Arrived in Norway!

This week, or to be precise, Friday night, I arrived in Norway with my parents. It was a long drive that started Friday morning at 3 am. I have my drivers license, but I’m only allowed to drive with a more experienced driver and only in the Netherlands until I’m 18. To still drive part of the 1400kms I drove from our house to the German boarder. This was a fun new experience to drive this early in the morning. After I did my half hour, my parents had to drive the rest and I slept for more than half of the drive. At around 7 at night we arrived at our cabin, which is a really cool cabin, luckily since we will spend our holiday here for 2 weeks, not just for the Europeans. 

On Saturday we had some time to

explore the area and do some groceries. Whilst doing groceries I ran into a really cool poster. There was a banner of the Europeans at the square where the shops were. It's not a big town where we are, so it's cool to see that this event is really alive.

For Sunday I had a training set on the lake to get used to the area and this also helps me get rid of some nerves. Even though it wasn't very busy and there was almost no one else training, my set was at 9 am, so Saturday I went to bed pretty early, especially since Friday was a weird and tiring day. This was for a good cause, because in the training set I immediately ran my first 3 passes, which I was really happy with, because this is already more than I managed to do at nationals. These trainings sets are per 15 minutes, but 15 minutes is quite long to be training just one event, especially just before competition. Therefore I decided together with the national coach to change from slalom to tricks after 4-5 runs. There was not much time in between, because every training minute is rather expensive. This is the first time I switched from slalom to tricks this fast and it felt really weird to suddenly be going half the speed on a ski half the size. Even though I needed a bit of time to adjust, I did my run without falling the first time. This gave a lot of confidence for the competition. The only thing is that I felt as if I did my run really slow, but this turned out to not be the case, so that was probably because the boat and movements are much slower than in slalom. In my jump training I had to get a bit used to all the buoys that were in the area, but after the first jump I understood the timing and I could work on building confidence before and on the ramp.

Since the trainings sets went really well, I have more confidence in the competition. This helps to get rid of some nerves. This is necessary since I am not here with a big team. The Dutch delegation is just me and one skier in the disabled Europeans. Contrary to last year, where there were more people and also my age. Since we did many other things together too, there was less focus on the competition. Now I feel more

pressure of the competition, so it is good to gain some confidence in skiing. We also went to do some sight seeing in the area, because Norway is really beautiful, and we want to have the feeling that we are in fact on holiday. This also helped in the distractions a bit. 

I'm very excited for the competition, where I am aiming for new PBs in all disciplines!