'You either have passion or you don't'

Last week I wrote about my goals for the coming season. Even though I can't be on the water very often now, it is still time to work towards achieving those goals in any way possible. There are a few ways in which I focus on achieving my goals during the winter. First of all some of the very active people at my water-skiing club spent a lot of free time on building what we now call the ski-machine. It's in essence a sort of treadmill, but much bigger. It is only possible to practise for tricks

on this machine, since other skis have fins which will damage the machine. Also they involve different techniques which you can't practise in this way. It's amazing to be able to practise some basic tricks on, because with every error you make in your body position, you will fall. It is also great to practise toeholds on. For this we are able to hold a handle hanging from above as well, so where you would normally fall, you can keep yourself up. It is of course the aim to not use it at all, because the techniques have to come from your legs, because on the water, sadly, we don't have a drone that flies with us and holds us up when we're about to fall. However any wake turns are harder to simulate and flips are impossible. Therefore my goal really is to not be able to practise on this machine anymore. This would mean that for tricks my run consists of flips and ski-lines, which all involve jumping over the wake, therefore they cannot be done on this machine. These tricks are worth the most points, so one day I want to be able to do that of course (though I believe it will always be good to work on the basics). Until then, I'm practising tricks that I want to use in my qualifying run. I made a video of this on my new Facebook page.

One of the trainers of the club training, who put a lot of work in the ski-machine, also prepared a pre-season training programme for everybody to get our muscles ready for the season. This happens every Sunday and I'm on my way there now. We do interval training with 18 different exercises, alternating muscle groups. We end with some very slow squats, 3 seconds down and then 3 seconds up. Last week I still thought they were easy, but it turned out that I was stretching my legs before going down again, which takes the pressure off. After I changed this, I definitely did not think they were easy. The other fun thing about this training is that we already see our team mates before the season actually starts, which is, if you remember the word, very gezellig.

One final thing I want to say is that I also try to ski when the weather is (relatively) good. Today was actually the first time this year, after more than 2 months not skiing. When I woke up, I saw the water in my garden was frozen. This slightly discouraged me to go skiing today, but two things got me back on track. The national coach saying: you either have passion or you don't. Then later is saw this photo of the lake that I skied at, waterski school de Harder Veluwemeer. At that moment I was sold and I started preparing, both mentally and my gear... Looking back, it was definitely beyond cold, with the water temperature around 5 degrees (Celsius), but Alex and Gerrit made it a lot of fun with tips on both techniques and staying warm.