New Year Training and Races

I decided to celebrate the New Year by once again running away to Austria for some more training and races. The week began with training in Stubai, the place where my adventures with the British ParaSnowsport Team began just over a year ago, and was finished by racing in Rinn as part of the RollRinn festival (a big event to raise money for disability sports in Austria) which was great fun.

This was purely a slalom camp so the things I worked on in training were mainly around making my turns tighter so I can ski a better line closer into the gates. I made a great deal of progress in this area but I still have to work on my balance in my rig to make hitting the gates less risky. It was also interesting to ski the same slopes I had attempted just over a year ago, I was encouraged to find that the slopes I had struggled just to get down before, now seemed fairly straightforward.

As well as training on the glacier we spent a few days skiing on a smaller slope lower down (as the weather was quite bad). This was the steepest slope I had ever skied gates on before, and the first day training here wasn’t the best day I have had. The next day I did much better on it, having had a good rest and starting to adjust to the steepness of the slope. That being said it was still a bit hairy as there were quite a few big holes in the course, meaning that I spent a large amount of time flying through the air rather than having my ski actually in contact with the snow!

After the great training sessions it was time to put my new skills to the test in quite possibly the weirdest races ever. The slope used for the races in Rinn was fairly short, not much longer than the indoor ski slopes we have in the UK, I was told that in the summer it is a golf course. To add to this, the button lift did not take you all the way to the top of the racecourse, so most people had to hike up about 50 metres, whereas the sit skiers like myself were loaded into the bucket of a tractor and driven to the start - that was a new experience!

The first race was a night slalom, which made things all the more exciting albeit rather cold in the start gate (it was -22°C and I was wearing barely more than a lycra catsuit). The first run I made it down the course at a fairly steady pace, enough to give me a second run. By the time the second run came around I was very cold, and, realising that the faster I skied, the faster I could get back inside the heated tent, I made the decision to be a bit more aggressive with the next run. This next run was going very well, I was racing considerably faster than I had done before, but however, what I had failed to notice was quite how tired I was. Coming over a roller section right before the finish I felt my body start to spasm, and I didn’t have the strength left to fight it, so I ended up falling over, and as the place I fell was so flat, I couldn’t get myself up. That night ended with what was basically a massive party in a tent.

The next day I was ready to attack the course, I managed to get down doing what is quite possibly the best skiing in gates I have done so far. This excitement was somewhat weakened when it was pointed out to me at the bottom that I had missed one of the last gates. Me and a few other people had managed to misinterpret the ending of the course and so I ended up skiing the wrong way round one of the gates. This meant I was disqualified and so I had no second run. The cause of this is just due to my relative inexperience, and I’m sure that with time and experience in different courses this will improve. I did find it interesting though that in the end only four sit skiers (both male and female) actually completed both runs.

Despite not finishing either race, I consider one this one of my most successful camps, I made massive progress towards skiing a tighter line, and the events of the race pointed out some of the things I need to work on.