Gear Testing Tips & Tricks w/ Hoji, Ted Ligety, Anne Wangler, & Jess Tennyson

GEAR:30

BLISTER

Arts, Design, Skiing, Snow, Snowboarding, Sports, Outdoors, Bike, Technology, Gear

4.9 • 809 Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2025

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today we are sharing the first of our Blister Summit 2025 panel sessions, and we’ve got a great one to kick things off. We’re asking the pros — Hoji, Ted, Anne, and Jess — how they go about assessing and testing ski and snowboard gear, and what advice they have for the rest of us? Plus you’ll hear Ted share one of his favorite (but questionable??) ways of testing skis.

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TOPICS & TIMES:

BLISTER+ Updates (00:00)

Intros (5:34)

Evaluating Prototypes (8:21)

Assessing Gear for Yourself (11:35)

Going in Blind vs Getting Info First (18:05)

Gear You Liked but Didn’t Expect to? (23:29)

Advice on How to Evaluate (28:41)

Trickiest Variables when Testing? (34:10)

Ted’s Favorite Testing Method (38:55)

Audience Q&A:

Evaluating Pow Skis Outside of Pow? (46:26)

Intuitive Products vs. Adapting to Them (49:27)

Personal Preference vs. Objective Performance (54:00)

How to Rule Out a Bad Tune? (55:29)

How Many Runs Should You Take? (56:48)

What Notes Do You Take? (1:00:16)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, welcome back to Gear 30 on the Blister Podcast Network.
0:09.6	I'm Jonathan Ellsworth, and you can check out everything we're doing and reviewing over
0:15.5	at blisterreview.com.
0:18.5	Today, we are sharing with you the first of our Blister Summit 2025 panel session conversations,
0:26.2	and we've got a great one to get things kicked off here.
0:30.1	We are once again asking the pros how they go about assessing and testing gear,
0:36.1	and this is a very interesting, very thought-provoking, and pretty wild conversation.
0:43.8	And we've got some great people on this panel, including our patron saint of gear 30,
0:50.5	Hoji, as well as Ted Ligody, yes, one of the greatest ski races of all time, Annie Wangler,
0:58.2	who is new to the Armada Ski Team, and notably, Annie happens to carve a ski, about as beautifully
1:07.1	as anyone I've ever seen do it in person, And yes, I did just mention Ted Ligody.
1:14.3	I'm just saying, in terms of like the platonic ideal of a carved ski turn, I found myself all
1:21.6	through the summit thinking, Ted Ligot could represent all men on that front, and Annie would be a perfectly great
1:30.0	representative on the female side of things. Yeah, watching those two carve a turn is just about
1:38.3	as good as it gets. Oh, and I should maybe also point out, Annie happens to be dating Hoji. So, yes, this is like our first
1:48.3	couple's edition of how to evaluate gear. And then finally, rounding out the panel, we have
1:54.7	Jess Tennyson, who is both an athlete and product tester for Never Summer Snowboards.
2:01.3	Now, our plan here over the coming weeks is to publish many of these Blister Summit panel
2:07.6	conversations over on YouTube.
2:10.6	So if you haven't yet subscribed to our Blister YouTube channel, we've included a link in
2:16.1	the show notes, and I strongly suggest signing up
2:19.1	Pronto. And some of our Blister Summit panel sessions might find their way to this Gear 30
	...

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