Hey guys, so it's been a pretty eventful month or so, with all the races going on and travel etc. At the qualifiers at my home hill in Marquette Michigan, everything came together and I won every race except slalom. It's even more fun when you win by one 100th against a good friend..... which I did in 1 of my GS races! How crazy is that? One 100th? On the last night, we had the dreadful awards that last like 3 hours of listening to Brewster McVicker announce all the events and winners and finally the overall winner! I hit my 1st goal of being the overall winner in my division.
After all that, we started to drive to Aspen 4 days later which is such a boring and long drive. When we got to Aspen, the place we were staying at was amazing! It was 30 minutes away but that was ok because we were able to eat at home every night and save a ton of money.
As always the first morning of an event is the hardest with waking up so early. It usually gets better though, the training was decent for downhill. I tried my DH skis the first day but felt I could do better on my SG skis so I switched for the next training run and the race. It paid off, for the race I was winning all the splits when I ran 21st but 2 gates before the finish I got launched into some of the soft snow and had to stand up to pull out of it. Still not sure how I made it. That bobble cost me the race putting me in 6th. SG had no major struggles and went home with a 7th, I was pretty fired up. For GS I decided to go for broke and even though I managed to boot out, I still got 15th on a really technical course so I was pretty happy with myself. It was by far the coolest GS course I have ever skied.
All I needed to do now was have a good day of Slalom which seemed to be going great after training on the day off. That night though I caught the flu and had a really high fever until about 2am the day of the Slalom. As bad as I wanted to race, I had no strength and didn't want to risk injury. There were a couple of guys who I normally am very close to that ended up in the top 5 or 10 so that may have helped my overall a lot. Oh well, welcome to ski racing right?
I really liked the skiing at Aspen and it was fun to hang with fellow SRD member Andrew Hancock a little at the awards. Andrew and Serina did really well, I hope to bring more to the SRD table next year in J2's. The Aspen team ripped it up and I am happy that I was at least the top kid from Central. Next year is a new year and lots of things change every year. I look forward to training harder and trying to improve on my results. What a crazy sport, 1 tiny mistake and your back a couple spots. I guess that's the fun of the Championships.......everyone is a really good skier.
Then to top things off, we get home and I find out I made the print with a cool picture in Ski Racing magazine for the DH at my qualifiers that was pretty cool.
I hope everyone has a GREAT summer and look forward to more blogs of summer activity
.)) Colin Vogel
No comments:
Post a Comment