Bowling #teamNL

This weekend we were fortunate enough to have another team training with coach Coyotte. Sadly, on Saturday, after starting at 7 in the morning, the boat broke. There was a problem with the prop so skiing was out of the question, even though it was only 10 am, so everyone had skied just once. Luckily I did have a good set that first one, because I did 4 at 13, which is the best I’ve skied on this site. I was especially happy with how my technique felt, this has really improved lately. As for the boat, there were a couple of options, but none of them were really ideal.. By the time an agreeable solution was found for the prop, it was 13:00 and at that point we weren't allowed to ski. The national team was allowed to ski until 13:00 and after 18:00, so just as the boat was up and running, we had to stop skiing, after waiting for 3 hours! Since we wanted to get away from all the waiting and frustration for a bit, we went bowling with the team. It was a lot of fun, but let's just say that it's good we are the national team for waterski and not bowling… The youngest kids got side rails, but sadly for the others, including me, these were able to go up just for specific players, so a lot of gutter balls were thrown! In the end, Coyotte won, so he can teach us something here as well. However the most important thing is that we had a lot of fun, laughed a lot and were able to get our mind somewhere else. We then decided to get an early dinner, so we could ski without stopping after 18:00. We were able to get some more sets in, but not as many as we wanted, because there was a wedding at the ski club! This wasn't the ideal situation for a training weekend, but it was quite fun to see how they organised their beach wedding, including picking up the bride with our speed boat! The fun we had with the team that day is what I want to focus on, because the last 2 ski sets went far from great.

Luckily Sunday is a different day and I started full of fresh motivation. My slalom set didn't go as well as Saturday, but still better than a couple of weeks ago, so I won't let that bother me too much. As we had to stop at 13:00 and wouldn't continue after 18:00 because most people, including me have quite some time to travel after, we had to fit in everyone's 3 sets in the first 6 hours. We worked really efficiently and I felt as if every time I blinked it was time to warm up again! I much prefer that over the waiting from the day before, so I was more focussed each set. Since I have a trick competition coming up, I was working on runs that would be stable enough for next weekend. Also I discussed strategies, like setting a PB in the first round (sure would be great) so that I will be able to add more and more risky tricks the following rounds. I wanted to focus my sets on the least stable tricks that I want to do in my run. I feel like it went really well and this gives me some more confidence for the competition. I'm also happy that the tricks that I have to put in this season’s final run are already becoming stable. Especially a 540 turn in toe holds went really well. During the set we really moulded each part of the trick, I kept building the trick with the tips I was getting. Every time I used a tip, the turn went a bit better until finally I did a perfect fully credit 540 toe hold. This is great, because this has to be the first trick I do, so if I fall on it, I will lose all the points in that run! With the runs and strategies for next weekend and some more training at home, I hope to set a PB above the 3000 point mark at the competition. I'm excited, but nervous to work towards that, but I've seen what happened when I focused on just slalom, so I should be able to do the same focusing on just tricks!