Wednesday, January 03, 2007

rough day

I'm writing this from Park City, Utah, where we're getting ready for the annual Huntsman Cup races, which run this Friday through Sunday. The rest of the team skied at Deer Valley this morning while I stayed behind tinkering with my monoski. At noon I joined the others at Park City Resort to run some slalom.

We were training on CB's, a long, steep hill that used to host men's World Cup races every year. (I usually like the trail, and I like to say that they named it after me.) The course today was on the steepest part of the run, and the snow was mostly man-made, a contrast from the stuff we've been skiing on in Winter Park. What's more, I was skiing on a new shock absorber and my monoski just didn't feel right. These factors came together to foreground some of the weaknesses in my skiing, and the result was that I had an absolutely awful day of training. I didn't make it through the course once, blowing out or falling several times each run. The coaches kept offering advice, but all I wanted was to be left alone and try and work my way out of the hole I was digging for myself. On days like today it's really hard to make yourself keep skiing when you know it's not going to get any better. All I can do is put today behind me, be glad it was only a training day, and redouble my efforts tomorrow.

(The linguist in me wonders: why redouble? It's not like I've already doubled them...)

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