Jumping Journal: July 27, 2009

Summer has finally arrived.  At least it sure has felt like for the past week or so now.

 

Gee, the temperatures have finally made it up into the 80's for several days over the past week now.  The humidity has pretty much matched the temperature and it has made for some of the muggiest conditions I have seen in a long time.  I'm not use to this kind of weather in New Hampshire.  I don't normally think of breaking a sweat at 8AM in the morning but I have been breaking a sweat each day for the past week quite early in the morning.  Definitely not normal, but I guess I can't complain too much...at least we are going to see something that kinda resembles summer before fall starts to make it presence known in a couple more weeks.

 

I arrived at Storrs Hill shortly after 6PM and found to my surprise that some of the high school kids were out.  I didn't figure these kids in particular I would see again until the start of the school year if not the start of winter.  They surprised me quite big time.  It isn't normal to see high school kids have the motivation to come out and jump once the school year is over.  This year things seem to be quite a bit different.

 

I walked into the lodge to change into jumping clothes and I saw my second surprise.  Rusty Dan was going to jump tonight.  I haven't seen him jump at all this summer.  Rusty is a term we give to anybody that hasn't jumped in a while, typically anyone that you have jumped more recently than they have can be called Rusty.

 

The night ended up with Colin, Dan and I as the adults out jumping and three high school kids were out jumping from two different schools.  Quite a nice sized fleet for the toasty warm/humid evening.

 

I headed up for my first jump and Dan had already soaped up so I knew I could just ride the inrun much quicker thanks to his soap job.  The first jump both surprised me and didn't surprise me.  I knew with the soap on the inrun that I would definitely go further than I had been in the past couple of jump sessions.  The fact that I went from typically jumping 13-15 meters the past couple of sessions to jumping 17 meters on the first jump tonight still caught me off guard though.

 

The second jump was about the same but I started to notice I was doing one thing that I wanted to do a little work on.  I wanted to look to the bottom of the hill instead of down between the skis.  Since I have been having all the trouble all season long with crashing I haven't even thought anything about trying to keep the eyes/head up.  I did spend the rest of the night working on keeping the eyes looking to the bottom of the hill and it did for some unusual jumps.  I'm still not fully use to not looking between the skis.

 

After the fourth or fifth jump I watched as Colin came down and took a jump.  Colin started jumping about a month or so ago.  He's 28 years old.  I think this was either his third or fourth time he's been jumping.  I was amazed at his jumping.  He was jumping better than anyone else tonight.  He was landing most of his jumps around 18-20 meters.  He is jumping with alpine boots, jumping skis/bindings.  At least I think he is still wearing alpine boots.  He reminds me of a jumper from several years back, Wes Wilson, who came out and started jumping and 6 weeks later he was already jumping the K90's.  Colin reminds me of him all over again.  He is picking up the sport very fast.

 

On my fifth jump I noticed that I wasn't cocking the ankles.  I decided to correct that on the final two jumps of the evening.  After wiping sweat from my forehead, like I did all evening long I managed to keep the ankles cocked for both of the final two jumps of the evening.

 

Not bad to have 7 jumps in quick fashion in the 7th month of the year.  I had thought about taking another jump or two but decided not to.  I was already sweating up a storm and decided I wanted to dry off.

 

Hopefully the weather will cool down a little before next week gets here.  It would be nice.

 

Crash