It’s been another busy few days for me but I’ve rounded-up an eventful long weekend below:
Saturday 23rd – Terminal 5 again – third time lucky! Having had to cancel my flight for earlier in the week as I wasn’t going to Zweisimmen, I had booked a flight from London City which tied in nicely with the rest of the team from school arriving from Luton. BA decided to cancel it. So I had to try again with a flight from Heathrow which gave me 45 minutes from when my flight landed to get on the train to Meiringen. This being Zurich, I knew that things would run like clockwork, so I just trusted that BA would do their bit. Luckily everything worked out fine, and I made my train.
Sunday 24th – Had a morning of free skiing before the International Schoolboys Parallel Slalom. This is always a really fun race with each school putting in teams of four. We had a really strong team and cruised through the first few rounds and found ourselves in the quarter-finals and had high hopes of making though further. Sadly a crash from our first skier put paid to that so we were out which was a real shame.
Monday 25th – GS day, one that I was really looking forward to given the training that I was doing just before Christmas. The weather wasn’t too bad either. I can’t believe what a mess I made of my first run, I came to a complete stop at one point and had to pole like mad to get going again. Somehow I was lying in seventh place overall and second in my age group. I had a fantastic second run down a lovely open course. I put in the second fastest run and pulled up to fourth overall, only missing out on third place by 0.15sec. More importantly I was awarded the Viceroy Cup as the winner of my age group – a good day!
Tuesday 26th – What horrible weather, it was a complete white out, I am glad that it was slalom rather than GS, otherwise it would have been cancelled. First run was going really well until four gates from the end when I straddled a gate, I hiked back up and got back in the course, but lost a lot of valuable time. What was worse was that I climbed up one gate too far, so wasted even more time than ever. My second run was equally fast and I made no major mistakes, and posted the third fastest time, but that wasn’t enough to put me on the podium, sadly I finished fourth in my age group and eleventh overall which wasn’t great.
So now back to school for another exam on Thursday, now what can I remember about ideal gases……?!
I am now really looking forward to going back out to Bormio in February and racing in the English Championships which will mean five races in five days, that is going to be hard work!