Jumping Journal: February 19, 2008

Not the straightest track I've ever skied on.  Granted a couple of real nice 'saves' to say the least.

 

After the nice warm day yesterday, hi 52 with a little bit of rain but not enough to do any major damage to the jumps, today cooled down and at first, daybreak, it appeared it was going to be a nice day.  By 10AM the clouds had moved in and so had the snow.  Snow squals kept moving through at my house until I left for Lebanon.  Since this is high school winter break the hill is open for regular skiing this week from noon-4PM.  I'm helping with the lift so I left home about 11:15AM.  On the drive up to Lebanon I ran into some real nice snow squals.  The weird part came when I got about 4 miles from the hill the snow stopped and the pavement was bone dry.  Everywhere east of there had received snow but Lebanon hadn't seen any of it.

 

The sun poked it's head in and out of the clouds all afternoon.  A few flakes of snow fell but you had to be paying attention or you would have missed them.

 

After the hill closed I walked over to the jump and helped Cannonball get the trackcutter setup so he could cut a new track on the inrun.  As he finished off getting it prepared I knocked the ice of the stairs on the tressel.  The bottom 1/3rd of the stairs were nothing but ice, the top 2/3rds were pretty much bone dry...STRANGE.

 

As I was finishing up the stairs I could hear the alpine race was getting underway on the ski hill.  I went over and watched a few minutes of the race while waiting for anyone else to show up to jump with.  Supposedly Dan and Cannonball was going to be helping with the lift during the race, but that turned out not to be the case.  Nick showed up and I saw a kid go walking off toward the jump inn with his skis.

 

I headed on over and suited up.  I made my way on up the jump.  Dan decided to go from the top bar rather than from house.  Cannonball tried to scare him from going from house.  I looked at the track going right up to house and said the heck with it.  I didn't look at the snow pile in house just the track going from house down the inrun.  I removed the bar and it got away from me and went down the inrun.  Fortunately it stopped on the stairs about where the stairs come up from the landing hill.

 

I went to put my skis on and quickly saw why Dan went from top bar.  The snow was extremely uneven in the house.  It made standing/turning around in house rather awkward.  I finally got into the track and noticed it was the usual backward sloping track, err trying to slide you off the back of the jump rather than down the inrun.

 

I got the signal and ended up sitting on my heels on the first and second jumps.  Neither of them went much further than 32-33 meters.  I come to realize the track Cannonball cut wasn't the straightest to say the least.  On the first jump I really noticed a couple of wobbles in the track. The second jump I had a nice save as I came WAY out of the track with the right ski but I stuck to the inrun position and pulled it right back in and managed to have a nice jump anyways.

 

I finally stopped letting the arms drop on the arm.  They were causing all the problems to start with.  I was managing to keep the butt as well, since I wasn't letting the arms drop.  I was staying in the track a lot easier.  Now if I could get myself to jump.  So far I still wasn't going over 35 meters.

 

The third, fourth, fifth, sixth, heck even into the seventh jumps I was mostly working on the inrun position and trying to get it completely back into form and still ride the inrun, with the wobbly track, and keep myself from reacting to track conditions.  By the sixth and seventh jumps I was also working on trying to jump on time.

 

On the eighth jump I had a rather unusual landing.  The jump was nice and smooth.  The timing was the best of the night, by far, but the landing...  It felt like the very tip of the ski was the first thing to hit the snow.  It didn't appear to me that I had uncocked the ankles but it seemed like I was about to dig the tip into the snow.  It didn't happen but it was the weirdest experience I've had in all the jumps I've ever taken.

 

I was starting to get below the bows at 35 meters so I'm guessing I was getting down toe 36-36.5 meters on a couple of the latter jumps of the evening.  After the nicely timed eighth jump I went back to jumping late and not getting the full power at the takeoff.  Admittedly, jumps nine and ten weren't all that late.  The eleventh and final jump of the evening was noticably late.

 

Toward the end of the session my technique was starting to come back as well.  I'm still bent at the waist, something I have never figured out how to overcome.  Other than that everything seemed like it was going pretty well tonight.  I do need to keep the ankles cocked all the way into the hill.

 

Don't know if I'll jump tomorrow or not.  I may have two opportunities.  I'm going to have to wait and see if either one of them materializes or not.

 

Crash