I woke up to my alarm blaring some upbeat song that I was not ready for at 5:30 in the morning. Yet I rolled myself out of bed, literally, and finished packing my numerous bags for the trip. After loading everything in my car and grabbing a bar for breakfast, it was off to the dark PCMR parking lot to load and leave with my team.
Fifteen minutes later we were speeding out of the parking lot with our destination no less than 12 hours away. For the first hour, the van was almost completely silent and full of sleeping teenagers. After the sun slowly rose and we started becoming conscious, Tina turned up the music. Somewhere in the twelve hour drive we stopped at a park. It had this huge slide with a ladder in the middle and two long metal slides going off both sides. It looked kind of like this...
Tina checked us in and we dropped our backpacks in our rooms. Since the Park City Ski Team was the only team to arrive a day early, we had temporary rooms with 3 other people from the team. Later we would be assigned rooms with 2 people, mostly mixing teams. Since we would only stay in these rooms for one night, no one really unpacked or anything.
Some of us changed into workout clothes for our "recovery" after sitting in a van all day. Before we met outside Cam pulled up in the Enterprise, and we all unloaded the rest of our stuff. Since my contusion still wasn't fully healed, I ended up walking behind the team while they jogged. Pretty soon I was alone walking the streets of Bend until I got to the park they jogged to and stretched with them.
After our recovery, we all got back to the hotel and settled in, going out for dinner later. Me and three other girls went to the Black Bear Diner, a restaurant literally five steps from the hotel. (I'm sure that place got incredible business during the race- all of the teams racing stayed in the same hotel). We then had a team meeting and set the load and departure times for the morning.
The next day, we woke up around 7, which is the longest I've slept in for a long time. We rode up to the mountain, got dressed in the lodge, and loaded the lift with our SG's in our hand and GS skis on. The plan was to free ski the Super G hill that we would be racing on the next two days. We ended up taking about eight runs between our GS and SG skis. We got to know the hill well, also- a couple big jumps/knolls with tons more terrain (rollers, fallaways, etc.). It also looked super fun to race on and got me excited for the next days.
After coming back to the hotel we tuned our SG's for the next day and went for another recovery. At this point my leg was a ton better, and felt pretty good while skiing on it that day. So I jogged over with the team and went through movement prep when we got there. Our coach brought a soccer ball, and you can guess what that led to. Okay, I'll tell you. We played soccer for a half an hour or so, and after a couple minor injuries we jogged back to the hotel.
Dinner was similar to the night before, and the meeting followed at eight. Departure times were earlier and the coaches threw out the bibs. I would be running 46th. Now let me explain the seeding at champs. Since each region's points vary, and could be unfair due to different race penalties, they had a certain number of spots in each seed for each division. So PNSA and Western Region could have a number of less skilled athletes running before better kids in IMD (Inter-Mountain Division, which I'm part of). Also, since IMD has a larger number of better athletes, I was running late. Hence bib 49.
The training run in Super G was a ton of fun- the set was interesting and it was nice to get a run in on the hill in gates. The snow wasn't too fast, however, and visibility was slim. I got in two inspections and ran through the course in my head as much as I could, then took a warm up run on my trainers. I was an over thinker, however, and needed to get my mind off of the race. So at the start I listened to some pump up music and did my movement prep, stripping when I was about 20 out (when bib 29 was in the gate).
The run went alright and I ended up in 29th, but it was still just a training run. The real SG race was yet to come. We undressed in the lodge, loaded the van, and drove back to the hotel. The drive was only about 30 mins one way between the hotel and mountain, which got us back to the hotel around 1. We ate lunch and did a recovery on our own, and tuned our SG skis for the race the next day.
We also packed up our stuff and moved into our new rooms. My roommate and I were lucky because our new room had already been cleaned and prepared and stuff, so we moved in right away. My other friends, however, didn't get their rooms until around seven at night.
We watched video from the training run and got some good feedback for the next day. Later we had the meeting, which just went over the schedule for the next day, since we were keeping the same bibs for the race. Rooms check were at nine and we were fast asleep by 10, anxious with anticipation of the race.
To be continued....
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