Luggage arrived!

To me, the most important news of this week is that my luggage arrived. It arrived Tuesday afternoon, so I had to ski on borrowed equipment for two days. There wasn’t a lot of difference in the way I skied, but still it is always nice to have your own materials. On the bright side of my missing luggage, I got to go shopping for some new clothes, which would be paid by the airline. However, I’ll still take my skiing equipment over new clothes any day.

At the start of the week, I did a lot of passes at the 16 meter line. This run was already quite stable, but now I can run it very well, even if I make some mistakes throughout. On this line length it is easy to work on some new technical things. For example I started really working on doing a counter rotation in the turn. This allows for much more angle towards the next bouy, so once I really get the hang of this, I’m sure I’ll improve a lot. Now, even though the counter rotation is not perfect yet, I already notice that it helps in my skiing. After practising many 16 meter passes, I went to 14 and I ran it the first try. I hadn’t been able to ski through my 14 for quite a long time, so I really know my technique has improved by practising on 16.

In jump there are also interesting developments, which I’m really excited about and I hope to be comfortable with it soon. First of all, I started skiing with a sling. This is attached around your waist, and you can put your right arm in it. This means that you can handle a lot more pressure with this arm. I noticed that it has made me much stronger and I can create even more speed. The other thing is that I started doing a ¾ cut, instead of a single one. In doing this you first go to the right side of the boat. After gliding there for a few seconds, you turn in and cut from there straight to the left side of the boat, where the ramp is. This naturally creates much more speed than starting from behind the boat and cutting towards the ramp. Even though when learning this I don’t go straight over the ramp, I can feel I have much more speed and thus if I can keep this speed onto the ramp, I will jump much further. I have only spent one set working on this new cut, so I haven’t been over the ramp yet, but I’m extremely excited to find out how that will feel. Though honestly, I’m also a bit nervous because you are taking a lot of speed.

In this first week, I have only done 2 trick sets, due to my missing luggage, amongst other reasons. The sets I did were mainly working on the basics again, because I haven’t been skiing since Europeans. These went fairly well, but I have been warned for very hard work to come. There are a lot of tricks that I am expected to learn during my stay. This means that I should practise a lot on the trampoline and on the ground. This will be very hard work, but hopefully I’ll soon be able to show you guys some new tricks!

Finally I want to wish everyone at the

youth E&A championships a lot of luck, especially my #teamNL and #teamsoubiron team mates! I really wish I could also be there, but I will be following everything from here, whilst training for my own competitions!