All right I am sorry for not posting anything for the last eight months, and I don't really have a defence as to why since I cant rightfully count sloth as a valid reason. Allot has gone on in those eight months and I will try to cover everything but I may just condense some of it.
So we left off with the World Cup events in Panorama in early December which turned out pretty good and me being sick just before the team was to go to Copper Colorado and to make things short, it didn't go very well in Colorado and that is about all that I am going to say about that, since I don't want to rehash a bunch of bad results.
But on to the Good. After Copper we focused on a bunch of training in order for people to get ready for the Paralympics in Sochi Russia to which I was not sure if I would be going based on my poor performance in Copper. But I put all that behind me and focused on the speed training that we were doing in Nakiska and Panorama over the span of about a month. It was also at these training camps the I was graced with the information and the overwhelming privilege with knowing that I would be following the CPAST team on their entire World Cup Circuit and would also be representing Canada and the RoosterTeeth Community in Sochi at the 2014 Paralympic Winter Games. Now to put this into perspective only about 1% of people who ever enter into completive sport and actually make it to a World Cup level actually get a chance to participate in a Paralympic or Olympic games. And to thing that I would get the chance to embark on a for lack of a better word "Adventure" like going to the Paralympics seems unfathomable, and go I very much did. But not before some other nifty things occurred.
So now we find ourself on New Years Day, enter 2014. I am on a plane to Germany where we will then drive to Austria to a town by the name of Kirchberg Austria which is a quaint little skiing town in a low lying valley where we trained a bit of SL and GS for about a week which was nice and relaxing before the World Cup Finals which were to be held in in Tarvisio, another slightly larger skiing town on the Italy side of the Austria/Italy/Slovenia boarder. The races consisted of two Downhill and two one Super G and one Super Combined race. Now to be true to how the rest of this race series and season played out I need to mention like I have before in other journal posts that I was going through skis like toothpicks, which I was not happy about for obvious cost reasons, so Rossignol if you are reading this I love your gear and what not but it doesn't hold up if your a 200 pound sit skier. Anyway I'm getting a little off target. So in Downhill races you actually do training runs a few days before on the exact run and course set that you will be competing on for safety reasons, and my first run on the course I took it easy as allot of people do in order to feel things out especially because I knew that the surface at the bottom of the track was going to be rough and bumpy, but I still managed to flatten the ski I was using, which by this point was no big deal for me. The next day for training run number two I decide to go all out and see what is possible, bad idea. Everything went well until the very end of the course where it was rough I was going so fast and it was so bumpy that I when I hit the micro terrain with about four turns to go in the course that I separated the bottom from the top of the ski to the point where when we watched the video later that night you can distinctly hear the ski snapping where it sounds like someone taking a large stick and breaking it over there knee and when the video is slowed down you can actually see through the middle of the ski as it breaks and separates, but I still finished that run , yay me. The races went good and not so good but not bad. The first Downhill I finished 5th out, a second and a bit behind first, and in the second DH run I had a similar situation to my second training run but and ended up 10th, the Super-G I was 5th again, and unfortunately I did not finish the Super Combined (hey these things happen, I'll figure it out one of these days). So all in all these races were pretty good and I was a happy camper.
The next stop was back to Germany to spend three days in Munich or München as the locals call it to relax and unwind before heading to Sochi for the "Big Show". Any way not to get into to much detail it was allot of fun, and as a result I took it easy for the third day and rested and slept, it took a good three days for my knees to stop hurting, I can confidently say that was the most walking that I did since I broke my back and my knees sucked to begin with, good thing I use a sit ski.
The next stop was Sochi Russia for the 2014 Paralympic Winter Games, which since this post is getting a bit long and I want to think a bit more as to what exactly I want to say I will continue this later, just hopefully not in another eight months, just kidding.
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