Leading up to St. Johann

St. Johann, Austria

12/31/08

I had a brain fart and thought my plane out of Aspen left at 7:30am when it actually left at 7:00am. Oops! I got to the Aspen terminal 35 minutes before an international flight with 7 bags to check. I wouldn't recommend that course of action! Luckily the baggage handlers ok'd my check in and I made it on the plane and avoided a major logistical headache.

1/1/09

After spending New Year's Eve on the plane our U.S. Ski Cross team arrives in Munich. It's an easy two hour drive into Austria to a little town called Niederndorf. When we arrive we realize the organizers for the event have placed us far from the venue. What we think is a half hour drive to St. Johann turns into an hour with the traffic. There's also no place to tune. This is unacceptable to us and Tyler Shepherd, our coach, goes to work to make some changes. I spend the rest of the day doing jet lag management. I do everything I can to stay up throughout the day. Somehow I make it to ten o'clock and I'm able to sleep through the night; step 2 of jet lag management complete. The first step of course is to sleep on the plane.

1/2/09

We checked out the race hill today. We are racing in St. Johann, which is about 5 minutes from Kitzbuhel. Right away I recognize the snow is rock hard and I think to myself "we're back in Austria." It looks like this snow would be perfect for a slalom or a GS but I don't know about a skier cross.

We took a couple of runs and then checked out the course. It looks short. The top of the course is steep. The start faces perpendicular to the fall line so when we come out of the gate we go directly across the hill. We traverse across the hill through some woops. Then we traverse back across the hill and hit a big jump that takes us directly into a sweeping berm. We then hit the flats where there are a few jumps, some big berms, a lot of woops, and then a big jump into the finish. My guess is about a 40 second course. The start will be key, of course, and there might be one passing zone. It's going to be a fast and furious sprint to the line.