Independance

This week many people of the team were back, yet the weather was still beautiful, so luckily it was a week filled with all 3 things I came here for.

I only have one more week to train in Toulouse, next week I will end with a competition in France, after which I will fly back to the Netherlands. Luckily there are many fun things waiting for me at home too, including a very special clinic, which I can’t wait to write about. Even though it feels like the end, especially including the weeks I was here in June, I must keep focussing on skiing here and not let my mind travel back home just yet.

In the past week I have noticed a lot more how independent I have become and how that has been necessary too. This comes in two major parts, first of all, living practically alone, which means cooking, cleaning, chores, etc. But also more importantly in skiing, the past weeks I have had a lot of issues with my equipment. Many fixable things luckily, but that does mean that I have to learn how to fix them. Sadly I also learned to see when something is beyond fixable. All these have been learning experiences for when I will be skiing by myself in university and can’t give all my broken equipment to my parents and get them back fixed. Since many of my friends back home are moving into their own apartments, I realised that this is a nice way to ease into being independent and eventually live alone.

In last weeks blog, I said I hoped to run 13 coming week, since I was close back then. During this week I had a couple of really good shots to run it, but I just came a little short. Now I feel like I have to run it in my last week. I have all the tips and coaching I need, so now I just have to give everything and run it.

I am also working on some new tricks,

like a 540 in toeholds, but also the 540s over the wake in hands. These tricks won’t be ready to be in a run for this years competitions, but they are a good investment for next year. I’ve also been working on pinning other trickers, this means holding the rope when they are in toehold, and of course letting go when they fall. This is good training to see other peoples mistakes, because I make a lot of the same one, and now I see how scary they are. It emphasises the importance of making my tricks clean, so that the pinner does not get too many heart attacks. Since there are some skiers who I can’t pin yet because their tricks are too difficult, I was put back behind the wheel. I drove the boat for one skier so that Vinney could pin. My turns are getting better, but I still have some work to do driving in a straight line, but at least everyone involved made it back to the shore safe and well.

In jumping, I am working on jumping more stable with the sling. It is quite a difference, but I got used to it fast. Now it is especially important to also take advantage of it and not just learn how to land with it. Hopefully if my jumps and cuts are stable enough, I will be able to do a ¾ cut in next season’s competitions. 

I'm excited for next weeks competition and will be training towards it in the last week. I hope to ski a PB, even though it might not be as close to my trainings pb as I hope, especially because the first competition after a hard period of training can be difficult.

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.

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!

Pass the handle

This week’s blog is a little bit later

because my flight to Toulouse didn’t go exactly as planned. For starters the flight was delayed by 1 hour, but that isn’t such a big of a deal, the real problem was with luggage. I travel with two check-in bags, one containing my skis and one containing everything else I need to ski, like my ropes, gloves, life jacket, jump suit and helmet, etc. This particular time I also had my baseplates and bindings in my second bag, because the bags can only weigh 23 kilos, and my jump skis with bindings weighs a lot. Usually I take off the heavy jump bindings, but this time I couldn’t unscrew them and I had to take off everything from my other skis to get to the weight I was allowed. Now my ski bag has arrived, but everything else I need to ski has yet to arrive, since that bag was left in Amsterdam. So instead of spending yesterday to assemble my skis and write a blog, I had to plan how I was going to borrow everything from other skiers, so that I can ski today. I ended up using different parts 4 other skiers, but it worked. I hope my own materials will arrive soon so that I can ski with stuff that fits properly.

However, this is not what I planned on blogging about this week. Last week Sunday was called ‘pass the handle’ day. This is a day in which skiers can pass the handle by teaching others how to ski. This is with the goal to grow the sport, which is very necessary. Waterskiing used to be much more popular and well known than it is now, and it would be great if more people knew the sport and funding for the federation grew.
I didn’t have the opportunity to teach anyone how to ski last week, but I believe I can help grow the sport through my blog. I get some great reactions to my blog and one in particular I like to share. There was a girl who contacted me to say she was inspired by my blog to get back to training and also give training to other people. This was amazing to hear, but what makes it more special is that she inspired me in skiing about 4 years ago. She was at my first training camp and she helped me go over the ramp for the first time. It was fun to read back old messages that I sent to her, for example that I was very proud of landing a jump and doing a side slide. These things are not really special to me anymore, but it is a good reminder that at one point, this was all I could do and I was really proud of that. It reminds me to be proud of how far I’ve come already too and helps me see that it is possible to go even further.

Finally, even though it is kind of a rough start to the training in France, without my suitcase, I am very happy to be skiing back here and see everyone!

E&A championship u21 2016

Tonight is the closing ceremony of the European and African u21 and disabled championship. This means that all the preliminary and final rounds have been skied and all medals have been distributed. A good time to look back at how I skied this week and what I want to take away from this competition.

The week started off with some training and familiarisation sets on the competition site. This is to get used to the water and if all goes well, gain a little confidence before the competition. In the slalom familiarisation, I crashed and had to stop the already short training set of 5 minutes even earlier due to the pain. I wanted to do too much and flew over my ski, after which my boot clicked off and I landed on the top of my ski with my knee. Initially I was afraid I had opened another scar that I have on my knee from before last Europeans, but luckily it was just the hit that was hurting. That afternoon I had had some time to rest and I skied my trick familiarisation. Both runs went really well and I even almost completed the last trick of my toe run, which is one I’ve never before completed and it is in my run just in case I do finish it in competition and get some bonus points. I was happy and newly confident after being quite upset with a slalom crash, which is not a great feeling to go into a competition. The next day was the jump familiarisation in which I jumped 22.1 meters, only 90 cm under my personal best and with some great coaching from Michael Kjellander, who has won world medals!

On Thursday the competition really started, first up was the slalom preliminaries. The fact that I fell in the last training was still in the back of my mind, but with some encouragements from my team and the French team, I was ready to fight for  a new PB. I had a very relaxed and well executed first pass, which I was happy with, because I started on a faster speed than usual. After came my second pass, on which I fell in the last training, but other than that I usually run this pass. I was relaxed on the first few bouys and it

was looking like I could finish the pass, but then I was a bit late at the fifth bouy and I tried to rush the turn. Because of that my upper body went down straight into the water and that was the end…. Next time I just have to keep calm and trust that I will have enough angle to get to the last bouy no matter how late I am. This is something that I also learned in training and started working on, but I had too much stress from the competition to be able to think about that. This fall landed me in 16^th place, just short of the top 15 that I was aiming for for this competition.

I had the entire day to deal with this disappointment, because tricks started on Friday. Luckily the other skiers were a good distraction on Thursday. I was up for tricks early in the morning and I felt ready. My tricks in practise are very stable, so the only hurdle was to deal with the competition stress. The first run went really well, I did all my tricks in my hand run and it felt like they were in time. This added some pressure to the second run. When I went on the boat to change skis for my toehold run I felt so much stress being released from clearing my first run that I was shaking. When I started my toehold run, I didn’t feel ready. I went for the first trick anyway and I fell… this means 0 points in my toehold run, which is worth the most points out of the two. I had never fallen on this trick in competition so this was a great disappointment. When I got my score of 1360, I knew I had done a good hands run and was on my way to a PB if I stood up my toeholds. Only my last trick was ‘ no credit’, it was disapproved by 3 out of 5 judges. This, along with getting over some competition nerves, is something to work on for the next competition. With this score I was last, and didn’t get the top 10 space I was aiming for and which would’ve been well within reach.

Finally on Friday as well was jump. Here I felt much less pressure, even though in all disciplines I was skiing for my own PB and not

per se for the competition. Most likely it is because you have three jumps, whereas if you fall in tricks or slalom, it’s over. My first jump was 21.9m, my second jump was also 21.9m, which was so bizarre, I thought the measuring system was lagging. After some tips for the third jump I tried to focus on them and because of that went very early. When you are early, you have to slow down before the ramp, which means all the built up speed is essentially lost. This jump was less far, so 21.9m is my jump score, which got me 9^th place.

Even though there were not many in the #teamNL, everyone was watching live stream and staying in contact through every social media there is!

Overall the main idea is that I need more competition experience to be able to deal with the nerves that I was feeling. I am upset that I did not ski a PB or even close to what I wanted in slalom and tricks especially. However, I am very motivated to go back and train hard and do more competitions. New PBs will be set soon!

Arrived in Norway!

This week, or to be precise, Friday night, I arrived in Norway with my parents. It was a long drive that started Friday morning at 3 am. I have my drivers license, but I’m only allowed to drive with a more experienced driver and only in the Netherlands until I’m 18. To still drive part of the 1400kms I drove from our house to the German boarder. This was a fun new experience to drive this early in the morning. After I did my half hour, my parents had to drive the rest and I slept for more than half of the drive. At around 7 at night we arrived at our cabin, which is a really cool cabin, luckily since we will spend our holiday here for 2 weeks, not just for the Europeans. 

On Saturday we had some time to

explore the area and do some groceries. Whilst doing groceries I ran into a really cool poster. There was a banner of the Europeans at the square where the shops were. It's not a big town where we are, so it's cool to see that this event is really alive.

For Sunday I had a training set on the lake to get used to the area and this also helps me get rid of some nerves. Even though it wasn't very busy and there was almost no one else training, my set was at 9 am, so Saturday I went to bed pretty early, especially since Friday was a weird and tiring day. This was for a good cause, because in the training set I immediately ran my first 3 passes, which I was really happy with, because this is already more than I managed to do at nationals. These trainings sets are per 15 minutes, but 15 minutes is quite long to be training just one event, especially just before competition. Therefore I decided together with the national coach to change from slalom to tricks after 4-5 runs. There was not much time in between, because every training minute is rather expensive. This is the first time I switched from slalom to tricks this fast and it felt really weird to suddenly be going half the speed on a ski half the size. Even though I needed a bit of time to adjust, I did my run without falling the first time. This gave a lot of confidence for the competition. The only thing is that I felt as if I did my run really slow, but this turned out to not be the case, so that was probably because the boat and movements are much slower than in slalom. In my jump training I had to get a bit used to all the buoys that were in the area, but after the first jump I understood the timing and I could work on building confidence before and on the ramp.

Since the trainings sets went really well, I have more confidence in the competition. This helps to get rid of some nerves. This is necessary since I am not here with a big team. The Dutch delegation is just me and one skier in the disabled Europeans. Contrary to last year, where there were more people and also my age. Since we did many other things together too, there was less focus on the competition. Now I feel more

pressure of the competition, so it is good to gain some confidence in skiing. We also went to do some sight seeing in the area, because Norway is really beautiful, and we want to have the feeling that we are in fact on holiday. This also helped in the distractions a bit. 

I'm very excited for the competition, where I am aiming for new PBs in all disciplines!

National champion overall

Looking back at nationals today definitely comes with some mixed feelings. In the training on Saturday, it was clear that the water conditions were quite difficult. Due to a high level of the water, backwash was a huge problem. This means that the waves the boat makes, come back into the course when you want to start your next run. After the boat has been going for a while, the water is very difficult to ski on. In my first time slaloming, I did 5 bouys at the 16 meter line, where I should have done all 6. Since the conditions were very tough, this did get me the title of national champion for the under 21 women.

Crowned national champion by my mom

The second time in slalom I was expecting to run 16, since I was so close last time. Instead of this, the wind started blowing really hard and very inconsistently. This makes it hard to compensate for the wind whilst skiing. I skied very far under my personal best, I was so disappointed that I didn’t even realise how many bouys I had at the 18 meter line. After me, my biggest competition skied, she also couldn’t pass the 18 meter line, but we both didn’t know how many bouys we had. It turns out that we skied exactly the same, which means we had to ski a tie-break, because there has to be one national champion. In the tie brake we both still had trouble running the 18 meter line, since we both made the same mistake at bouy 6. This makes it hard to get to the end gate. We both tried to go through, but she got through and I just missed it, making her the national champion of the open women. In the training on Saturday, I felt good about my tricks, I also timed my runs to make sure they were within the 20 seconds that they are allowed. I was confident and slightly nervous for my tricks in the under 21 category. This is because I was far ahead of my competition due to my slalom results. I am not able to beat her in jump just yet, so I needed to put up a good trick score. I did a good first run, but fell at my last two tricks. Then when I went on the boat to change my ski for the next run, I felt a cramp in my right foot. I tried to stretch it out on the boat and continued for my toehold pass. Just a couple of tricks into my toehold pass, my left foot completely cramped up and I tried to continue skiing, but the pain and distraction were too much and I fell. My score in tricks compared to last year is still quite good, but it is far below what I wanted and should have tricked. The same happened in the tricks for the open women category, but now it was even worse. I couldn’t finish my runs and had to accept a score in the 2200. For the jump I tried to not be bothered by what happened in slalom and tricks and just focus on what I could still do. In the category under 21, I jumped a new pb  of 23 meters, which is 2 meters under my goal, but I’m still very happy with it. When it was time to jump for the open category I was exhausted and couldn’t put the power into the jump that I would’ve liked. Still I jumped as far and further as my new pb from last week, so I am consistently improving. In the end I am the new national champion in slalom and overall in the under 21 women and got second in all other disciplines in under 21 and open women. It leaves room for improvement in titles next year and hopefully in results at the under 21 European and African Championship, which is the next competition!