Jumping Journal: February 17, 2008

Fat doesn't fly, LOL!!!  I guess candy bars aren't fat rather instead they are sugar.

 

Gee, Lebanon Winter Carnival must have come late this year.  Normally I see the big day of jumping at winter carnival, not this year though.

 

I arrived at the hill and found Dan and one of the high school kids already out jumping.  I suited up rather quickly and headed on out to join them.  I was hoping to get 12 jumps today so I would 230 jumps on the K50 so far this winter.  I figured I would have to grab nine jumps prior to the competition and another three jumps during the competition.  Something told me that this would probably be a real big wish but a not a reality.

 

The practice session didn't go too terribly bad.  It didn't seem like I was getting as far down the hill as I normally would have been.  Around jump seven I went back to working on keeping the shoulders up on the inrun to see if I would be able to keep from hunching the shoulders in the air.  The first attempt went smooth.  I don't know if I did keep from dropping the shoulders in the air or not but I did have a smooth jump.  The next jump was another story.

 

I would have to say the eighth jump of the day was one of the scariest/crappiest jumps I've taken thus far in the eight years I've jumped.  According the Nick I did a good job of keeping the shoulders up but I ended up dropping the hands and I let my butt drop as well.  I rode off the takeoff on my heels.  I didn't notice any of that.  I did notice that when I got into the air the body position seemed horribly wrong.  I ended up unlocking my left leg and I pretty much knew nothing good was going to come out of this mess.  I came down one ski at a time and it seemed like I might very well get away with this mess that I got myself into.  I lasted for another second or so before I lost it and fell to the ground and slid the rest of the way down the landing hill.  As I started across the bridge I noticed both skis had come off and one of the skis was dropping down into the brook while the other ski was going on up the outrun and didn't appear like I had to worry about it going into the brook.  After I stopped sliding I got up and looked over the bridge and noticed the ski just went over the edge and dropped onto the ground down by the brook but didn't actually end up in the water. I walked on up the outrun and retrieved the other ski first and then retrieved the ski by the brook last.

 

I walked back up the stairs and on my ninth and tenth jumps of the practice session I ended up trying to jump with my left hand.  I didn't fully realize it on my ninth jump but I did feel the left hand come up and I figured it was just a mental reaction/flight to safety kind of mechanism.  When I did it on the tenth jump I realized it felt like I was trying to snap with the arms.  It was a very strange feeling.

 

I ended up taking one more jump and it went better.  I called it quits and awaited the competition that was to come later on.  I walked over and watched the jumping on the K25.  While watching the competition I was also listening to the distances as they were being radioed in to Kim, who was entering the distances into the computer, I thought I heard someone's name mentioned that I knew.  I hadn't seen this particular jumper since the winter of '06.  It was a former Newport High School jumper, Renee Barnes.  It seems like she always has a way of popping up to jump when you least expect it.  Today was no different.

 

After the awards/candy bars for the small hills were past out we headed over to get the competition started on the K50.  I was planning on only fore jumping...at least until Cannonball through me a bib.  I hadn't registered for the meet so I guess I was registered whether I liked it or not.  I don't think I have seen so many high school kids in one K50 jump meet in a long time.  Maybe never that many before.  The masters class was WAY out numbered by the high school kids.

 

My three competition jumps were much shorter than what I have been jumping over the past few weeks.  I'm not sure what the deal was.  They all seemed like pretty decent jumps but I could tell that I was landing further up the hill than normal.  Turns out I was only getting down to 32-32.5 meters.  I ended up tying Dan for last/third place in the masters category.

 

All the kids decided to go back up for a couple more jumps and I followed along.  I figured why not make it 30 jumps for the weekend.  I haven't had a weekend with this many jumps since the first weekend of last winter.

 

The first of the two jumps was good but the last jump I ended up losing it in the transition and sat down riding through the outrun.  Fellow team member on Team Sticky Sticky Quack Quack(she decided to rename it already) told me that if I went back up for yet another jump I would be called Crash for the next two months.  I had to refresh her memory as to who gave me the nickname in the first place, namely me.

 

After starting out sunny this morning it had turned cloudy by the time I started jumping in practice.  The forecast is for a mixed bag changing to rain by sunrise tomorrow.  Highs for Monday are suppose to be in the mid to upper 40s.  We did cover the inrun before we left so things should be pretty much ready to jump again come Tuesday.  I'm hoping with this being vacation week for the local school kids that I might end up grabbing one or two multi-jump sessions this week.  Time shall tell.

 

Crash