Filling in what has happened since New Zealand

  Ok so allot has happened since New Zealand some good and some bad but mostly good and the bad only really pertains to equipment and the such, also some DNF's can get lumped in there also but I will get to those. New Zealand finished off with a series of races the most notable being a World Cup slalom (my first ever World Cup by the way) in which I placed 3rd.  The last race in NZ was a Super G in which I placed 4th again not to bad for my first ever stab at the World Cup circuit.

After that I was off to Saas-Fee Switzerland for about 3 weeks for a bunch of training. It was a good trip and notable in the fashion that I got to spend 3 weeks in a picturesque Swiss ski town in the early fall skiing and the such on a glacier. Not much was exceedingly eventful really but it was good to do a bit more traveling and get a chance to continue to improve on my skiing skills. But the important thing on this trip was the I learned that after all of my hard work and dedication to skiing and striving to improve my skills on the hill and within each event, I was now officially an unofficial member of the CPAST team. Meaning that while officially I was still a prospect member I would be running the full team World Cup Schedule up to and including the Paralympics in Sochi Russia, provided that i met the selection and point criteria to go. 

   All of this is great but there was a bit of hardship of a sort to overcome. For a long while And still currently to a degree I was having some serious equipment issues. For example so far this season I have either completely written off or otherwise damaged 15 skis this season and at about $200-$500 per ski I can tell you it has not been a cheep season. There was a point where we were training in Panorama BC before some low level IPC races where I was going through almost one ski per day. The source of the issues that I was having is related to my center of gravity in relation to the ski, my sit ski was configured in a way that I was sitting to far back and when I was thrown out a turn I would land on the tail of the ski and because I was trying to recover from the error I would then in turn rock forward on to the tip of the ski. The result would be that when I rocked forward the force of the ski under tension would sling shot me forward even faster and would eventually pull out the heal of the binding delaminating the ski in the process. Other Issues that I have had is a tendency to not finish GS races, there have been 4 this season so far and I have only finished 1. But enough about the bad there is still some great news to be read about in this Journal entry still.

   So the last set of races I just finished was an IPC World Cup race series held in Panorama BC as a test event for the 2015 World Championships next year, which is nice because I believe I stand a fair chance to do well at those World Championships. I say that because in the Downhill event I placed 4th amongst a field of the worlds best racers, and it was my overall plan to not take any risks on this run, which meant that I was scrubbing speed in a few sections. Other races didn't go as well as that first DH went but I am chalking it up to the fact that after the DH that night I came down with a horrible sickness which sapped all of my energy, even now I don't remember much of my race runs while I was sick.

But Now I am starting to feel better although I still have a nagging cough that dose not seem to want to go away. Right now the CPAST team is in Copper Colorado at the next set of World Cup races which will comprise of two GS and two Slalom races. My goals for these races are top 8 finishes in all four maybe a bit better if I put down some real good runs. Well I do think that is all there is to tell for now and hopefully I will get to another entry in a more timely manner.