one foot bed (wedges under the foot or under the binding) in relation to the ski can have dramatic results (both positive or negative) for the skier. This tuning process must not only be well understood by the technical tuner (The US Ski Team has specialists for this), but also the skier must be able to provide feedback from the slopes on how the subtle changes are actually working.

One problem with the analogy, is that skiing is a physical sport requiring not only balance, muscle control, tremendous strength at the higher levels, but also the ability to subsume fear. The fear is always there, channeling it into moving down the mountain at high speed is a skill learned by practice. In ExtremeProgramming the consequences of failure are not injury or death as it is in advanced skiing.

There are several, possibly useful, analogies between SoftwareDevelopmentAndExtremeSports.

Drills and skills

http://www.breakthroughonskis.com/