Jumping Journal: January 17, 2006
Day ??. It's not easy to keep track of the number of days when they get so far apart, LOL!!! Boy has Mother Nature ever thrown one of the worst January's our way this year. December was great and now January isn't worth a crap. Warm weather and rain twice within the past week and now rain forecast for each day through Saturday except for Thursday. I guess the jumping can't get much worse, at least as long as you have snow on the ground.
Tonight seemed more normal, than again I was in the bibs. No crashes all evening long. It seemed like I was back to my good old self again, Mr. Consistency. I haven't seen that side of me except the past two Tuesdays now. It has been wild contrasts between each jump each evening. Now last Tuesday and tonight both have been that simple case of, when you've seen one jump, you've seen them all.
Admittedly, over the course of the seven jumps I took tonight each one did get a little bit better from the previous one but it wasn't the big improvement like I saw last Tuesday. I didn't notice the decent jump position tonight either. It seemed more like typical jumping for me versus "having the skis in the face" jumping that I had last Tuesday. I'm not sure what I was doing differently then as compared to tonight.
Now to play the waiting game and see when I'll be jumping next. 1-2 inches of rain foreccast for overnight into tomorrow doesn't make tomorrow sound too promising.
Crash
posted by Ryan Crawford at 11:23 PM
4 Comments:
Dude, you should really consider coming to Saint Paul for the National Master's tournament. Its winter here.
-Joe Berens (Minneapolis Ski Club)
There's several reasons why I'm not planning on going out to Masters Championships:
1. Money
2. I'm not in jumping for competition. I don't plan on competing this weekend in Lebanon at the prep meet leading up to JO's. The competitive environment takes the fun out of jumping for me. I didn't get into ski jumping to compete, I got into to ski jumping to jump and have a good time.
3. I don't have a USSA card, for my own personal safety. When jumping demons are fighting you nastily you know what to do and what not to do. I know getting a USSA is a suicide mission at the present time. I'm not about to get one when I don't have to. Since I don't compete I don't have to deal with getting a card. Also, I MIGHT be able to get away with not having the card for Masters Championships, but it would definitely be a different story come the Super Tour on Sunday. Why come out to only jump for one day. I can stay here and jump all three days over the weekend plus the extra travel days that the eastern boys will end up missing while traveling out to the Minni/St. Paul area.
By the way, I was wrong on one of my recent posts. It turns out Bill Ryan is back jumping and is hoping to get off the 50 once this crazy rain disappears and allows to get back on the hill again. I really didn't think he would be back out jumping again until the very end of the winter at the earliest.
It does sound like their will be four eastern jumpers at Masters this year, that is out of the seven Master jumpers that the east has currently.
This has been the craziest January, temperaturewise, that I have seen since I moved up here in the fall of 2000. This reminds me more of when I lived in NW Ohio as a kid. It's been very abnormally warm and ?rainy?.
Crash
Money, I know what you mean.
I understand about not wanting to compete. I love the competition and look forward to doing better than last place someday. ;)
The masters tournament at Saint Paul is not a USSA sanctioned tournament so you don't need to be a USSA member. You would need to for the Minneapolis tournament.
We hope to convince the USSA to allow master jumpers to have either a daily member ship or a lower cost alternative. The way it is now is so wrong. This is part of the problem with ski jumping I think.
Thanks for skiing,
-Joe
Heck you and Dr. John ought to hook up, LOL!!! He's your eastern equivalent. He's been jumping for 10 years and he jumps just about as far now as he did when I first met him six years ago. Granted he can only get out on the weekends since he lives 3 hours each way from the nearest jump. He doesn't like to jump on plastic so he never comes up for any summer jumping. This hinders his progress quite a bit. Him and I jump at Lebanon pretty much every weekend all winter long.
Actually, even though I know most people in this sport would kill me for saying it, I think the worst thing for this sport is competition. Read Myth #2 Debunked. I go through what I have seen wrong with ski jumping throughout the 13 part series that I wrote up earlier this month.
You do have another interesting concept with the outrageous USSA fees. The strange thing is I talked with an alpine race coach, his kids both alpine race and they also jump for Hanover High School. In alpine racing they do have one day licenses. Granted they are still something like $45 for one day. I about choked when he told me that. You look at something like the USCF(United Stated Cycling Federation) they do one day licenses, at least as of several years ago, at around $5-10/day.
Let me know your ideas on what has hurt ski jumping. I'm always interested in hearing other jumpers thoughts. You can post them here or I will also get my email address put up in my profile right after I send out this reply. I don't think I ever put it in the profile when I was forced to changed the blog address.
Crash
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