Impressed

Today marks the end of another great

week of training in Toulouse. The temperatures have risen a lot compared to last week, with an average of around 30 degrees Celsius. There are generally 3 reasons I went to Toulouse to train, of course the coach, the team and finally the weather. Since a lot of the team went to Italy this week for the European and African Youth Championships, I feel like I have traded the team for the weather. Many people are coming back tomorrow, so next week I’ll let you know if the weather was worse again.

The results at Europeans for my team were quite differing. Sadly there were no finals for the Dutch team, despite great skiing! Luckily tomorrow we can welcome a newly crowned European Champion back at the lake, I’m extremely happy for Léa for winning slalom in her final year under 17!!
In watching these live results I noticed how important it is to be very consistant,  because anyone can fall in a pass too early. It is extremely motivating to watch and it emphasizes the importance of experience in competition and consistancy.

I’m really happy with my training results of this week. Since I could watch many of my friends ski at Europeans through live streaming and results and I skied well myself, it has been a really fun week.

First of all, in slalom I am running quite a lot of passes at 14, which I hope will become stable enough to run it in competition in 2 or 3 weeks. I haven’t been working on the 13 meter line a lot, since getting the right feel and being more constant at 14 is very important. However, when I did ski at 13, I did 3 bouys on the first try, which is only 1 less than my pb. To top this off, the pass was looking so good, that Vincent thought I was going to run it. Hopefully next week I can improve just that bit that I need to be able to run my first 13 meter pass. I feel like having a personal best with bouys on 12 meters is a real milestone in slaloming for me.

As I said last week, I’ve been working with a sling in jumping. When I wrote that, I had only practised with it in free skiing, but now, I have been over the ramp with it multiple times. I will not forget the first time quickly, since it actually went really well. I was pretty nervous to go over because you cannot move your arm to help balance the landing. I was thinking about this a lot, but then in the turn Vincent’s hat flew off, which landed right between my feet and I was able to pick it up really

fast whilst skiing. After this, I wasn’t so focussed on the sling anymore, and the jump went really well. Because of the sling, my position in the air was actually better than before, which surprised Vincent, who was quite impressed and we were both very happy with that jump. Hopefully learning a ¾ cut will go just as smooth.

In tricks I’m back to working on my newest tricks, which earlier I could do sometimes, but not always. These are going quite well and I’m excited to work on those and other new ones. What’s surprising, but I’ve said it before, is that I can do tricks that are usually experienced as hard to learn quite easily, but I get stuck on easier basic tricks. This week I’ve heard multiple times from Vincent: I’m very impressed, but I don’t know if I’m more impressed by the fact that you can do the wrap in, wrap out so perfectly, or by the fact that you struggle on the [easier] back to back.