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!