Beginning of Winter!!!!

We went to Panorama, Canada for two weeks to ski, train, and sort of study. When we got there the conditions could not have been better. It snow for a week straight, the snow would freeze and become firm over night making the next days of skiing amazing. Training was amazing, I was skiing really well. Food was okay, so much better then Chile, at least we knew what we were eating.

Teachers don't realize that our day doesn't end when skiing does. We have to workout, tune our skis, watch video for a while, have meetings, and now that the World Cup season has started, we watch that too, and sometimes we have double sessions of skiing on top of all that!!! They think that we just sit and chill all afternoon so they give us WAY too much homework. Then they tell us that we have class the day we get back so we have to finish all of it no matter what. So instead of sleeping on the journey home, we stay up finishing homework and we do the same when we get back to school. We don't have time in our day to read a 300 page book that repeats the same thing over and over.

Other then the tons of homework we had it was a great camp filled with skiing and friends!!! The trip back was long and tiring considering it was a red eye flight mashed in between two four hour bus rides. When we got back to school it was a rude awakening. We were unpacking the buses in t-shirts and shorts surround by grass and dirt; no snow!!!! We were supposed to start skiing on Sunday but that in never going to happen!!!! This winter might be one of the winters where everything comes in March which will stink, but hey, i am up for some powder in March!!!!!

Sand Pits

Sand pits, sounds like fun right? Not so fast, not when they are almost vertical and you have to run up and down them. Down sounds fun right? Wrong again, your adrenaline is pumping so fast you almost puke when you finish the flip 1000 times, get sand all over your face, belly flop course. Not to mention you have your whole team cheering you on, or just laughing so hard they almost pee their pants because you just ATE IT!!!! Point is, it is the BEST, funniest, most entertaining workout of the year, so far.

Burke Traveling

Traveling with 60 kids is not an easy thing to do, heck traveling alone is a pain in the butt. So how many things can go wrong with a group of teenagers with all over the wait bags? A lot, starting with the departure. With burke if you plan on taking a coach bus and three vans, we always end up taking four because we have too many big bags.

We get to the airport with 5 hours to spare, and we have no time to fool around. Our bags all way between 65-100 lbs and with that our first plane to Dallas was over weight. We had to kick 30 people off the plane, they were on the next plane an hour later, and we got rid of all our extra fuel. So what happens, well of course Dallas has bad weather so we get stuck circling in the air. We ran out of fuel and had to land in Austin, by now our plane was supposed to have left 30 min. ago. So we refuel and are in Dallas airport in 3 hours.

Our other plane, to Santiago, had to wait for us because we were half the plane. We then proceeded to sit on the plane for 3 hours only to be told that we couldn't fly because the flight crew had missed their time window, and they had to sleep. So it is now 2 am, we haven't eaten since 10 am, and we are stuck in an airport with no vending machines and no open stores. They give us dirty cots to sleep on and finally all of us fall asleep. We wake up the next morning to find random people starring at us because we are asleep at 7 am in the middle of an airport, half the guys in just their boxers.

Finally, we make our flight and we arrive in Santiago, without losing any bags. It is now 12:00 am and we start heading for Valle Nevado, we get their at 2 am and start unloading ALL the bags. By the time we get into our rooms and to bed it is now 4 am and we have been traveling for 44 hours. We then wake up at 8 am to ski the next day. Ski Academies, aren't they FUN!!!! Traveling with 60 ski racers isn't easy but we all have a blast anyways, we laugh our heads off even when we haven't slept in 24 hours and we bond. Now that is an experience I will never forget.

Chile 2009 GS training

So yesterday my friend told me, as we were wrenching the GS gates into the hill, that the boys got in 21 runs of slalom training. Of course the idea of beating them, for bragging rights and just having more runs, was stuck in my mind for the next two slipping runs. Slowly, while training, i realized that my padding was on wrong and that it was shifting under my GS suit, causing a lot of pain while hitting the plastic gates. We get to run 6 get we realized that we lost 2 out of the 7 people training and as the runs went on, we lost more and more. At this point I was just training to train, first day back in gates since June and I was pumped.

At run 15 we lost the last person and all who were left was my coach, my friend, and myself. That is when the idea of going for 20 runs really came out and that was when we really started "racing" and not caring how much it hurt. We got to 20 runs just to do one more because we wanted bragging rights and each run we were getting better and better, also we were really amped that we still had so much energy. So we got the 21 runs of GS training in, we pulled, and our coach was HAPPY to call it a day. He then said, "You girls are going to work me this year!" and man is he right. Afterwords, we felt awesome, besides a few bumps and bruises, just because we did so well.

Well that all went down the drain today, I woke up barely able the move my upper body, bruised and swollen from arm to arm and kind of not looking forward to the early morning. But i ended up on the hill, somehow, and started training. After a few runs I realized that maybe, while yesterday was one of the best days of training, i pushed myself too hard a little too early. But i don't regret it, runs 16-21 were the best runs of my life in GS gates and that wouldn't have happened if i wasn't as competitive as i am.

So I have learned to move my pads when they shift, drink TONS of water, eat in between every other run, and to just keep going if you can!!!!