Competition 1/2

This weekend I had a competition after a

week of training only in slalom. The competition was at a beautiful location and the water skied really well. The only problem: there was no wifi or cell phone service, so the blog is a bit late. This will be the same next weekend when I have one more slalom competition, with 4 rounds of slalom. It’s a different location but again no wifi to post the blog, this will come Monday or Tuesday. 

I’ve already written a bit about my training with Anthony in France last week. Including the fact that all the sets are filmed and analysed. After that, I still had 6 sets of training there. Since I was changing quite a bit in style and trying to get rid of some  bad habits, skiing was quite hard and the results in bouys was actually getting worse. Eventually after skiing, practising with my handle before skiing, visualising the set and watching the videos after, things started to fall into place. I was running very nice 18 meter passes, because here I have a lot of time to think. Also the 16 meter passes were getting cleaner and technically much better. This looks nicer, but it also saves quite a bit of pain, for one because I do more on technique rather than strength, and also because the chance of a serious crash decreases significantly. I was getting more an more confident in the new technique and I was running almost all my 14 meter passes; A very good sign for the upcoming competition. On Thursday I left Paris to head south to the competition site. I did one set on the lake there on which I ran 18, 16 and 14 in a row. After, I ran another 14 meter pass, just to be sure, and again I ot round all 6 bouys. This gave me confidence for the competition and I was thinking I might be able to prove Anthony wrong, because he said the new technique still needed a bit of time to sink in and it might be hard to run 14 at this competition.

After a rest day on Friday, since I had been

skiing twice a day for a week straight, the competition started at 10 on Saturday. In the first round, I was good in my 18 meter pass. I thought to myself, quickly get the 16 meter pass out of the way so I can start on 14. In my 16 meter pass I tried to think about everything I learned and to do it as similar to training as possible, despite some competition nerves. Throughout the pass I felt like I was getting really late, so I rushed to the last bouy. When I saw that it was still a bit further, I threw my legs around it, due to which I was out of balance. After the 6 bouy, I still had my handle but I was almost completely in the water. I thought maybe if I just held on, I would still make it through the gate, but the boat was too strong and I fell in a front flip. Afterwards, when I saw the video, it turned out that I wasn’t even that late at the bouys, so I don’t know what happened here, but no chance at 14 meters... 

The second round went a bit better. I had a nice 18 and 16 meter pass, which gave me confidence starting at 14. I would just have to do the same, and focus on having a good start. I got round 1 and 2, but at 3 I started to rush again, leaving a result of 3.5 bouys at 14 meters. This is not my best result at a competition, but it does beat my second best results. The European and African ranking list is based upon your two best results, so this would improve my score a little bit. Despite this, still all I wanted to do was run 14, but I would have to wait another day to try that.

On Sunday, I skied the last 2 sets. Both of them I ran the 18 and 16 meter pass, which I should be happy with. After changing some technical things and trying to ski with a somewhat different style, it is good to get into 14 meters 3 out of 4 times. However, I say should be, because I am not particularly happy with this. My goal was to run 14, and I really wanted to do that. In the final 2 sets, I did 1 and 2 at 14, so sadly I didn’t reach my goal for the weekend. On the birght side though, I met more really nice people which I hope to see more often at competitions and I have 4 more chances next weekend. Hopefully the technique will set into my memory and get comfortable so that next weekend I can ski a nice PB to end the season. Until then I will spend some time with family, since I’ve barely seen them throughout this busy summer!