Thyon!

So Thyon has to be one of the most beautiful places I have ever been in my life...ever.  Our hotel has a clear view of the Matterhorn, one of the highest peaks in Europe, there are mountains EVERRYYWHHEERREE, and we are staying in the heart of the Alps, which is downright amazing.  Today Shane and I did a little bit of training with Bastien, who lives here, and Thomas Bergfors of Denmark.  The race hill is pretty sweet.  Its not too too too steep, but it has a lot of rolls.  The jump is going to be pretty much huge, but it will definitely be the best jump we have done this year.  The sprint is going to be super long, and the classic is going to be brutal.  There is a huge cat-track that we are going to take, that if we have good speed coming into, we should be able to just tuck across it.  If not its going to be a brutally long skate.  Tomorrow we will train a little bit more with Bastien and Thomas, see if we can get really comfortable on the hill!  Most of the US Team pulls in tomorrow so pretty stoked to see some new faces!

Kandahar Day 2!!

So we ended up going to the super combi at at Chamonix, Les Houches today!  Pretty awesome to watch.  We didn't ski, and instead we hiked up the side of the DH course and watched from a sweet jump where racers crossed a ROAD in the middle of the course.  They were getting some pretty sick air!  Then we walked a little lower and saw a pretty fast section of the course just above the finish.  We watched the slalom from right at the finish line! That was cool!  Ivica Kostelic laid down a rediculous slalom run to go from like 23rd place to win it!  The other Croatian, Natko Zrncic dim had two amazing runs, and ended up second!  Pretty amazing to see two croatians on the podium together for the first time, and 1-2 no less!! Svindal was Svindal and cleaned up a prett solid 3rd.  He could have one but he made a pretty silly mistake in the slalom that cost him..oh well, he still got some pretty good points!  We had a pretty crazy drive to Thyon today too, lots of switchbacks and crazy drop offs.  We are going to do some training/free-skiing at Thyon tomorrow, get used to being at altitude.  Our hotel is at 2000 meters sooo, the race hill is pretty high!

THE KANDAHAR!!

Banner day in France....The skies were clear, the temps were pleasantly just bellow freezing, and the snow was fast!  We had an amazing day at the Kandahar Downhill!  Didier Cuche proved once again that he is still ridiculously fast in DH, winning yet another downhill this season!  Doninik Paris of Italy showed some  young speed talent, and the rest is Austraia...not much to say there.  I have a new level of respect for these guys after seeing it live, but WOW are they flying.  After the four forerunners, the first WC racer that went by looked, like he was going at least 40mph faster than the forerunners.  There was a big jump on the top of the course where we were standing, and he went like 15 or 20 feet further!!! IT WAS CRAZZYY!!  Thats all I have time for now, but here is a sweet shot from the top of the course!  Driving to Thyon today!!

FRANCE!!

After a few days of skiing DEEEPPP powder in Austria at the SKI CIRCUS (Saalbach Hinterglem), we have arrived in France to see the Kandahar Mens Downhill at Chamonix!  Shane and I drove ohh about 9 hours to Geneva and picked up his wonderful girlfriend Maura at the ariport, and we are now settled into our hotel here in, I don't know where, France, but it is beautiful here and we have a sweet little hotel!  We had a little debocale in Austria, a strap got caught in the latch of our trunk, and we couldn't open it, but with a little elbow grease from Thomas the dirty Dane we got it open.  A trunkless car would have made packing a little tricky!!  I would have some sweet video of Powder for you, but I can't get it off my camera sooo, that will have to wait!!  I'll let you know how the Kandahar goes tomorroooww!!!

Well..

I'll be short and sweet, today I did not ski well, thats about it.  I made too many mistakes in critical places, and I got too many penalties.  Mostly for doing things to keep my time fast after making stupid mistakes.  I ski fast when I can keep em' on line!  Hopefully over this short break we have, 10 days, I can work out some kinks and come back in Switzerland and kick some butt!  Shane and I are going to see the Kitzbuhel Slalom tomorrow morning, so that should be pretty rocking!! So long!

What could have been...

Today is one of those days that you just have to stick away in your back pocket and let stew.  As far as skiing is concerned it was a great day!  I made a silly mistake in the first run in a delay.  My goggles were fogged up so I was not looking where I needed to be looking, a mistake that I should not have made, with or without the foggy goggles, but they certainly did not help me any.  So I slid on my butt for a little ways but I pulled it out and still managed a pretty fast time considering.  The second run was really good for me. I skied mostly clean, aside from jumping about three feet early on the jump.  I got a little lost before the jump, too many turns just before the jump.  I was really fast off the jump and I got really late, fast but late, after the jump but I again held it together just long enough to  crash through the last gate, penalty free, I cleared the telemark line :) and slide through the finish line on my belly.  So I have earned a bit of a reputation for dramatic finishes, but hey I finish!  So raw time, I would have been fourth, but I got nailed with 18 penalties, 6 on the jump for not making the line and 12 in the gates.  So I ended up in 19th place.  My stance is of "questionable bootspace"  So any of the close ones I got hit with a penalty for.  I was not the only one though, a few other guys also got nailed. Sooo goal for tomorrow is to ski clean and fast!  After these races I will spend some time training working on making my stance a little bit wider so that I do not have so many close calls.  Hopefully I can ski well tomorrow, in my crash I incurred a nasty bit of skiers thumb, so I am super sore tonight though, I can barely move my thumb!  ICE ICE ICE!!  I am bib 22 tomorrow, hopefully I a ready to go!!

A FINISH!!

Well I did not ski as fast as I had hoped to today, ending up in 17th position, but I did ski two runs without crashing, on the same day, so a step in the right direction I suppose!?  The course was pretty gnarly especially after the jump where the set was super tight.  I skied rather conservatively in the first run, eking out 19th position after the first run.  I skied clean except for three penalties for not making the jump line.  It was near impossible to make the line, it was VERRYY far.  In the second run I went for a little more, but I paid for it, barely missing the jump line, then skiing one of the last gates before the wrap on the back third of my inside ski with my butt on the ground and the other ski in the air.  I managed to pull it together and finish the run with only that penalty, and still fast enough to land me 17th place.  Hopefully tomorrow on a longer GS course I can ski more aggressively and snag a higher position! I am bib 19, wish me luck!  Shane snagged a sweet 8th place, cole was 31st and maggie wrapped up 16th!  Lets see what we can get tomorrow, GET AFTER IT!

Snowing in Rauris!!

We had a decent day of training today at Rauris.  It is finally snowing after weeks of warm weather and rain we are getting some fresh (wet) snow.   The race hill here in Rauris has a few decent pitches...sort of, but the jump is pretty lame.  I ripped my speedsuit a few days ago trying to get it off, so I unstiched all of the padding to make it fit a little better, and I even sewed it back together all by myself.  I Doesn't look pretty, but I bet it holds up pretry well!!

recap!

Soo, I have not been post in quite a while because the internet where I was staying only worked on Shanes computer, and not well enough for my blog to load.  So four days latter and here we are, FINALLYY posting in the blog again!  We got to Zell am See friday afternoon and spent saturday chilling out around the town, watching all the skiing we could handle!!  Sunday we spent the day up on the glacier at the Kitzsteinhorn.  AMAZING!!  You take two gondolas and a chairlift just to get up to most of the ski area!!  The Summit of the Kitzsteinhorn is around 3029 meters, all of the skiing is above 2000 meters, and Zell am See is at like 609 meters.  You are so high up in the mountains skiing on a HUGGEE Glacier.  It was a truly amazing experience.  The picture above is a good shot of Shane shredding the top section of the glacier.  Monday and tuesday we had some great training at Shmitten at Zell am See, the local ski area.  The snow was super hard, like it had been zambonied a few times!  I feel super fast, so hopefully we can lay down two solid runs tomorrow in the Sprint Classic.  For now, I am off to train at Rauris!!

Settled in!

We have settled in Zell Am See as you training location for the next couple of days with the Danish Telemark Team.  Our hotel is very nice, we have good beds annndd...a sweet jacuzzi tub in our ROOM!  I am pretty stoked to try it out tomorrow after skiing!  Also I owe a huge thank you to Friends of New Hampshire Skiing for awarding me some of their grant money!  I cannot express how appreciative I am of what they do for New Hampshire Skiers!  I am pretty pooped, it's amazing how tired you are after driving all day!  Hopefully the fog here will lift here for us to be able to ski what we are skiing on!!

Zell am See!!

So indeed we are going to Zell am See today to train with the danish telemark team!  So that means the chances of us going to the Kitzbuhel Downhill just got REALLY GOOD!!!!!!

this is getting old..

Today sucked...period...first off it was like 10 degrees, celsius, and POURING rain.  The race hill sucked, and so did my bindings.  I was having a great run, I even made the jump line, but as I landed my binding released, so I had to ski out of the course on one ski!! I am very lucky that I did not fall.  There were seven or eight dnf's today, all after the jump.  It was brutal for everybody.  My time before I crashed was looking very fast, or so I have been told.  So I know that I can ski well, but I just need to FINISH!!  My neck is pretty sore from yesterdays crash, and today my back and knee hurt from trying to save myself from crashing face first into slushy ice, soo, I am going to go jump into the hot pot and relax.  I think we are going to stay in Germany for a couple more days, since the races in Slovenia have been cancelled, they lost all of their snow.  We might also go to a biigg resort in Austria to train with the Danish team.  But I am not sure!  So the adventure continues!!

ouch..

Well today did not go exactly as planned, but I am still happy with the end result today!  The course was super super turny today, and icy as all get out.  The entire course was one big sheet of ice, but we are racing on a europa cup hill so it has to be super hard for them to train and race on.  Ice aside, I had a pretty crappy first run.  I carried to much speed of the last pitch before the jump and I had to dump a bunch of speed, as well as make a few alpine turns before the jump, and proceeded to just miss the jump line, not dump any speed, then completely blow out.  I threw my skis out for the second gate after the jump and they hooked up WAY early and I got flipped turned and tossed every which way.  As one person said, it was "One of the more epic crashes I have ever seen."  It certainly felt like it.  I got up significantly discombobulated, with one pole and no goggles.  A gate judge politely directed me to the next gate, seeing as I had no idea which gates I had or had not gone through and I finished the run after about 20 seconds of collecting myself and making sure everything was still there.  So I got to do a second run just to familiarize myself with the course and to see how my times stack up against everybody else, from the very back of the pack.  I think I was about 30 seconds away from earning points, so I pretty much just got to go out and see where I was at.  So I had a killer second run, laying down the 13th fasted raw time on a terrible track.  I didn't really jump as much as I should have, I was really focused on just having a solid second run and making sure I finished standing up to get a reasonable estimate of how fast I was skiing and thats just what I got.  So I am happy with the second run result, and knowing that I can lay down fast times.   I am excited to see what I can do tomorrow in the sprint!

Ready to goo!

Ski's are waxed, bib has been drawn, 62 (men start at 41), food is settling quite well, and I am ready to go! The race run looked like it was in pretty good condition today.  I think part of what we are skiing on is actually injected snow.  The German Europa Cup team was training on it today.  Hopefully I can go out and get some tomorrow, I'm STOKED!!

ssmuushhh

So we FINALLYY got to ski today.  I was definitely in need of a little bit of good turns.  Contrary to yesterdays boilerplate snow, today we got about six cm's of warm slushy snow on top.  It totally made  the rock solid groomer underneath all soft.  So we skied for about an hour or half powder, half "slop pack" stuff.  The best way I could describe it was like skiing through really good mashed potatoes.  We finally have internet at our hotel, so thats great news, buutt I am still cashless, and we also cannot find a place to tune our skis...but there is a team captains meeting tomorrow, and we also are going to have official training tomorrow.  A lot of the teams are pulling into town today, but  I don't think any of them will be staying with us, we are in a cozy little place.  Its pretty much a big house.  A woman lives on the bottom floor with her husband and two kids, they kind of run the place.  There are four room upstairs, two of which are occupied by the US Team.  Thats okay, we are going to spend most of our time up in Oberjoch for dinner, captains meetings, tuning and such so we will be around the other nations plenty!  The mountain is beautiful!!  I am trying rather unsuccessfully to upload photos, but hopefully soon I can grab them and share them with ya'll!

Bad Hindelang!

ahhhh, Deutchland!  After a long day of following the sings to that led to "D" yesterday, we had settled into our place in Bad Hindelang today.  We got in around ten am, it was only a half our drive from the place we stayed last night to our hotel in Hindelang, so we had all day today to wander around.  We  drove to Oberjoch, which is where we will be racing, its only about twenty minutes, 300meters of vertical elevation, 7.5 kilometers, and 105 curves away.  For those of you that don't feel like doing the math, thats 14 curves per kilometer.  Personally I think they underestimate that number, the road is rediculous.  It puts the kanc to shame.  There is legitimatly not a single section of road that is straight for more than three or four meters.  Its silly, and we have to drive it twice a day.  The race piste is hard as a rock. Apparently it has been quite warm here, and just recentlz thez had one or two nights of intense cold.  Its boilerplate hard.  We watched a little bit of the German teams training and it looked rough.  Hopefully we can do some freeskiing on the race hill tomorrow to get a feel for it.  We went for a little run throught Oberjoch, it felt great to do something physical.  Its amazing what a half an hour of running, pushups, high knees, and other assorted exercises  can do for a body that has been sitting for three days.  Cole and Maggie got here around four from Munich and we just went out to a "Shneitzel Haus" for dinner.  SOO tasty.  I am loving the food here.  I am looking forward to doing some skiing finally tomorrow!  Lets get shreddy!!

Oh I almost forgot!

Did I mention our car is WAAYY too nice for us?  Its this fancy OPEL station wagon, we look like a couple of rich tourists, then upon a second glance into the backseat you will find it completely packed with an assortment of ski equipment and other goodies all in some sort of hefty wear and tear, definitely not what rich tourists cars look like!

Travel sucks...

That was the longest two days of my LIFFEE.  Great travel day today, ha. Everything went fine until the baby next to me kept me awake all the way from Chicago to London, so no sleep for Cory on the overnight.  Then I can't sleep in the Heathrow airport, well because thats just kind of sketchy, I don't want to get all of my stuff stollen while I snooze.  So there's a solid six and a half hours of no sleep.  Sweeeett! I did sleep the entire one and a half hour flight from London to Geneva, and believe me it was great.  Then I get off the plane go through customs, a breeze believe it or not, and go to baggage claim.  No if running on one and a half hours of sleep wasn't bad enough, I get to baggage claim only to discover that none of my stuff really made it to Geneva from London.  AWESOME!  So  here I am in Geneva, no skis, no clothes, boots and helmet check, but nothing else.  Shane has been waiting for me since eleven o'clock (turns out he got there around three) and my flight was a little bit late, just to add some icing onto the cake.  So I am standing in line at the baggage services desk staring aimlessly around the baggage claim area pondering how I was going to sort this mess out, and what do I spy on the back of a luggage trolly, but my ski bag. I must have looked insane, I jumped out of line and flagged down the trolley driver and grabbed my bag off the top.  I now have skis, poles, boots, helmet, goggles, and my jackets and pants.  Good enough to ski.  Long story short, my ski bag went on an earlier flight than mine from London to Geneva, and my duffle bag took the next later flight after mine.  I got there right in-between them.  How funny is that?  So Shane and I are in a hotel somewhere south of Bern, Switzerland.  We really aren't sure exactly where we are, but we are headed in the right direction, and within a stones throw of the highway we want to take to Germany, so I guess we aren't too bad off.  Tomorrow we will start the drive and see how far we get, should be a fun day.  I am looking forward to racing, World Cup opener is just a few days away!!

oh gosh...

 i am seated in row fourty three g.....of fourty five rows...going to be a long trip.  

And So the Adventure Begins...

In t-minus 32 hours (well 24 technically but 32 sounds better) I will land in Geneva Switzerland and then the adventures start for real!

Enjoying the last couple days in the 'boat!

I am enjoying my last couple days here in Steamboat before heading off to World Cup races! Yesterday I got to ski a little powder over on Mt. Werner, that was epic. The snow out here is so so so much lighter than east coast snow. I have now skied champagne powder! Today I got some good training with the winter sports club over on Howelson Hill. On Sunday we did some gs gate drills to work on turn shape and moving the skis away from the gates to generate some sick angles and make things FAST!! Today we just did straight gs training with a little post training skate. The set was super tricky and it had some elements that reminded me of the world championship course at Rjukan with some rolls and banked turns. I am skiing fast so hopefully I can trow down some good results at world cup in the next couple weeks!! Yeehaaww!

TRIVIA NIGHT!

I went to trivia for the second time on my steamboat trip last night at the Rio Grande. The first time we went we were first and second the first time, this time not so much. We didn't even stay for the second round. But The food was spectacular! I had a spectacularly spicy roasted chicken burrito. WOW was that thing spicy. That was probably the most spicy food I have ever eaten...ever. Seriously it was crraazzyy!!! I practically slept on the toilet I drank so much water!