Last bit of training before the race's

November 21, Panorama, British Columbia.  We just finished our 4th day on snow in Panorama.  Our first day here the snow was incredible, bullet proof and super grippy perfect for breaking in new skis and getting balanced on the skis after being off for 7 weeks.  The time off was well spent in the gym and healing our bodies for the up and coming season, lots of massages, stretching and rest over the past 7 weeks on top of all the training made for a perfect prep block for our long camp in Pano, along with the NORAM's at the end of it.  

This years fleet!

Packing for Pano

The view on our drive from Calgary to Panorama

Top Of Old Time the small opening in the trees on the left is the entrance to Hay Fever

This year in Pano is probably the hottest year I have seen here in the past 4 years ive been here, I still have yet to break out my big jacket.   Because of the hot temperatures they have only been able to open up 2 runs so far, Hay Fever and Show Off.  Show Off is the run right underneath the chair with some fairly simple terrain, its got a small pitch right off the start that goes onto a flat which than gets slightly steeper once it straightens out, and than has a couple rolls along the way.   Hay Fever is completly the opposite, you go threw a small cat track threw the wood's which then opens up to a gradual pitch that slowly gets steeper as you go down and than completly drops over into a steep decently long pitch and than flattens out after about 20 or so gates onto a long flat, my favorite SL run.

Top Of Hay Fever

Hay Fever, looks flat... Its not

The snow making crews have been out and in sight on the mountain the past two days looking like they are going to get ready to blow snow as soon as it gets cold, and from what I hear they are going to hopefully start tonight and continue blowing for 36 hours straight, which will get Old Timer open, a great GS and Super G training run. 

Always check your dins on new binding before you start skiing

As you've probably figured out the weather has been up and down for the past 4 days, our first day was clear skies warm and perfect snow, the next day was overcast still warm but softer snow.   Yesterday the worst so far it was warm super soft snow and mixed between rain and snow threw out the day, needless to say we got wet.   If you look at the positive side of things it was kind of cool as you went up the chair and the temperature got colder as you went higher the rain turned into thick big snow flakes, kind of cool.

Its snowing, or is it raining either way nice view!

Today, was a great day snow was excellent on Show Off and the weather was co-operating until now,  its started snowing again, which isnt bad because 1. we are off the mountain and staying warm and 2. if its snowing it must mean its almost cold enough to blow snow.

Show Off on the left and the chair lift we take every day!

We started out the camp with a block of free skiing and a few stubbies, and than going right into a second block of full gate SL training in a fairly simple course, and than been in full gate courses getting longer and trickier over the past 4 days and than today with a full length SL course with some timing to see where everyone was at.  Tomorrow we are going into GS for the next days and than taking a day off before our next block of the camp.   The camp has definitly started off on the right foot for everyone I'm pretty sure but definitly for me, some of the big changes we were working on in Chile have really happened the past few days and we are just working out some kinks to make my skiing even better. Hopefully my GS will do the same!

Cheers

Back again, we are now in Valle Nevado, a 30-40 min car ride or a 10 second hike from the top of one mountain to the other.  We arrived two days ago in Valle Nevado, the weather is great and the conditions are great on the runs but to get to the run can become quite tricky depending on what part of the mountain we are on.  Our GS block is now over and we have started a 5 day SL block here in Valle with one last day of GS on our last day. 

View from our room in the hotel

Day 1 of SL we were in full gate SL courses but for small sections one of which was quite off set but 13-14m and the other was more of a normal SL course we would tend to see.  Day 2, so today we were on a run called Fox Trot its a gradual pitch at the top and than a long flat with two decent rollers half way down.

Fox Trot is the run straight ahead to the left of the run on the right

On our first day of skiing in Valle we were on the hill loading the chairs at just before or at 7am... the sun wasn't even up yet.  We ski probably an hour to and hour and a half more here than we did in El Colorado and can get alot of runs in, in the day because of such a fast turn around.  Today the team did about 900SL gates give or take a few.   I unfortunately could not get that many runs in for a mixture of reasons, one being the soreness of my feet from the bone spurs pushing up against the shell but the foremost reason is once again my hip.  Yesterday on the second last run of the day I caught my tip on a SL gate and twisted my hip which brought it to and past the range of motion where the pain begins.  It has been sore all yesterday and all today as well, lots of ice and stretching will hopefully help bring down the pain in it so I can ski more runs tomorrow. Today I think I got in about 5 or 6 runs in the course before the last run I did jerked my hip into an uncomfortable position and had to call it a day.   On the bright side I got to tan a little bit while sitting on my balcony watching everyone else ski while icing my hip.

Skiing at 7am

Icing the hip while watching the team ski

One of the best things about Valle Nevado is the nightly sun sets!! even though they are all the same view, which is coming out over El colorado its some of the best sun sets I've ever seen. 

Sun set over El Colorado from Valle Nevado

Sun Rise looking over the mountain

Sun Set View from the common area

Sun Rise over El Colorado

Tomorrow we are back on Fox Trot with nice and sharp skis, as needed, and looking to get as many runs or more tomorrow.  The snow here in Valle is very very slick and our skis dull very easily if we don't bring a diamond stone, file guide and file on the hill with us every day. 

Warming up while the sun is getting up

There really isn't much else to talk about for now besides the skiing and taking care of injurys there isn't really anything to do here.

Until next time.

Watching the team ski from the balcony

Last minute changes

Hello from El Colorado Chile!  I am currently in Chile for a 2 week training camp 1 week in El Colorado and 1 week in Valle Nevado.  The weather has been great for the last week, minus one day.  We have now been on snow for 4 days, or 17 days total this season if we include the trip to Mt. Hood, Oregon.

 

Early morning on day 3 of the camp

For the most part this camp has been building off of what we did in Mt. Hood, except at a much faster pace and in some actual 26m plus GS courses.  Feels great!  Our first day on snow was mostly just shaking off jet lag and getting back into the grove of ski racing.  After a couple runs and a bit of exploring the mountain we started doing some drills. Our first day was also one of the coldest days we've had this camp, needless to say my feet where not ready for the temperature and froze, literally.

Tuning room or tuning spot rather

We have discovered that my feet have terrible circulation and my toes need a lot of space so that they don't freeze more on that in a bit!

The new boots

Day two was a little more interesting than day one, in three words I can explain it as a total white out.  We woke up at 6:30am and were on the transport at 7:30 we arrived at the mountain to be told that it is not letting anyone up because you cant see more than 5m ahead.   So, what else to do in ski racing than wait it out inside the lodge playing games and cards.  Joey, our coach bit the bullet and went up to see what was going on. with a radio in his hand and a radio in our hand we awaited news on the conditions.  1 hour later he had reached the top of the mountain where we were supposed to train, the ride up takes about 30min tops, not looking to good.  Report back from Joey was well cant see much i'd say its a 80% chance we will not ski today.  Two and a half hours into Joey's expedition we decided to radio him to find out where he was, as we asked him he emerged out of the fog.   That was all the skiing that was done for that day.

Cant see much out the window and up the hill...

Days 3 threw 5, where fairly straight forward minus a few changes to the plans that were unexpected unwanted, day three and four we skied 24-26 gate GS and than today about 35 plus gate GS course in the back right beside Valle Nevado, we could literally take 10 steps and be in Valle Nevado.


At the end of day 4 my two big toes where completly frozen one was purple and the other the toe nail was starting to fall off,  it was time to make some adjustments and fix this probelm, I did not want to loose a toe or two for that matter.  Back at the house me and Joey went threw all our possibility's and decided that the best and easiest way was to shave down the foot board in the bottom of the boot we took of about 3mm and boy did it make a difference, you wouldn't think so but my toes felt 100000000x better today with that small adjustment. We are going to keep a close eye on my toes for the rest of the camp but I think they will be alright from here on out!

Not alot of space in there

Solution, I think so!

The BIG difference

Now to get to the title and what I mentioned in that last paragraph all these last minute changes.   To start off our camp was supposed to be 3 weeks long we only found out 2 days prior to leaving that we would loose a week and only be here for 2, that's a lose of 7 days, its fair to say the team and myself where not to excited about the lose of an entire week of skiing,  the next thing that changed on us was day 2, the weather, yes I know we cant control the weather, but because of it we lost another day of skiing so we are now totaled at 8 less days of skiing and because of the weather we sacrificed our day off for the second day and will now ski the rest of the camp no breaks, as long as the weather permits.  Than Day 3 our transport who is to arrive at 7:30 arrived about 7:45 7:50 and than as we got into the transport the truck would not start... try after try the truck would not start... so we wait yet again new transport truck arrives around 8:05 and we rush up to the hill.  Now for the next thing that has changed on us without notice or planned for was the closing of the front side of the mountain. meaning the chair lifts and t-bars we take up in the morning all closed... new way to get up the mountain, a convoy of around 10 pick up trucks to transport our team the French woman's B team and Chileans up dirt roads that are barely 1 car wide all the way up to the back of the mountain.  It's a little scary but its really fun at the same time to be in a truck on the edge of a mountain drifting all over the place cause its all mud or snow. 

Nice sun rise as we drive up the mountain

Decent down partly in snow

Decent down the mountain partly in mud

That's basically the most interesting parts of our camp so far, more to come as we ski more, I'm sure more plans will change, just a hunch tho!

Enjoy the view!

Visibility 0 to 100

It is now day 5 here in Mt.Hood, hope everyone had a good Canada day weekend.  The previous three days have been quite interesting.   The last three days consisted of poor viability and high quantities of skiing.  A regular day consists of waking up at 5:30am departing from out condos 6:20am and going up the lifts at 7:00am, to say its early is an understatement.  By 9:30 we feel like its 4pm and we have been skiing all day.  Unfortunately day's 3-4 we did a lower amount of skiing due to lack of visibility so we only did between 6.8 to 7.6km total of skiing.  Yesterday as we where arriving at the mountain it seemed like it was going to be our first clear day of skiing... that was false hope. Luckily we had about an hour of clearish skiing but after that visibility got to an all time low, you could see maybe 10m ahead if you where lucky.  For the coaches they basically saw us for two gates and than we disappeared into the clouds again.  The weather out here has been a little temperamental to say the least.

Rowan from less than 15 m away in the clouds

looking down into the clouds from the top

Yesterday, July 1st was my birthday and as tradition a classic pie took place luckly for me they missed me with the first pie (dog food (I was not happy about that)) but they got me later on that night with blue icing, which isn't so bad.  Yesterday was a good day it was pouring rain, and it wasn't super dark all day and skiing was fun and i learnt some stuff so all in all it was a good day!

Now back to that dog food pie, I just want to make it perfectly clear that on someones birthday you pie them with wipe cream or something that tastes good, ie: moose, icing, etc.  you do not go out and get dog food and try and pie someone with it,  because for one its insanely gross and it will ruin your whole day and two if you where the one getting pied would you want it to be dog food?? so think about what your using to pie someone with and make sure it wont ruin your day... I was slighty pissed about the dog food thing and if they had got me yesterday would have ended a little differently.

 Happy Canada Day From Mt.Hood

Today was our first fully clear sunny all day, day on the mountain.  We skied a total of 8.4km which doesn't seem like a lot but on the ski hill it is a lot of skiing.   The sun was out all day and it was a little windy but once the sun was up and high the ski hill got pretty hot.  We worked alot on slow low performance skiing for the last five days and today we got into a little more carving mode with the majority of our runs being full performance carving.  Still tons to work on but it is starting and building rapidly right now!!

We meet again.... Mt Hood

Been a while since my last blog post, so I'm going to try and out more effort into this blog page and keep everyone updated with my season, and stories of my life!  for those of you who are very observant you have probably noticed that this blog is coming to you from Mt. Hood, just a quick re cap, Mt. Hood is located in Oregon, USA it is considered the most hiked mountain in the USA and is also considered a semi active volcano.   Don't worry tho they will give us lots of warning before it erupts.  Yes i know its June 29 and i should be on a dock somewhere tanning having a beer or two but no, we are on a mountain for the next two weeks skiing in the middle of the summer.... pretty awsome eh!!

So back to whats going on, it is now the beginning of the 2012/2013 ski season this is our first and definitely not our last pre season camp.   We flew in from Ottawa on wednesday and have now had 2 days of skiing, can't say they have been the best days but can't say they are the worst.   Than again if you look at what our goal for the camp is they have been two very successful days!  We arrived pretty late wednesday night tho arriving at our condos around 11pm local time, thursday everyone was a little tired to say the least.

The goal of the camp this year as it is every year is to work on our technical foundation to be stronger technically and to have a strong foundation to build off of and go faster every day we are on snow.  This is the best time of year to work on such things, how ever it gets kind of boring sometimes, because for one we do a lot ( and i mean a lot) of slow skiing like we might as well just snowplow at the speed we are going.   Though by skiing very slowly and attentive to detail we are becoming more fundamentally sound and much stronger skiers.  Needless to say the last two days have been very slow... we have maybe done 2 runs where we got to link a few carved turns together but besides that its been skidded turns and working on body position and lower joints.

Yesterday being our first day, we got a late start to the day by leaving our condos at 7am and being on the hill by around 7:20 7:30 or so, pretty late eh? hahah!  It was a beautiful sunny day yesterday super warm and great snow conditions we skied the whole day on the upper portion of the mountain stoping briefly for a 30min break and than right back at the slow low performance skiing.  We left the mountain at around 12/12:30 yesterday got home ate lunch and than right into a dry land to flush out our legs and stretch out our sore muscles from the first day of skiing again this season.  And of course we had to play multiple games of cage before we could call it a day for physical activity!

Top of lane 17 located at 2821m looking out over Oregon

Today, on the other hand was practically polar opposite of yesterday with poor visibility and slight rain.  Our lane is number 17 located just of the top chair life at 2821m in altitude its a constant fairly steep pitch that works great for the drills we are doing, only problem is while skiing in the clouds today we couldn't really get a lot of feedback since you could see about turns and than disappear into the cloud.   Its a pretty fun experience to ski in the clouds, I can't say this has been the first time i have done it but i can say today was the most runs i have done consecutively in the clouds.  A feeling that occurred almost everyone run today tho was vertigo because you could barely see 20 feet in front of you and the lighting was completely flat you couldn't really tell where you were going so you would just have to keep tight to the rope beside you but even than i got a little dizzy trying to find my way down the hill!  With all the poor weather we still were able to ski just over 4.5km total today which for a day of technical drills isn't too bad.  

So thats all for today ill post another blog later on in the camp and maybe we will have a video blog in the making to be posted later on in the weeks to come! But for now Happy Canada Day!!! Every one better party hard and have a great long weekend!!!!!

My season thus far! :)

Ski seasons are always eventful, and with this season being half over already it has been an interesting year.  As you saw in my last post I put alot of hard work into my training and improving my technique, so to say I was excited and ready for my first few races of the year would be an understatement.  My first race of the season was 2 slalom's in Val Ste Come, Quebec.  The first day went well finishing 13 and scoring a 55.49 I was pretty stoked with the result considering it was a fairly flat run and to be honest my pitch skiing is better than my flat skiing (in my opinion) so finishing top 15 on a flat run and getting, which was at the time, my best score in SL was a great feeling.  The second day of in  Val Ste Come I was ready I was pumped but unfortunately went out first run, and that was it for Val Ste Come, haha.

After that we were off to Mt. Tremblant and Mt. Blanc, 2 GS and 2 SL.  The races where a little interesting because the schedule was being changed constantly, instead of racing right away (the day after we arrived) we waited 3 days so that the girls could race and than we race after them.  It wasn't tooo bad because we got to free ski at Mt.Blanc and Mt.Tremblant which was pretty awsome!! After 3 days of free skiing we got to start racing again first off with GS at tremblant, and they went awsome I finished 16 and 26 and brining my points down from 73 to 50!

 
After Mt. Tremblant we headed over the Mt. Blanc for some SL racing which went decently well minus the first day where I went out second run.  The second day went better I finished 18 and scored a 59.99 again I was pretty stoked.

So that started off the season on good note and a great boost of confidence for the rest of my season.  In my mind I was on track for a perfect season. It was now 3 days before christmas and time for some R&R, we had even more time to relax and rest as out races in Alpine, ON on the 27th where canceled due to lack of snow.  So we stayed home we rested and we trained working on our technique and trying to win every training run!

Are little break did eventually have to come to an end.  And the races started back up down in Ontario for the Miele Ontario championships.  First races where SL at Alpine and it was my first time starting in the seed I was stoked it was a great feeling, now I know alot of the top guys where over in Europe and stuff but still, take advantage of that good feeling haha! So the first day I skied well and Finished 4 and scored a 49 which went on to be my second best score to date in SL.  

After that great result it started to seem like my season was taking a turn and starting to go the other direction as I began a 5 race DNF streak. It definitely wasn't how I wanted my season to be going but sh*t happens.  Unfortunately I was letting these DNF's start to take advantage of me and break away at my mental game.  In Georgian Peaks it definitely not going as planned two DNF's in two days, and the second day was pretty eventful it was during my first run where I made a dumb mistake 4 gates from the end and ended up going out and breaking my hand (to be discovered a few days later) as I said going out was starting to break down my mental state and I got pretty pissed off when I went out, I was also in quite excruciating pain in my hand because I had just broken it.  So now that i've gone out and broken my hand I was pissed and yelled very loud and should go without saying I got in a little bit of trouble. 

For the next 2 hours of my night on the drive home me and my coach had a talk about the events that happened that day.  Little did I know my coaches where playing a trick on me.  They had me convinced that I was going to miss the next 4 starts because I had gotten sanctioned.  It was an intense 2 hours to say the least.  

I must say tho that those 2 hours in the van really made me realize that I cant let going out mess me up mentally and I have to continue to stay positive.

Unfortunately even tho my mental game had been fixed my DNF streak continued :(

We headed up to Mont Ste Anne, Quebec, for an awsome GS race,  first run went very well (I cant remember what I placed first run tho haha) but than second run was a familiar story and I went out 3 gates from the finish this time, but I kept my cool.

Now it was time for Super G, the first race I made a stupid mistake and flew right by a gate on the flats.  So second race I knew what I had to change and brought an end to my dnf streak!!! I finished 20th, I was happy but I know I can do better.  

Again it was time to travel to another mountain and it was time for SL again this time in St. Sauveur, QC.  First day I went out second run on one of the stupidest sets I have ever seen on that hill, but the second day was completely opposite I finished 11th and scored a 47 which is my best SL score to date!

We were back home for 3 days and than headed off to Dartmouth for 1 GS and 1 SL it was soo awsome to see the quality of skiing I was up against.  So with my fixed mental state and renewed confidence I was ready.  To make a long story short I went out both days. But it was a great experience to watch all the amazing skiing!! 

So to end off this blog, I just want to point out that I still feel that I am on track for a perfect season because after my turn of events earlier in the season I came to realize that finishing well and doing that every time is not the only way to have a perfect season.  For me it is being able to come down at the end of every run and know that I was not holding back and that if I were to have another shot on that course I would ski it the exact same, and that is just what I do.  As for when I go out I dont get mad anymore I take the time to think about what happened and how I can make sure it dosent happen again.

Just a quick glance of my results this season!