As promised...

I still think sharing this with the world might be a bad decision, but I shouldn't be the only one laughing at this, so I'll post it anyway. Last week I mentioned that Jacky Jongenelen took some charming pictures of my trick set. This was because when I tried a toehold 360 (wrapout). I leaned too far back and therefore I almost fell. I managed to stay standing by waving my arms like a lunatic with the facial expressions to match. Jacky made a collage to see the progress of the trick. Whilst doing this I found it quite funny that I didn't fall and that was also captured on photo:
Luckily after this attempt, I did improve and this trick is getting more and more stable. This is essential, since it is the first trick I will do in my toehold pass. If I fall on this trick, I will not get any of the points I get from my toehold pass, making it impossible to get the score I need. If I fall later in the run, there is still a chance that I got the necessary points before the fall, but nailing the first few tricks is essential.
For my hand run, the first trick is also one that I am only just starting to learn. It is the wake line 360, hopefully I will be able to stand this trick soon so I can post a video on my Facebook page and the trick will make more sense. I started doing this trick on the ski machine throughout the winter. I tried it for the first time on the water last weekend and it already went pretty well. This was very bizarre since usually new tricks take long to learn. Since my muscles already understood the movements from training on the land, I'm learning this trick much faster. I've only tried doing it 4 times, since it is still really cold and can't ski during the week. However I have a very good feeling about this trick and hope to land it soon.
Coming Wednesday, the season will be officially opened at my home club. After this I will be able to ski a lot and hopefully show you some new tricks shortly after.
One more thing I did this week is make some measurements of my ski with my trainer. I brought my ski to his garage, where the ski machine is as well, so I took some advantage of that too. He looked up the factory settings of my ski, so that we would have an indication of the position of my fin, bindings and wing compared to the way they are intended to be. This is a good starting position in finding the ideal measurements. Most of the measurements were good and according to the factory settings. Currently it is not smart to make adjustments yet, because due to the cold I'm not skiing as well as in mid-season for example. If I feel like the turns are difficult, this could be due to the fin settings, but it is more likely to be due to my technique and slightly frozen muscles. Therefore making a change now will most likely backfire when I start correcting my technique again in warmer temperatures.

Bittersweet

This week's Wednesday was a bittersweet day for me. It was the last day of lessons at high school. On the one hand, this means no more lessons, because we get time off school to study for our exams. On the other hand, this means exams are coming really close and this comes with the necessary pressure. However, this also means that my gap year is coming closer. After 5 weeks my exams will be over and only 5 days after my last exam, I leave to Vincent Soubiron’s skischool. I’m beyond excited to start a year in which I am actually free and there is not an essay in the back of my mind or a test week coming up after the holidays. I have many exciting things planned for the upcoming year, and I hope you will enjoy following those adventures.

Even though my exams are coming up and I need to revise a lot, I also want to spend more time on my skiing. As you know, I need the practice in order to qualify for the Europeans. But it’s also good for me to keep skiing, because then I can focus on something else, forget the stress and not just study all day long. I was planning on going to my 'second home', which is a 2.5 hour drive away, until the weekend before my first exam. However, coming back this weekend, I am really tired after an intense weekend of skiing, so I’m doubting if it is smart to do this before and during my exams. It might be smarter to just ski at my home club instead of driving 5 hours up and down. This weekend, the boat was let into the water, so now I have the opportunity to ski closer to home.

Hopefully I'll make a bigger spray further in

the season!

Besides studying for my exams in between my ski sets, I also took on another challenge. As I've mentioned before, this year my parents and I are really trying to go about skiing more seriously, so that I can have the best season ever and close the gap between me and the really good skiers at the Europeans. Even though I know it’s not realistic to catch up with the best just yet, I do feel that doing more research into every aspect of skiing will improve quicker. One of the things I want to start this season is keeping track of how my sets go in training. For example, I want to keep a log book and video more of my sets. In this way my dad and I hope to spot patterns that might lead to an adjustment in either my technique or equipment.  There are a number of things you can do with the fin settings for example. This is an aspect of skiing that is closely related to my brothers hobby, which is karting. My brother and my dad spend a lot of time figuring out the best set up for the kart in a race, and this should be applicable to water-skiing too. Since it makes such a huge different in the racing world, we figure it can make a difference in ski performance as well. What I don’t know yet is if this will make a difference at the level I ski, but it is good to have an understanding and awareness of how the ski works anyway. This way we also have the knowledge ready when the time comes that every little adjustment on the ski will improve my results. It’s also fun because it gives my dad a chance to combine his passion in karting with water-skiing and see the sport from a more technical aspect.

Other than this, I have set another challenge for myself today… It is to look a little more charming whilst skiing. In the boat Jacky, who I mentioned last week as well, took a few pictures of my trick set. Some of the pictures are quite terrible, but I might still consider sharing them with you when I receive them :p.

Dissapointments

This weekend I spent two days in at the lake in Handel again to start my training on the water for this season. The results, especially in slalom are quite disappointing to me. The results last week weren’t good either, but since the weather was really nice and it was one of the first times skiing, I enjoyed that anyway. However now the rush of spending my weekends 'down south' and skiing actively since a long time has worn off and the reality of my skiing level is sinking in...

Besides the fact that water-skiing is obviously a very physical sport that requires a lot of muscle and core stability, there is also very underestimated mental aspect to it. One of these aspects is particularly present in the start of the season. After only 4 months off the water I ski a lot worse than when I finished my training in Florida in December. I know that this is very logical seeing how cold it is and thus the muscles can’t reach full capacity, also you haven’t burdened these particular muscles this much in a while, so they need to get used to their function again. I also know that every year before I, have gotten back to the level I was before the winter, so logically I know I will reach that level again this year. All this logic aside, it is still very hard to deal with the fact that you have worked an entire year to reach a certain level and you fall way back again, because of the winter. This can get really frustrating, but you have to restrain yourself from pushing too hard with cold muscles and getting injured. This is a tough element of water-skiing that I come across every single year. This time, I had to deal with it twice. I fell back between the end of the season and going to Florida. Then I improved in Florida, which I honestly didn't expect. But now I fell back again to my level at the start of last season! This is very frustrating and it’s hard to not go all out to get back at that level.

Saturday the wind was still an excuse, but on Sunday

we went to the lake really early to ski with

less wind, it was certainly worth every yawn :) 

Due to the frustrations it is sometimes hard for me to really want to conquer the cold and get back on the water. Every skier has to go through this phase and I know from experience I will get through it. Last year I was entering competitions without have gone through this phase and training enough to get to my normal level. This was a really bad idea as you can imagine and that is why this year I’m putting in a lot of time in the gym and start on the water much earlier. Especially in tricking now, every set I get closer to my 'pre-winter' level, which feels as if I’m learning all those tricks again. Since learning new tricks is one of the great joys of water-skiing for me, this gives the beginning of the season a silver lining for me. And it really isn’t all bad, because getting back out on the water after months of not skiing, gives me the biggest smile on my face, not matter how bad it goes haha.

Then I’d like to end with a quote I remember from Jan Johnson: “Skiing is a really nice sport; you learn to deal with disappointments.... a lot”

Spring!

As I said last week, I thought I would ski on Monday in Handel. However there was a code yellow weather warning throughout the country, which means heavy storms. Due to this driving wasn't really recommended, and even if we were to drive 5 hours, skiing was definitely out of the picture. Now I skied on Saturday, but since my mind was set on skiing Monday, the 4 days before Saturday felt like forever. In the end it was worth the wait, because the weather was the opposite of last week. There was a lot less wind and today the temperature hit 21 degrees Celsius! The little

wind that was there helped to dry my suit in between sets, so I didn't mind that much. With this temperature, in combination with the fake alligator that was on the ramp, I thought I was back in Florida! Only the water temperature lags a little behind Florida, but it was around 10 degrees, so with a good wetsuit it was bearable.
Saturday was a lot colder, even though the weatherman predicted 18 degrees, it was actually 12… The silver lining was that it was not super busy, so I was able to ski 2 sets, even though we started late. There was still work to be done on the slalom course and sadly there were not many people to help so this took some time. The skiing started at 17.00, so I was happy to still be able to ski 2 sets. I had contacted the Dutch coach to see she could come as well. This way we could work on a new trick run that will get me into Europeans. We had a lot of time to work on this, so it should be flawless now. Then I had two trick sets to put it into practise, but for the second time this year in the cold temperatures, it looked no where near what I had in mind haha. I enjoyed it thoroughly nonetheless, because I waited long enough to start skiing again. After my last ski set, we quickly had to drive the caravan to the camping, otherwise it would be dark when we were setting up, which makes it unnecessarily hard. We had just enough light to set up my second home in the other side of the country. I was sure we would forget something, at first we were really scared it was the power cable, without it there would be no water, heater, light, etc. Luckily it was a little less dramatic, but we did forget the games, so we had to improvise. We managed to have a lot of fun anyway, so after a good nights sleep, we were ready for Sunday. On Sunday the skiing itself already went much better, maybe the weather had something to do with that :).
Besides the skiing it was also fun to see all the people that are members of this club. It was great to catch up with everybody and ride along in the boat with the other skiers. Especially in the sun this is one of the best ways to spend time in between sets. One of the things I talked about was with a photographer Jacky Jongenelen (action2.nl) to ask if she could shoot some pictures of me skiing some time. I'm excited to have some good quality pictures. She is also going to be a photographer at the under 21 European and African championship, all the more reason to qualify!