The Certified Ambulance Documentation Specialist (CADS) certification is the first offered by NAAC that is specifically geared for EMTs, paramedics and other EMS field practitioners. Under the agreement, CADS will occupy the Brecksville Stables, including two of the stable barns, offices and arena, two fenced outdoor paddocks, outdoor arena & equipment barn. Cleveland Metroparks and CADS will have shared use of certain overflow parking and a paved turn-around location around the stables.

Dallas Morning News
see the recent article:
Bad Knees? This device might let you keep skiing

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Have a question for us? Call us: 970-949-4533
email: cads@colorado.net
or snail mail: 2121 N. Frontage Road, PMB 160, Vail, CO 81657

SKIING Reviews CADS

STRUT YOUR STUFF

CADS, those rods attached to boot and back, can help you ski better.

By Nicholas Howe

Reprinted in its entirety with permission

Skiing with CADS is skiing with questions. People sometimes hesitate, wondering if itwould be rude to ask. Then they ask. For me, the questions began last winter, with myfirst day on CADS at Vail, and continued after I’d gotten home to New Hampshire.

Q: What are those things on your legs?

A:They’re called CADS, which is the easy way ofsaying Constant–force Articulated Dynamic Struts.

Q: They look weird. What do they do?

A:CADS work like a car’s front–endsuspension, which lifts the car’s body, presses the tires against the road, andstabilizes the geometry of the steering system.

Q: Yeah, but don’t they feel strange?

A:At first they felt very strange: as if mybody were being lifted, my skis were being pressed down on the snow, and my legs were instrange: as if my body were being lifted, my skis were being pressed down on the snow, andmy legs were in zero–g. Now the only strange part comes when the afternoon ends andmy legs feel as if it were still morning.

Q: Are they hard to get used to?

A:Don’t jump right onto black diamond bumps.Start with skating on a smooth beginner slope, then make GS turns on a steeper slope, thengo to crud to get confident.

Q: They look dangerous. Won’t the rod poke you if you fall?

A:I can’t imagine that happening, partly becauseof the way the rods are mounted, and partly because I can’t imagine how I’d fallwith CADS. Like many skiers, I used to be a conditions–ninny: When heavy crud orboilerplate came along, I’d back off, I’d get in trouble, I’d be miserable,and I’d quit. That’s all gone now. With CADS, I just keep sailing along.

As an Easterner, I also got burning thighs and out of breath the first few days onColorado trips. The first time I tried CADS was at the 11,250–foot top of Vail. Teninches of overnight snow had turned to lumpy spring crud, and I expected to pull up afterfive turns, pant, and wait for the fire in my thighs to go out. In stead, I made nonstopturns all the way down to Mid–Vail, then began talking without so much as a singledeep breath.

By this time the interlocutor is getting used to the look of my CADS. A webbingstrap goes around each thigh, with a cord from each strap passing over a little pulley atthe top of a slender fiberglass rod and down to a thick rubber band anchored in a swivelat the back of each boot, which also sockets the lower end of the rod. The cords usuallyrun out through neat brass grommets set into your pants just below the waist, but I’mstill wearing the web rigging on the outside. For lifts or lunch, a flick of the wristdisengages the rods, which store inside a pair of ski poles that comes with each set ofCADS.

Q: Who thought of all this?

A:Take the next lift ride with me for a more extendedessay on the picturesque etiology of CADS.

One day Walter Dandy was riding up a lift at Heavenly Valley and noticed how much histhighs hurt after a run in the heavy Sierra snow. Suddenly, like Paul’s revelation onthe way to Damascus, Walter saw the CADS design in his mind’s eye, unannounced by anyprior thought, but complete in every detail.

This surprise probably had two origins. For one thing, there’s invention inWalter’s blood. Hi family counts a long line of important innovators in many fields:19th–century harbor dredges and industrial milling machines, break–throughneurosurgery—one family member even invented the batter’s helmet, butdidn’t patent it because he thought one shouldn’t make money from sports. Foranother thing, Walter is quite severely afflicted with dyslexia, the perceptual disorderthat usually makes it difficult to make sense of printed words but can also lead tostartling originality in conceptual design.

Walter spent several years working on his idea, but he realized he didn’t have theskills he’d need for development and production. So he looked in the Yellow Pages andfound Tony Nespor, Czech by birth, now an engineer in Walter’s native Baltimore and afountain of technical skills. The market launch, however, was not easy. Trying to sell thefirst CADS, Walter says, was like trying to sell the first oyster.

Now Walter has the eager evangelical nature of a man who has repealed a troublesome lawof nature. He also has a large pile of letters that read like testimonials from pilgrimsto the curative shrine at Lourdes: people with arthritic knees and hips, with bad backs,with circulation problems, with legs weakened by age or debilitating disease, with kneestorn by too great a devotion to risks of all kinds. Also from people like me, who justthought they’d give CADS a try.

After several days in Vail, I came back home to New Hampshire and Wildcat and morequestions.

Q: Do those things work in every kind of snow?

A:Sure, and some places that are hardly even snow. Ijust hit an alligator, and it didn’t bother me at all.

Q: An alligator?

A:Yeah, one of those places where a grooming tractorwent down a slushy slope and the track froze solid with all the knobs and ridges hard asgranite. It was chatter city, instant disaster in my former life, but with CADS I madeturns the whole length of it and never so much as scraped an edge.

Not only that, but I started the day at Wildcat with two nonstop runs, which Icouldn’t have done on the best day I ever had as a rubber–legged teenager. Myfirst days of using CADS were all dizzy infatuation, but now I’m settling down tosteadier thought and I notice that CADS seem to have a built–in pedagogy. I’vealways tended to sit back too much, now I’m moving forward to the position all thoseinstruction articles recommend. I’m also looking farther down the hill, anotherinstruction favorite.

Q: Don’t your skis do odd things with that rigging attachedto your boots?

A:Yes, they do the right things, whichdoesn’t necessarily happen when it’s only me that’s attached to them. Thisis because, in an Aristotelian sense, a ski wants to do the right thing, it hasgood behavior designed into it. That is, when a ski is flat, it goes straight; whenit’s on edge, it turns. My skis only get in trouble because I make mistakes and theycan’t get away from me.

Q: Huh?

A:Sure. It’s pressure that makes a ski workproperly, and losing that pressure or misapplying it is what gets you in trouble, likechattering. When a ski chatters in a turn, when it bounces on a rough surface, each bouncecauses the ski to lose contact with the snow and breaks the arc of the edge that is makingthe ski turn. You can understand this better if you think about fleas.

Ccsd

Q: I am, but it doesn't help.

A:Okay, look at it this way: If a flea went skiing,it wouldn’t have trouble with chattering. That’s because fleas can store energyin their legs, which is why they can jump hundreds of times their own height. Wecan’t store energy in our legs, but the rubber spring on CADS can. Practicallyeverything we do on skis involves dropping down from a straight–legged positions, andwhen we wear CADS, quite a lot of the weight we lower is stored as energy and used topress the skis on the snow.

Q: So the more I lower my weight, the more I flex my knees, themore pressure goes into my skis?

A:Good question! That was a big problem forWalter and Tony Nespor and the answer is the C, the Constant–force part of the name.We have a lot of energy storage devices in everyday life—torsion bars, leaf springs,coil springs, slingshots, archers’ bows—and so on, but none of those areconstant–force. When you load most springs, it starts easy and gets harder;that’s nonlinear force, what engineers call stacking. The release is stacked, too:first a lot, then less and less. What was needed for CADS was a nonstacking spring, anearly constant–force spring.

Walter and Tony tried all kinds of metal springs but there were too complicated andbulky, so they went back to basic chemistry and developed a rubber spring with thecharacteristics they needed. That means the pressure on your ski stays almost constantwhether you’ve got a little flex in your knees or a lot.

Q: What about breaking? My slingshots always broke on the reallybig jobs. Us post office drop boxes near me.

A:Walter and Tony thought about that: What would coldand ultraviolet light do to the rubber? So they went back to high–tech engineeringand hung one of their first rubber springs on a backyard fence. It’s still perfectlygood after four years.

All of this means that CADS provide a steady downward force that keeps the skis fromdoing bad things, like chattering and getting deflected by bumps or crud, and at the sametime CADS help skis do all the good things that are built into their design. And if thatisn’t enough happiness, your knees and legs are bearing less weight, so your kneesdon’t get hurt and your muscles don’t get tired.

Q: Ah–hah! I knew it sounded too good to betrue! If CADS are taking the weight off my legs, that means my quads are turning intonoodles.

A: I can tell you’ve been reading those T–shirts that read No pain, nogain. But they don’t have it quite right. A burning thigh muscle is an anaerobicthigh muscle, it’s overdrawn its oxygen account at the metabolic bank. You cangain strength with anaerobic exercise, the heavy, grunting, painful kind favored by weightlifters and sprinters who need those quick explosive moves. But you can also gain strengthby staying in the aerobic mode, by keeping your muscles well–supplied with oxygenwhile they’re working. Your legs will gain strength by having a good long aerobicworkout without thigh burn.

Q: Well, what about purity? I mean, CADS look like a prettyartificial deal. We’ve got enough high–tech stuff in this world already. Skiingis my chance to get natural.

Montgomery Cad

A: I know what you mean, but purity has its slipperyslopes, too. Does a zillion dollars worth of snow guns and grooming tractors give younatural skiing? And what about equipment? When I started skiing, my boots were about likewhat I’d wear for work shoes now and my skis were solid ash with toe–strapbindings and no metal edges. Heck, the equipment we use now costs more than a new carcost then, and it’s probably more highly engineered. Have I lost virtue becauseI’m using modern equipment? Maybe so, but I’m also having a lot more fun now.The rest is up to the theologians.

How do I Order?