Jumping Journal: July 12, 2007

One away for Lebanon.  Next month marks the big 120, err 10 straight years of year round ski jumping.  Okay, so it will also mark my 80th consecutive month, but whose counting.

 

After a week of rain, 9+ inches of rain fell in parts of Vermont between Monday and Wednesday this week, the weather finally turned nice and sunny today and the temperatures were actually pretty decent as well, no 85-90 like it had been during the first part of the week.

 

I arrived at the hill to find that only Cannonball was there.  It turns out everyone else decided not to jump, some wanted to go run whitewater instead, boo---hiss.  I guess they have forgotten that you can't get any better at jumping by going and paddling whitewater.  I won't mention any names though, LOL!!!

 

After talking with Cannonball for a while I changed clothes and walked up the jump.  I didn't have anybody to soap down the track for me and I decided that I could just jump harder if I wanted to earn the distance instead of having it handed to me.

 

The first wasn't bad given the lack of soap but Cannonball did point that I was riding high on the inrun.  I hadn't even realized it.

 

On the second jump I started to change the inrun position and noticed that more than likely I have been riding high all summer so far.  The change in position didn't quite seem natural at first, to say the least.  Changing the position caused me to jump late and on jump three and four I ended up mostly working on trying to get back down into the normal inrun position and get the timing down.  I was getting down into the position by the fourth jump but the timing was still off and I wasn't doing the best of job at cocking my ankles.

 

Jump five turned out to the best jump of the evening and maybe the best of the summer, if not even longer than that.  I had the nice inrun position and managed to get the timing down and ended up going around 16 meters without the aid of soap.  I could only imagine what the distance would have been with the help of soap.  There's always next time I guess.

 

Crash