Lindsey Van

It has been quite a while since my last blog post. I have been doing all sorts of new, and fun things including skiing in my first Big Mountain skiing competition. The competition was held at Snowbird, and it was the World Championships of Freeskiing. It was a new and refreshing experience for me. I was able to compete in a sport I love without the pressure and expectations. It was great to compete again, I think I was missing that. It was new and fresh which was defiantly something I needed. I have been Ski Jumping competitively for 19 years, so it was time for a little change. I have always enjoyed skiing when I had time between jumping, but this year I was able to ski a lot more. It was fun to do something away from the Ski Jumping world, and get my mind off of it.
The conditions for the qualifier day at Snowbird weren’t ideal, but hey it’s a winter sport and it is what it is. The qualifier was on West Baldy at Snowbird. West being the keyword. In the spring the west facing slopes get a lot of sun, which makes the snow nice and mushy like mash potatoes. The problem is when it freezes overnight, and becomes a boiler plate come time for the competition. I skied pretty hard, but didn’t push it too much. This was my first shot at competitive skiing, so I had no expectations. The snow conditions made it rough but I qualified 2nd, and was able to compete in day 1 on Silver fox.
Silver fox is right under the tram and is a north facing slope. We had about 3 inches of new snow the night before, so that added to the north slope made the snow much more ideal. I was 2nd to run the venue. I picked a line down a chute with a mandatory cliff out at the bottom. I had no problem with the difficult top part of the line, but caught the back of my ski, and went for a rag doll. I flipped and flopped over and over again. Interesting crash, but the skis didn’t come off, so I was able to finish my run ending in 21st place. Obviously falling is not ideal for moving onto the 2nd day, so that was the end of my free skiing adventure. I did see lots of great skiing from the other women and look forward to skiing with them again next year. I had a great time doing something new and refreshing. It was something that I had wanted to do for a little time, so felt good to get it out of my system.

This entry was posted on April 11, 2010 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Ski Jumping . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.