First week in Toulouse

I’ve been in Toulouse for exactly a week now and settled in to my new ‘home’ for the coming weeks, which wasn't hard with a gorgeous view and beautiful sunsets.

Even though I had made great effort to train as much as possible in the weeks before coming here, it has become clear that 4 sets per day is still quite a challenge. Especially after several weeks of mainly studying and very little in the gym. Before coming to Toulouse, I trained little in jump, making it challenging to complete the drills I was training. I felt some improvements in how easily I could complete the drills after 2 days, but the last 2 days were tough again as I became increasingly tired. Saturday was my first rest day and I was very happy to have it. My coach says that the first 2 weeks of intensive training like this will be tough, but after that you are used to the rhythm and it will get easier, I will let you know if he’s right when I get to that point!

Despite the fact that it was an exhausting week both mentally and physically, I’ve already improved quite a few things, which means if I continue like this, after 5 weeks of training, there should be some great results! In learning new tricks I have quite weird preferences it seems. Many tricks come in two parts, you make the trick, and then you do the opposite of that trick to make sure you get back to the same starting position. For example if you turn a 180, you will turn another 180 in the opposite direction to be back at your starting point. I have been working on turning a 180 over the wake of the boat, whilst stepping over the line. Going from behind the boat outside went well, but getting back took a little longer to perfect. Usually it’s going back that is easiest, so much so that there are people that will start in the back position and only turn this trick back as to avoid making the first part of the trick. I have experienced this with multiple other tricks as well.

There have also been some changes in my materials that I’ve been very happy with. This goes to show that all the times I skied bad and blamed it on my material, I actually had a point haha! But seriously, some of my new material has really helped me perform slightly better in multiple ways, although these are not major improvements, it helps. As I mentioned before, at home my dad and I were looking at ways in which a slalom ski could be adjusted to enhance performance. The first step we took was set my boots back a little bit, in order to match the recommended factory settings. My coach noticed this made the ski a bit more aggressive and changed some other settings to compensate. This happened on Friday, so we will still need some more time next week to find the perfect setting. I’m positive that this will improve my skiing, because it is impossible that the ski as I was using it was perfectly tuned to my preferences. I’m very curious as to how much these settings will help in my results.

I want to conclude this blog with some exciting news. I will be skiing the under 21 Europeans on all 3 disciplines. Because of this I was asked to give an interview for a local newspaper back home to explain how this happened. This will be posted soon, so that’s something to look forward to!

Off to Toulouse

Today is the day that my ‘countdown’ app finally read: 0 days. Time to fly to Toulouse to train for 5 weeks at Vincent Soubiron’s ski school. I’m obviously excited to ski so much every day, in nice temperatures and great coaching, so I will hopefully learn many things very quickly. I’m also really excited to see the people I met there last year again and see how they are doing. I also hope to meet new people there, since the water-skiing community in the Netherlands is not all that big. I really enjoy meeting new skiers from around the world and it will be good to meet other skiers from different countries before the Europeans, since the Dutch delegation will be very small. I look forward to being around even more people that share the same passion as me.

There were a couple of hurdles before I could finally fly to Toulouse though. First of all the 3-event bag always causes some kind of trouble every time I fly. This time was no different and it couldn’t be found in the system, so it took very long to check that bag in. Once that was finally sorted out, I went back to say goodbye to my grandparents and my mother. When going back in, my hand-luggage was selected to be weighed. This sucked, because I knew it was overweight and it wouldn’t have been checked if I just went straight through security after checking in my bags. I decided to leave my tablet at home and carry a book in my hand. This way the bags were still slightly overweight, but I got through! After came security, where both of my pieces of hand-luggage were selected for extra checking and I was also selected to be checked extra after the x-ray machine. To be fair, I understand why they needed to check my carry-on bag, because it’s not often that you see hard-shell bindings in carry-ons… This was necessary to spread the weight around my bags. This turned out perfectly since my check-in bag was 22.9kg and it is allowed to be 23kg. After way too long I was finally through security and instead of having an hour or two to spare, my flight was already called for boarding. I had originally planned to write part of this blog, whilst waiting for boarding, but there was no time, so I’m writing it on the plane. I knew that when I arrived in Toulouse, it would be too much fun to see all the people that I wouldn’t write it there. I was supposed to land at 13:30, so there would’ve been time to write it, but I’m glad I made the decision to write in the plane, because I landed after 16:00 due to a thunderstorm! The storm caused heavy turbulence, and it was not safe to land. The plan was to circle around until the storm passed, but we were out of fuel and got diverted to Carcassonne for re-fuelling. The turbulence we experienced whilst trying to land the first time was almost similar to some of the rides at the fun-fair in my home town. It’s another story I can add to my travel experiences, though I’m annoyed it reduced the time I could spend with my friend here in Toulouse.

I have set some goals for the next couple of weeks, which will help me reach the qualifying criteria for the European championships in July. I hope to be able to show these results so constantly that I can ski them at the nationals, because my grandparents are coming to watch those, and of course I want to impress them, and also show others why I missed their birthdays….

I'm looking forward to posting about my progress and taking some action shots! These will be posted next week, so stay tuned!

#TeamNL training

Last week I said this weekend would be a training withthe national team, this is great news fort he sport as a whole in the Netherlands. It was a great weekend due to combined effort of the national coach Talisa Hof and the new manager of the ski lake, who is also a member of the national team. The result of this was a great coach from Belgium, CoyotteSaintviteux and good food for the lunch and a BBQ Saturday evening. This allowed for a great atmosphere the entire weekend along with some good results from all the skiers. In total I did 6 sets this weekend, which was not as much as I would’ve liked, but the weather was much worse than it was the past few weeks. In stead of the 20-25 degrees (Celsius) that we had, this weekend it cooled down to 10 degrees with wind from the wrong side… Despite all this, I still learned a lot! Some things that were bound to happen soon, happened due to some final tips from the coach, which was great! Even better was that I started learning a new trick, the ‘wrap-in’ in toehold, on the Saturday, which immediately went really well. On the Sunday towards the end of my set, I made this trick for the first time. It felt really cool to learn a new trick in 2 days, since usually learning new tricks takes much longer. I also made sure to film the wake 360 step for you this time, you can find it on my Facebook Page! I made this trick only once, and it was not very controlled, but there’s a start. Because I’m a little camera shy, my sets go worse when there’s someone filming. Due to this I didn’t film my other sets and thus I can’t show the ‘wrap-in’ with toehold just yet. Since it was such a great weekend, there are plans to have some more training days shortly before the Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) championship. This will be three days instead of two and together with the same trainer. I am very confident that this will allow for great results for #teamNL on the championship! It was a really fun time (gezellig) with all the skiers, because it had been 5 months since we saw each other in Florida this winter. It is promising to be a season with lots of fun and great results for all of us. 

Even though the sport is not so popular, this weekend there was not one training camp, but two. The one for the national team, but also a camp for the youth of my home club, the ‘WSCP’. This is organized every year with Pentecost, on Sunday and Monday. This means I will be welcome there tomorrow, so I can still enjoy both camps this weekend. Here there will be two local trainers, Toon van der Ploeg, who won silver on last years disabled worlds, and Pascal van Dijken, who does not ski tournaments anymore, but has achieved great things in his water-skiing career. It will be fun to see how everyone is skiing after their week in Spain and after today.

Guess who's back

All the skiers who went to Spain to train got back today. If you are wondering who I am talking about, feel free to read the previous post. The group came back yesterday and some of the diehards were back on the water here today. I mean diehards in more ways than just skiing after an intense week of training. The wind today was also very terrible, which caused very high waves. I'm very glad they got on the water anyway so I could see how well they are all skiing, which was great. Usually coming back from Spain means somewhat of a weather shock, but this weekend, the Netherlands was actually warmer than most other European countries. This made it even better to spend so much time in the boat. However I seriously doubted if I would ski myself. This was mainly because the wind was producing waves with white caps, which was quite off-putting. I ended up skiing, though I will leave slalom for another time, but tricking was very doable. I am extremely happy that I went skiing, because it went extremely well. I only skied once, because I've had an exhausting week, but that one set was great. I did 2 new tricks, one of which the wake 360, which I predicted would come soon in the post As promised..., the other trick was a 540 wake turn, which I was able to put in a sequence with another 540 wake turn. This reminds me of a quote that says: If you wait for the perfect conditions, you'll never get anything done. The only down side of today is that I didn't bring a camera this time and thus none of this was filmed or even photographed. I will hopefully get on the water again soon and film it so I can show you what these tricks are!
And speaking of filming, we have a new toy. My dad bought a 'wake eye' recently. This is a mount for the gopro that can be put on the pole to which the line is attached and it will follow the movement of the line. This is especially useful in slalom, because if the camera doesn't move, you will ski out of the frame frequently. This way the camera will follow the line's movement from side to side and thus film the entire set. Hopefully this will result in cool videos to share, but also good quality videos that I can look back and look carefully at my technique and what I can improve. On Friday, we did a little testing with the camera, since this was the first day after my exam week, I was still beyond tired and I didn't feel fit enough to slalom. We tested the filming with tricks, just to look at the camera positioning. It works well in the sense that it is easy to spot mistakes and thus it's very educational, also I'm amazed at how smoothly the camera follows the line, even with subtle movements in tricks.

However the camera that we are using can't zoom in close enough and thus the film is quite far away. Essentially it's most useful for slalom, so I hope to test it with slaloming soon.
I now have 1.5 more weeks of exams, so I will be skiing to keep my mind clear, but not a lot, because exams are much more tiring than I initially anticipated.
For next week I have some exciting news. There will be a training in Handel, the lake I've already skied a lot this year, for the national team skiers. This is the first in a while, because there have been financial struggles, since water-skiing is not as popular as I think it should be! It's very exciting that things like this can be organized again and I cant wait to tell you about it next week!

Missing out

I have made a blog before about what a close group of skiers and volunteers we have at my water-skiing club in a previous blog. Also, I mentioned that our club provides training for kids under 18, by volunteers. A couple of years ago I went on a training camp in Spain with 2 of the oldest skiers at the time, I believe we were all around 14 years old. We went to a trainer called Xavi Mill, because our trainer at the club has known him for years. This trip was in May, because that's when our season starts, so it provides a great start to the season. The following years, every May there would be a trip and more and more people were interested in it. We've also been to other places, for example, two years ago we went to Italy. This year the trip is to Spain again. Of course it is great to be able to kick-start the season by skiing many sets a day in warm weather. However, similar to Europeans, what makes trips like these really memorable is the people you share the experiences with. Since you spend a week constantly being around each other, we all get even closer and since we already know each other well, it is always lots of fun. To be able to spend the entire day at a lake and nights at the beach with people who share your passion and that you see all summer, is absolutely great. Now it is the beginning of May and yesterday, the trip started, but this year not for me. This is because my high school exams start tomorrow, and obviously I can't miss those. Now since I don't have school after May 18th, because my exams will be done, I have a lot of time to go abroad and train just as much as I would in this trip. However I still feel like I am missing out, because its honestly amazing to spend a week with my team/club mates. After also spending the winter practising with each other, I was really excited to see everyone's progress, and I want to be there to develop my own skills and grow with them, but that's not possible. I made a deal that I would receive many updates on everyone's progress and pictures, and this is a welcome distraction from studying as well, though it does make me want to be there even more. After my exams, Ill be leaving to France to train, and so I won't see them as much during the summer either.
In the meantime, I can keep training in the cold water here, which is now probably colder than when we had our ' New Years Dive', which was in January. The videos I received from Spain today, but also in France it is extremely windy. Here in the North of the Netherlands, there was not a lot of wind and we had a great day of skiing, so this is really a rare moment that should be recorded :). 

The weather reports for the coming weeks are also starting to look much better, so I can almost remember why I like water-skiing so much.