Mind Of A Ski Jumper: Part 4

The links to the previous parts of this series can be found at the top of the page.  In Part 1 of this series, I showed how something from my past, totally unrelated to ski jumping has affected my ski jumping from the very beginning.  In Part 2, I showed how doing something as simple as watching ski jumping made my mind fight to keep me from jumping on jumping skis.  In Part 3, I showed how a simple, very innocent, crash ended up putting me in a year long battle with the mind.  In this part I will continue where I left off in Part 3, fighting to get back on the 45-50 meter hills.

 

Little did I realize at the beginning of the summer of 2002 just how much the mind can fight you when it doesn't want something.  Trust me it can get real mean and nasty when you put it in an environment that it doesn't want to be in.

 

Right from the very beginning of the summer I could do nothing but crash.  Quite literally, I couldn't stand a jump to save my soul all summer long.  I never had one completely successful jump all summer long off the 25.  Most the time I didn't even jump the 25, I just attempted the telebump, a platform that can be raised and lowered on the landing hill of the 25 that gives jumpers a nice opportunity to work on doing teles and also gives those new to the jumping on plastic a nice way to break them in and get them comfortable before they head on up the tressel to jump the 25. It pretty much acts almost like a 10 meter jump.  I couldn't even stick most of the landings on the telebump.  I probably crashed 60 to 70 percent of the jumps I took off the telebump that summer.

 

Now to contrast this to the previous summer showed that their was something VERY definitely wrong.  The previous summer, while still on alpine skis, I had very few crashes on the 25.  By the time August came around, I wasn't crashing any at all the entire rest of the summer.  The only two things that had changed, were:

 

1. I was now on jumping skis.

2. I had taken the crash on the 48 in Lake Placid and it had been haunting me ever since.

 

Not to add insult to injure but during the summer of 2002 their was three junior jumpers that were out jumping pretty much every Sunday.  Each one of them was on the verge of leaving the 25 and heading over to the 50 the following winter.  Cannonball was constantly egging on the three boys by talking about the 50.  The more he talked about the 50, the more I crashed.  I never said anything because by that point in time I already knew that ski jumping was all about kids.  I was the big time outsider that shouldn't be out there jumping.  I just kept my mouth shut and didn't say anything.  I didn't want to spoil it for the kids.

 

It just really seems strange how I could go from jumping seven straight months without crashing to now I was at the point of being able to hardly take any jumps at all without crashing.  Cannonball at one point during the summer tried to get me to go back to the alpine skis.  I flat out ignored him altogether.  I knew what the real problem was, the mind was fighting to keep me off the 50.  If I didn't think I could jump worth a darn and if everyone elsethought the same thing then no one would want me to jump the 50 and the mind would win the battle of "trying to protect me".  Pretty much I'm fighting the same battle right now with the mind only this time the mind is trying to fight to keep me off any jump bigger than the 50.  More on that in a later Mind Of A Ski Jump, as well as in the jumping journal.

 

What I didn't realize at the time was my mind also wanted to keep me totally away from Lake Placid.  I learnt that lesson in early October.  I normally am always gone on Columbus Day Weekend, the weekend of Flaming Leaves in Lake Placid.  In 2002, it just so happened that the event that I'm normally at had been moved to a week later due to conflicts where the event was going to held.  I started thinking about finally making the trip up to Lake Placid for some "summer" jumping.  I didn't go up there at all during the '01 or '02 summer.  The talk was that they were going to have competition on the 18 during Flaming Leaves.  I decided that I would go up.  How plans change!

 

The weekend before the meet, as usual, I spent Sunday afternoon in Lebanon jumping.  Before I took the first jump off the telebump Cannonball mentioned to one of the other kids about the competition the following weekend.  I told Cannonball that I had planned on going up to the meet and jump the 18.  I took the first jump, don't remember anymore how it went.  I think I did actually stand it.  It was either on the second or third jump, maybe it was even off the 25, I took a real nasty crash.  Cannonball was still asking me if I was okay or not as I was pulling out of the parking lot 10-15 minutes later.  I definitely bruised if I didn't break a couple of ribs on the crash.  Suffice it to say, I didn't go to Lake Placid the following weekend.

 

Winter came and I almost gave up jumping during the early November through Christmas off season.  I still remember seeing the email that I received in the beginning of December announcing that they were about to start jumping the 50.  I groaned big time when I read it.

 

I finally put on the skis right after Christmas.  Normally that is when I always used to start jumping.  I would keep the monthly streak in tack by jumping December  right between Christmas and New Years.  I had vowed myself that I would give it two or three days.  If things didn't change in the first couple of day I was done ski jumping.  As I have now, in the past day or two, come to understand, when things change in this kind of fashion, you always know that it is purely another mental mind game.  Things seemed like they had changed that first day.  Dr. John and Dan Brown practically had to shove me off the 25 to get me to jump it.  I truly didn't want to.  I didn't crash any of the three jumps I took that day.

 

Then Mother Nature decided that she didn't want to cooperate with me.  I had planned to jump at the Newport meet on Saturday morning right after New Years, then in the afternoon I was going to practice on the 38 at Andover in preparation for the jump meet there on Sunday.  Friday night it snowed 18 inches and the Newport meet ended up getting cancelled as a result.  I didn't finish shoveling out my driveway until about the time the practice in Andover was to begin.  I called off jumping the rest of weekend.

 

I decided to avoid jumping at Lebanon other than on the weekends.  I knew I could stay away from the shadow of the 50 by doing most of my jumping in Newport on the weekday evenings.  Little did I realize how it was still going to follow me when I wasn't around the 50.

 

I spent most of my time jumping in January in Newport.  Very shortly after I started jumping at Newport I started noticing a rather irritating problem.  The jump would go fine, I would land it fine, but about the time I got into the transistion I was noticing that the left ski kept wanting to drift out from underneath me.  Knowing what I know now, I would say that I was putting more weight on the right leg than I was on the left leg.  I ended up having to lean way forward to try to recover and on a couple jumps during the first two weeks I ended up crashing as a result.  Sometime around the third week I had taken a couple of jumps and when I walked back up to the top of the landing hill Ron, the Sunapee High School coach, stopped me.  He brought the problem up.  He started moving around his feet trying to demonstrate what he saw going on.  The very second he put his feet into a "V" I knew exactly what was going.  The mind was trying to bring back the crash on the 48.  It was happening right in the transistion, just like the crash on the 48 and my ski were trying to spread apart on me just like they did during the crash.  I was pissed to put it modestly.  I now knew what was going on.  The funny thing though was once I realized what was happening, it stopped occuring and has never happened since then.

 

Another interesting problem came up when jumping the 25 in Lebanon.  I had been avoiding Lebanon to try to keep from crashing, aka jumping in the shadow of the 50.  On the weekend I pretty much had no other choice but to jump the 25.  It was third or fourth week of Janaury when I finally realized another issue that was going on.  I had been crashing quite often when jumping the 25.  Hence why I was avoiding it.  One day I was jumping it and ended up crashing.  I didn't think much of it, other than the fact that my sore body was doing nothing more than getting more and more black and blue with each crash.  I took another jump that went fine.  Then on the next jump I crashed again.  I noticed something very strange though.  That crash and the one before it were identical.  In every way, shape, form, kind and color, they were identical crashes.  I knew this was extremely weird, and very unlikely that this would happen.  I started watching and noticing that all the crashes were the same.

 

One evening a couple of weeks later I was jumping at Lebanon and I had taken a couple of jumps that had went pretty decent.  I took another jump and I crashed it, yep identical crash.  I walked back up the the stairs to the takeoff.  The assistant coach made the comment to me, "You look great at the takeoff, you look great in the air, you look great when you land, and then boom, you fall over for no reason at all".  It didn't sink in until I got to the top of the inrun.  I finally realized what had been going on.  The mind was intentionally making me crash.  It wasn't going to let me look good while any of the coaches was around.  Of course not, it didn't want them to send me over to the 50 and it definitely wasn't going to allow me to think I was capable of jumping the 50 either.

 

The whole period of battling with the mind lasted for 51 weeks before it finally came to an "end".  I'll take a look at the "end" next time.

 

Until next time

Keep the ski tips up,

Crash