Jumping Journal: March 11, 2007

Day 43.  Jumping the 25???  Compression IN the track.  Hope this turns around quickly.

 

Yep, 50 days on snow is getting closer.  After the past two weeks with cold temperatures things have started to finally warm up.  The only problem is it doesn't sound like the warm up is going to last very long.  Last week we saw all time March low temperatures being set in the area.  To give a bit of the feel from the past week, Saranac Lake, NY...just down a couple of miles down the road from the ski jumps in Lake Placid, saw an overnight low this past week of -38 F.  On Friday it saw an overnight low of -29 F with a daytime high of +31 F.  Talk about a big temperature swing.  There were several days over the past week or two that the temperatures have been well below zero overnight.  It has seemed like a very strange winter.  Right now the forecast is for the 40s tomorrow and maybe even hitting 50 on Tuesday with rain, before turning colder back down the freezing point for the rest of week, and through next weekend.  It sure doesn't sound like winter is willing to give up the fight just yet.  I'm not complaining any at all.

 

Today was going to be a quick session on the 25.  I wanted not only to try to get back use to jumping the 25 for summer jumping sake but I also knew I need to work on cocking my ankles all the time.   After a little bit of rain last night and supposedly this morning I arrived the hill under partly to mostly cloudy skies with temperatures in the lower 40s.  I suited up and had the hill to myself.  Dr. John had decided he would flag but he didn't want to jump.  I headed up for the the first jump and started to realize this was going to be an interesting day of jumping.

 

The conditions had changed quite a bit from yesterday.  The track had softened up and as I went to head down the inrun for the first jump I noticed that the track was settling in right underneath me.  It was flat out compressing under my skis.  I could hear it and feel it both as the top of the inrun.  It was a rather strange feeling to have the snow settling as you go acoss it.  Each of the first three or so jumps I noticed the crazy effect.

 

During the early jumps I wasn't doing the best job at cocking my ankles but it did get better as the afternoon progressed further along.  By the end of the twelve jumps I was doing the best thus far at cocking my ankles since the digger on the 90.  Admittedly I used to cock them much better than I was today or yesterday.  Today I did notice that I was dragging the tail of the skis the more I cocked the ankles.  The rest of the technique had suffered quite miserably.  I think most of the technique sufferage may becoming from the fact of jumping the 25 versus jumping the 50.

 

Tomorrow should give better results as I believe their is going to be a late afternoon session on the 50 depending on just warm or wet things get between now and then.

 

Crash