Breezy's Blog: JO's on the way!

Wait, I thought the season just started! Seems like winter just goes by so fast. That is what I have been hearing for weeks strait. Ski racing season is one of the shortest of any sport out there, partly due to the increase of winter sports inside, which unless in Dubai is impractical for true ski racing, can you imagine having a downhill inside, that one we can’t quite do. So due to the difficulty of putting an entire mountain inside a building our sport season is limited to five months at best. This makes the end of our season even more different than other sports, in other sports after nationals your coach tells you about practice on Monday, not ski racing. This increases the end of the season’s worth. I don’t want to go seven months on a bad end of year race.

The problem with these end of season races is also that they are the difficult ones. If your end of season race is J2 Nationals, Wistler Cup, U.S. Nationals, Western Region Chams, Junior Olympics, or simply IMD Champs there is always more people your against. They’re simply designed to be harder races. With this comes the stress and that feverish need for results. The problem is, only one person gets to stand on the podium and be the best (with the exception of ties) yet I can always find 20 others who would give their souls for the position, and half the rest of the field who were disappointed at their result.

So when I sit here, one day before Junior Olympics, listening to cheesy, moving music, a pre-big-race ritual, I have to realize that it has been an amazing ride. I can’t look back on this season with a sour taste, I already had a blast, I don’t think one race can ruin that! Do I want to win, yes, but I know to do that I just have to put it down the hill and have a run just as fun as this season has been. Athletes have to realize that one race is not going to make or break their careers, not one day. You have to think about whether this race, which is one day to a week, is really worth seven months of anger at your result, that’s what I have to think about going into this JO’s and hopefully I can pull it off.

.)) Breezy Johnson