22-12

When I was a kid, I mean I still am, but when I was younger, my birthday meant the world to me. 22 was my lucky number and 22-12 had a nice ring to it. My birthday haunts me in every username I ever created, since 10% of the Dutch population is called Lieke and any username was already taken except my name followed by my birthday. Now I'll be forever wishing I was born 10 days later, which would give me an extra season in under 17, since the age categories are made using the age you are on 1st of January of the season. I turned 17 on the 22^nd of December and so I have to ski in the category under 21 this season. It feels like just as I am starting to catch up, the challenges become harder. This is very motivating, but I can’t help but wonder what I could achieve with just one more season in under 17. Maybe, depending on how much more I am able to improve in the coming season, I could start dreaming of a finals place at Europeans, in under 17, but now that I'm under 21 I'm facing a new set of challenges. This means that I have to adjust the goals I set for the coming season. The first important challenge I’m facing is qualifying for under 21 Europeans in tricks and jump. In order to make sure I can achieve this, I need to plan roughly how to train for it, and also very important, at which competitions I am going to try to set the scores. There needs to be a fine balance between the amount of time I spend training and when I start trying to set scores at the competition. This is difficult to judge when I am not able to ski, because I can’t predict accurately how fast I will learn new tricks and jump further. If I don’t spend enough time training, I will make the same mistake I made last year. Trying to qualify for a score of 2500, when you can just about trick that in training, will not happen.  But the score has to be set 2 weeks before the Europeans, and if I wait too long I’ll have just one shot to qualify, which is way too nerve wrecking for me. Therefore my plan is to ski as much as I can in April and May, which might not be a lot, because I have my high school exams this year. Then in June I want to go to Vincent Soubiron Ski School to make sure I improve enough to be able to set the scores. The plan is to then do competitions in France, since the first competitions in the Netherlands are in July, this would be very stressful, because it puts a lot of pressure on setting a certain score in just one try, since Europeans are mid-July. If I can do 2 competitions in France at the end of June and 2 in the Netherlands and Belgium or Luxembourg in July, I’ll have 4 competitions to try to qualify.  I hope this is enough to ensure my qualification for this year, because then in the years to come I can focus on ranking higher at these competitions rather than qualifying for them.