HIndsite

Well it's been a week since I've been back from Italy and the world skimo championships. Whenever you've geared a big part of your life towards an event/competition, I've found there's a certain amount of let down or even mild depression. You've been gunning in your mind and training for so long for the event....now it's done.

Soooo, you've got to re-focus and set yoursites on the next challenge. For me there's a little dissappointment because the race didn't go as well as I'd hoped (teams). The entire race was going right according to plan. My fitness was good, we were in the hunt, then I fell apart on the downhill. Maybe I shouldn't make such a big deal of it. We probably only lost a couple of places, but still, one of my reasons for going over was to show myself that I could ski at that level. For that last downhill 1300 meters worth I felt I failed.

But any failure, dissappointment and set back are only opportunities to re-evaluate. See where you went wrong and correct the errors. So now that I'm back and have had plenty of time to mull things over here are a couple conclusions. First, I need to train downhill with my race skis. Our tiny 160 cm narrow, insanely light skis handle totally differently than any other kind of alpine board. I found this out while training this past week at Norquay.

Norquay is a smaller hill (by Rocky mountain standards) that has one chair with only knarly runs. All double black or hard black. I took my K2's with similar dimensions to my race skis and with a friend hammered 8 runs as fast as we could w/ no stopping. No sweat. A few days later I did the same, but with my race skis. I felt like a beginner!! The light skis required a totally different balance point. After 7 runs on them though I felt waaaay better. Why didn't I do this years ago? or even a couple of months ago? Duh.

I've actually got a couple bigger races left. Our Canadian Nat'l champs included. The organizer promises a more technical course (it was alreay the most technical course in Canada). I'm going to keep hitting Norquay on my race boards. Fortunately this year has officially become an epic year and the normally rocky Norquay has great snow. And thankfully I bought one of those 100$ mid-week season passes. Thanks Norquay. Now if you'd only let us do some skinning uphill.