OTF!

After the succes stories of last week, I was brutally hit by a reality check. I crashed in my jump set on Monday. It was my first out of the front crash. As I was practising the ¾ cut I had just learned the week before, I approached the ramp feeling quite late. I felt like I would barely get both ski's over the ramp, but just before I was at the ramp I decided that I was still on time enough to go for it. However, because of that moment of doubt, my position on the ramp wasn’t good anymore. I had my ski's flat on the ramp, where normally you should continue cutting on the ramp towards the top left. With my ski’s flat, I still tried to kick off the top, but in doing so, I pushed back my right ski too far, which caused me to fall more and more forward. At that point it was a question of waiting until I hit the water. I was lucky that my ski's went off immediately when I hit the water, because that saved my joints. It did mean that I landed on them with my legs, arms and face, but that takes considerably less time to heal… After a short moment of being a little disorientated and taking in all the pain I felt to identify if it was actually bad, I was able to finally say I was oké. After a moment of processing what happened, I had to get back on the water and take some more jumps. This is necessary to keep confidence in yourself and not develop a fear of jumping. Of course, I didn’t do more ¾ cuts right away. I started with some single cuts, but was so scared that I tried to stand on my heels a lot all so that I wouldn’t go out of the front again. This is unsafe though, and I ended up falling backwards causing my back to hurt quite a bit. It took a couple of jumps to have some confidence again and it wasn’t till the training with the Dutch team back in the Netherlands that I felt comfortable with trying a ¾ cut again, but it went really well and I jumped Friday, Saturday and Sunday without any hard falls, so I am fully confident again. 

After I came back from France on Tuesday night, I had one free day at home. I thought the most important thing to do was go to the fysio and check out everything that I hurt by overusing it and the crash. Since the federation planned 4 days of training for the team with Coyotte, I wanted to be sure that I could ski without causing lasting damage to my body. He said ideally I would take a weeks rest, but since we both know that was out of the question, he taped my shoulder to help the blood flow to help it heal quicker. Also he told me to take some painkillers so that I would keep moving normally. Now I can say that it did help and I skied the past 4 days mostly pain free. In the end both my shoulders and my back hurt a bit, but that is no surprise really. Luckily it didn't stand in the way of having 4 great days of training and I was still able to learn a lot. Only slalom wasn't going exactly as I was hoping it would, but I have a whole week and a 4 round competition coming weekend to get rid of the issues I was having. Hopefully I will be able to prove to myself that I can still slalom well, because after the 4th set of not skiing the way I wanted to at all, I was seriously starting to doubt myself and wonder where everything I had learned in the past week went.