Jumping Journal: January 04, 2005

The start of another high school jumping season.  Normally, I end up taking two or three jumps with the kids while they practice.  I try to get to the hill early and grab a few jumps until the tressel starts to get crowded.  Once everyone gets there I head inside and warm up and wait for the competition to start.  I can already see that the first part of this year is already going to be rather different than the past several years.

 

One big difference is that all the high school coaches got fed up with having 60-70 kids per meet.  It would typically take an 1-1.5 hours to get through the meet.  The meets were just too long and the markers, coaches, judges, etc were all getting a little tired of such long meets.

 

When I first moved up here theirwas two separate divisions.  One division jumped the smaller hills, 25m and smaller, the other division would go up to 35m hills.  Back in, if I remember correctly, 2003, they merged the divisions into one and everybody would jump on hills up to 35m.  Instead of having 30-35 jumpers at each meet now they had 60-70 jumpers at each meet.  I've spent many Wednesday evenings freezing my butt off trying to stay warm while watching and videoing the meets.

 

This year they kept the one division concept but decided to have two meets each week and go back to having smaller meets, at least until the pre-state and state meet in early-mid February.  Tonight I came to realize that my Wednesday evening jumping may take a noticeable change.  I may very well end up getting a few more jumps than normal this January on Wednesday evenings.

 

The high school was finished in 33 minutes.  All the coaches were commenting about how quick it went, none of them could ever remember a meet going by so fast.  I've been going to the meets since 2001 and I don't ever remember a meet that went by that fast.  I didn't have gloves on, and my hands didn't get cold.  All in all it was one of the strangest high school meets I've attended.

 

Tonight started out pretty decent.  I decided that I had enough and have started to think about doing something in several days that I hadn't planned on doing.  Granted, I knew thinking this very thought would trigger my mind, I just didn't really know which way it would trigger it.  I knew within a jump or two I would be able to tell which way things were going to go.

 

I took the first jump.  It was quite different from last night.  A nice smooth jump off the 25 at Storrs Hill.  It appeared things were changing for the better, then again what else should I have expected.  The mind is just trying to cooperate real nice like to make me forget about what it's up to.  I don't believe a second of it.

 

The second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh jumps were all better as well.  I think I only took seven jumps but I may have had an eighth jump.  I kinda lost count after five.  I'm just not use to getting so many jumps with the high school kids around.  I'm still trying to figure out if it's the longer skis or some difference in my technique.  I am noticing something different about the jumps, I definitely can't explain it.

 

Knowing my mindset, tomorrow evening should be real interesting.

 

Crash