It’s hard to believe another month is nearly over; August has been a busy month starting with the wedding of friends, Mr and Mrs Richardson. A beautiful service followed by the most spectacular venue (a former monastry) was the perfect start to the month.
Out of season training essentially started the next day with a 1000 mile drive out to Austria for the training camp with the BDST. Now I’m sensible and a dad I made the journey over a period of two days stopping over in Hockenheim before pressing on to Hintertux.
My introduction to camp life was that it was going to be long days and that is exactly what they were. I was up at 6:15 for a quick wheel around in the wheelchair and early stretches before breakfast and then a wheel to get the first gondola at 8:00 and then on the snow for 8:45. We would normally be off at about 12:30 and then we would have a 2 hour rest period in which we would tech our ski’s, then it would be downstairs for the days phys which would last around 1 1/2 -2 hrs. Once back and showered it would be downstairs at 5:30 for video debrief on the days skiing, then tea then bed. It was non-stop!
The conditions when I was there where not great at it was only jjst getting below freezing at night and in the morning it was getting up to 12 degrees somedays. We started off the first week with slalom training which I thought would be great as I needed to work on my slalom. The conditions though made it very difficult for me to progress and I found myself getting worked up when things just weren’t going right!
After being in gates for the first few days I decided enough was enough and took myself out of gates and went back to basics to work on technique. That seemed to work for me and I felt myself gaining confidence.
The next week saw us change onto giant slalom which I was more then happy about as I had only really been working on my slalom technique since my return to skiing following my injury of last winter. Unfortunatley it didn’t go as well as planned and with the increase in speed I found myself hesitating more and more, resulting in me tensing up. Trying to be cautious and preventing another shoulder injury was probably the worst thing I could be doing!
The conditions didn’t improve as my confidence took a nose dive, so I took it upon myself to leave Austria and head to Landgraf, Holland and do some training there on my own. Once I had completed the 8 hr drive to Holland and started skiing there in decent conditions my technique quickly came back to me in both slalom and giant slalom. So after a road trip around Europe I came home feeling positive about the future of my skiing!
My next trip to Holland will see me training on my new seat, I head to Aspen seating in Denver next week to get fitted for my custom made seat. I’ll then fly straight to Europe to train on the seat and hopefully that will see my confidence pick up just in time for the start of the new season and the start of what is likely to be a long and tough journey!
Pete The Feet 