Getting ready for the competitions

This is the end of my fourth week in Toulouse, in exactly 7 days I will be flying home to the Netherlands to start the month of competitions. The first weekend that I will be home, is the Benelux competition and the week after I have nationals. This means that competitions are getting close and thus I need to start preparing for them. In order to do this, the way of training is slightly different than it was before. It is more about imitating the competition setting, which means don’t let go unless you really have to. This increases the chance of injuries slightly, however it also increases the chance of good results and thus a balance needs to be found here.

In slalom the competition setting means that all the passes have to be completed directly after each other. In competition, you can only increase your speed or shorten the rope if you have passed all 6 bouys on the previous pass. In training I was sometimes not running one of my first passes, or not running my passes in a row. In competition this would mean a lower score, so the focus now is really on running the 18, 16 and 14 meter line in a row. It doesn’t matter as much as before how good the style is, though of course since it is not actually the competition, we will continue working on the technique and style to make the passes better. On Thursday this showed in a pass at the 16 meter line, which was technically really good and immediately felt like it costs less effort than usual.

In tricks you get two passes of 20 seconds to show all the tricks you can do. If you fall, you miss all the points of the tricks you had after the one you fell. For me to get the points I want I have to complete both my runs and have them within 20 seconds. We made runs with easy tricks, though in the first few weeks we had been working on harder tricks, but these will be in my run next season. This is because this will give us a stable shot at 3000 points instead of a very risky shot at 4000. This is especially for the competitions in July and when I come back in August we will continue working on the new tricks. In training now, I am doing my runs, which means I shouldn’t fall at all during my set. Also if one trick doesn’t go as it’s supposed to go, but I didn’t fall I just continue, as in competition. This way I will be prepared fully when it comes to skiing at the competition.

In jump there was a lot of work to do before I would be able to jump the distance that I want. This is because I started jumping later than slalom and tricks and when I did start I was still afraid and didn’t like training for jump that much. Even later when I did like training, the opportunities were limited, at my home lake all  last season I was unable to jump, so I didn’t train a lot on the ramp. The bright side is, I spent a lot of time on my technique, which paid off as soon as I hit the ramp for the first time. This jump, even after almost a year of not going over the ramp, was technically better than any jumps in previous seasons. I am learning to increase my speed more to reach the maximum speed at the right point and now I will hopefully be able to jump well into the 20 meters.

This weekend there is a competition in Bordeaux where I will be watching some very good skiers, who will be able to inspire me to train to the best of my abilities in my last week in Toulouse!

On and off the water

First of all, I will tell you if this week was indeed easier on m muscles than the first two weeks. On the one hand yes, the muscles that were hurting in the first two weeks due to starting of intensive training, were not hurting anymore this week. On the other hand, some muscles are hurting more than before because of extra training I have started outside of the water. In order to reach the next level from where I am now, I need to spend a lot more time outside of the water, for example on the trampoline practising tricks and the correct posture for slalom. Furthermore, I am doing other exercises, like working on abs and shoulder muscles. Therefore these muscles hurt more than the first couple of weeks. This is definitely worth the investment though, because this will greatly reduce the time that needs to be spent on posture on the water and also makes it easier to improve, because I'm stronger.

This week there have been a couple of sets which were challenging and didn't go the way I wanted them to go. One way to improve this is to continue exercising outside of the water, because it is important to print the movements into my brain so that I don't have to think about it on the water. When I think to much on the water, I ski worse than when I don't. In slalom this is apparent, because I will run my first few passes, and do 5 bouys at 14 meter line length. Then after I'm assuming to get all 6 bouys, because I was so close. But instead, I only do 2 or 3.This is because in those last attempts at 14, I start thinking too much and not relying enough on the posture that I am printing in my brain by practising on the trampoline.

There are a lot more things that I

need to do outside of the water than when I first started skiing. These are not all fun, because ultimatey I just want to ski and enjoy the feeling of freedom I get when I go through the slalom course, hit the ramp, or learn new tricks. However, in order to keep improving its inevitable that I spend time on less enjoyable things, like drills and off-water training. Not to say these are all bad, I sometimes enjoy them, but nothing beats the feeling of really skiing. However this week one of the drills I have been doing had paid off. I finaly hit the ramp after 2 weeks of practising the cut on my jumpers. I hadn't been over the ramp in roughly a year, so it was really exciting. The first jumps were still cautious, naturally, but the last jumps of my set were technically better than any of my jumps from last year. There is a video on my Facebook page, from which this photo is taken.

I am really happy that the previous training was surely worth the investment, since now the jumps are already better. If I had been jumping all this time it would have taken longer to learn the right technique and more room for injuries and it would be quite bad for my knees. I now know that all these drills and exercises will be worth it eventually, case in point, and thus I'll gladly keep on doing them!

The mental side of waterskiing

Today I’ve been in Toulouse for 2 weeks, which means I’ve skied 40 sets already. From these 40 sets it is obviously impossible to ski them all perfectly. Some sets don’t work out quite the way you want them to, and even though you have great coaching to get the best out of your set anyways, some sets leave you with an unaccomplished feeling. Out of 40 sets, some are bound to be better than others, but since you ski so often in a short period of time, it also feels as if more sets are not as good as I would hope. If the 40 sets were spread out more, so would the ‘bad’ sets, but since they are all in these 2 weeks, the negative feelings caused by the ‘bad’ sets prevails. This is sometimes hard to deal with, because it is easier to remember what you did wrong and the tips you got to improve than to remember what you have accomplished. I was making things worse for myself by keeping track of all the tips I was given. Of course this is good, because this way I get the most out of my time here and I can look at the tips when I am not here. This does however put emphasis on what I am doing wrong and this was hard to deal with at times. This is why in the second week I also tried writing down what went really well to put everything back in perspective.  

Besides sets not going completely the way I want them to due to fatigue in my muscles or other reasons, sometimes, my coach said I wasn’t working enough. I was doing just enough to pass, with minimum effort. This way I was not improving as fast as I could, and since I have a long way to go still, I need to improve as fast as possible. This is when my coach told me I really have to make the most of every set, and every pass in every set and every trick. Even skiing back towards the dock, I need to pay attention to my body position. It is not that I purposefully decided not to put in enough effort, but since I was completing the exercise, I figured it was good. However if I want to be the best someday, I really need to put maximum effort into everything I do. When my coach pointed this out after the first couple of passes, I really worked on the last passes. This made my last passes the best ones from the set, though they should have been the worst, if I had worked hard in the first passes and made my body tired during the last. The sets after, I really started working with maximum effort, which meant we could continue with other exercises, so this is definitely something to never forget. If I want to get to the level of international skiers my age, I will need to work every set like it’s my last chance to prove what I have! 

Finally I want to share an article that was written after an interview I had. There will be a translation of this article coming soon on Facebook, if you want to be updated on everything there, you can like this page!