Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Wild and Striped!

I would like to say a massive thank you to Claire at Wild Stripes for this amazing set of base layers! So cozy and snug, cannot wait to try them out on snow! Until then, our freezing student house will do nicely. They say that you will not be able to resist showing them off and they are right!! Would definitely recommend them!


Monday, November 19, 2012

BUDS 2012 - Claire

They didn't stay shiny red for long
Given that I am a 4th year at university and this was my first time at BUDS (British University Dry Slope Champs), it was always going to be great and having a legend of a bus driver confirmed this as soon as we got on the bus! 8 hours later and we arrived at our hostel in Edinburgh which used to be a church. After our arrival and having cooked spaghetti bolognese for 12 people we explored the hostel and found that all of the Irish were also staying there!

In typical Scottish style, it rained almost all weekend, this made walking up the side of the hill to where we were based difficult and interesting! With regards to the racing, I wasn't expecting much as I had skied on dry slope for the first time in 2 years only the week before. However, I managed to finish 40th in slalom and 47th in GS out of 203 females, so it wasn't too bad! The weekend also meant that I got to meet loads of people who I haven't seen since I have been at university, which was really amazing!

The BUDS Ball was a perfect end to the whole event, any reason to get out a posh frock! Even if we did see far too much of all the "true scotsmen" who were there!

Our first experience of a drunken true scotsman of the night!


BUDS Ball 2012


UEA Ski Captain and myself

The view from the top of Hillend

Battered and bruised after the weekend

Saturday, November 3, 2012

London Ski and Board Show

It is quite unbelievable that today was the first time we have ever been to the London Ski and Board show (unless you saw how lost we were then it was pretty believable). So many ski related things in one big room!! We got quite excited at the beginning and made mental notes of all of the stands we wanted to go back and visit, but when that time came, we had trouble finding most of the stands again.

We did however manage to find FSBS to have a meet and greet, little chat and to collect some gear to start properly repping, as well as Rubix Kangaroo (look out for more of them next year!!) and the Verbier stand to pick up our free day lift passes (Swiss Ski race here we come!) and to meet some lovely gorgeous dogs!

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Jumps, Starts and POW!

POW!
We are both home, safe and wanting to go straight back out!
After our last post with photos of gorgeous blue skies and a big bright sun, the weather took a turn with non stop snow (yaaayy!), -20something temperatures and low light and visibility (boo!). This meant that training within the course and on the jumps wasn't an option due to how dangerous it would be. Therefore, we did a lot of free skiing as well as digging out the start gate and doing laps practicing our starts and hiking back up the slope. This practice was much needed and very valuable, especially for Max as he is quite tall our coaches came up with a different starting position for him, as well as saying that he needs longer skis. It was also a prefect opportunity for everyone to get some funny video footage.

Burying team member
We were both gutted that we couldn't do any more jump training, but looking back at it we were so lucky with the weather and snow conditions at the start that we were even able to get some in for an October camp.

Digging out the start gate















Despite the cold weather, we continued with fitness as well with our usual recovery jogs, as well as a press up session and a watts per kilo bike test. The weather seemed to make these long days even more tiring, resulting in me going to bed at 9pm every night (apparently I'm still in that routine as I went to bed at 8:30pm last night too).

My surroundings during my recovery jog
Start training
Although we are back home now and straight back to university, skiing hasn't left our heads. Competition dates are starting to be announced now, so we are planning which ones want to do (all of them!) and which of them we are actually able to do (not all of them). We are also off to the London Ski and Snowboard Show on Saturday to have a look around and go and spend some time on the FSBS stand, so come say hey to us!! In addition, I am off to Edinburgh next week, embarrassing myself whilst trying to do slalom and GS on dry slope for BUDs, it will not go down well! I'm getting some much needed last minute coaching tomorrow from Max to try and decrease the level of humiliation.


Max is currently editing his video footage to create an amazing video for you guys, so keep your eyes peeled, we will premier it on here first! Until then, here is a video that a team mate from the camp made, so you can see what sort of things we got up to.

A massive thank you to James and Craig at JJC Training for absolutely everything, Stubai for the snow and No Team for the course!

Max staring me out at the start