Fonna 2017 - In which GS and I become friends

I have recently returned from an amazing British ParaSnowsport training camp in Fonna, Norway, this was preceded by the exciting news that for the upcoming season, I am now a member of the British ParaSnowsport Development Squad (previously I was what was known as an invitational athlete). This is a massive achievement for me and I hope to have many more successes with the team in the future.

This was my first summer ski camp, and it was fantastic (although it did take a while to get my head around the fact that we could ski in the morning and go to the beach and go swimming in the fjord in the afternoon). During this camp, we focussed on Giant Slalom (GS), which is not a discipline I have had much success with in the past, it has usually resulted in many crashes and hits to the head. I am pleased to report that over the course of the 10-day camp, my opinion towards my GS skis completely changed, and I can now ski them quite confidently.

The main things I was working on were maintaining smoothness throughout all parts of the turn, and increasing the angles I make with my body as I ski. Both of these still need refining, but I made a great deal of progress from where I started at the beginning (very jerky and stiff). I was also putting particular attention towards my outrigger position, I tend to hold them quite far out to the side to maintain balance, but I need to work on getting them more forward to keep myself pointing down the hill to maintain speed and not veer off too wide outside of the gates.

Despite the area we were skiing in being renowned for its rain, we did spectacularly well weather-wise, and only had a day and a half with bad weather. I did manage an impressive crash on one of these days, when the poor visibility led to me not seeing a bump, flying a bit, and then landing on the tip of my ski, only for the binding to release (which requires quite a lot of force with my 20 din bindings) sending me into a somersault onto my head! However the next run, one of my teammates outdid me and managed to slice his head open on a ski - it was an exciting day!

Not only did this camp provide me with the chance to really work on my technique on a GS ski, it was also the first time I had ever attempted skiing GS gates. This was somewhat scary to begin with, as I had to get comfortable skiing significantly faster than I had done before, but once I did it was an amazingly exhilarating feeling. To my surprise I actually found that I did better in GS gates than I do slalom gates, with my “incidents” being drastically reduced (although not entirely eliminated, at one point, halfway through a really good run I found myself crashing and falling quite a distance - it did mean I met some American racers who were very friendly, albeit a little confused as to why I was suddenly in their slalom course, two lanes away from where I was supposed to be).

There were many factors contributing to the success of this block of training for me, one being that there was no added stress of there being any races, so I could focus purely on what I was learning. It was also helpful that there were not very many other athletes on this camp, which meant we all got very personalised coaching (almost one to one at times) and the group had a great deal of fun together. I made many improvements on this camp, my skiing quite drastically changed, and it was the best I have ever managed my fatigue during training, now I have to work hard to maintain this for the rest of the season.