Here it is! Finally… A redo of my Winter Park Intro that got deleted.
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This morning it was really overcast, so I thought it would be a nice day of riding. …Until it started raining.
Last weekend was my first BC cup race. We drove three hours from Silverstar to Sun Peaks on Saturday morning to practice riding the course to prepare for the race. We got our passes, registered and hopped on the chairlift. I was surprized at what I saw on the top of the mountain. I had to wait in line again. Not only to get on the chairlift, but to get on the race course. Only one person at a time go and with around 175 people, it took quite a while. We probably waited at the top for around half an hour before getting our first run in.
The course was a lot faster than I expected and was mostly straight with a few ruffed up berms. It was in pretty good condition the first day and I rode it only three times to make sure that my hands were fine for the next day. Sunday, the day of the race, I rode the course twice and I was surprised on how much it had gotten beaten up. It was time to race. I went up to the top right after Caleb who raced forty minutes ahead of me. Unfortunetly, there was a huge delay after someone crashed pretty badly on the course and everything was held up for almost an hour. The bugs were horrible.
Finaly it was my time to go. Everything was going fine and I noticed that the course was even more beaten up than when I had ridden it a few hours before. I noticed this especially when I crashed from hitting a deep hole that wasn’t there before. As soon as that happened I knew I had no chance of winning, but I tried as quickly as I could to find my bike and continue. The rest of the course was slow going for me because my handlebars and breaks were slippery because of all the dust and dirt that got on them when I crashed. I made it down, and was disappointed when I heard that I was in 4th place. I ended up being 17th, 43 seconds slower than the fastest racer in my category. I may not have gotten first if I wouldn’t have crashed, but I certainly would have been a lot happier being in the top 5. Oh, well. Hopefully the race here in Silverstar will go better!
Over the last 3 weekends, I’ve been taking an NSL course so I can be a lifeguard. I took it at the university and the guy who taught it was the pool director there. The first two days were a lot of swimming and some first aid. It wasn’t too hard, but definitely challenging. The second weekend was all first aid and learning how the pool works with all the chemicals and the behind the scene functions at the pool. We didn’t even get in the pool. The third weekend was pretty much all swimming. We did fitness tests, scenarios and some more first aid. In the end, I thought it was easy. I knew my first aid and knew what I had to do, so I passed without a problem.
Right now we’re in Silver Star BC in a condo right on the mountain. I rained pretty much all day yesterday but today it’s nice and sunny. I haven’t been able to bike yet because of my collarbone, but I should be able to pretty soon. Here are some pictures of the village on the mountain.
This is what we see when we step out of the condo.
When we walk down the path a little bit. See more of the village.
A Bit farther down the path.
This is where you can start to see the biking trails starting. You have to take a trail down to the chairlift to go up. The chairlift is lower down the mountain than the rest of the village. The one in the background is for hiking.
Here is more of the village. Quite colorful I must say.
It’s hard not being able to ride when Caleb and Dad can. I should be good to go within the next few days, but it’ll still be painful for a while. Advil up!!
Yesterday I broke my collarbone biking. You can see how in the video that I have provided in the bottom of this post. But for now you will have to read my explanation. HA! My friends and I went biking one day and he knew of this drop in the river valley near rundle park. We went and looked at it and I thought it was pretty crazy, but I didn’t do it because I had the wrong bike. A few days later I came back with the right bike and after a few (about 20) run-ins, I finally did it. I came up a little too short and bottomed out on my rear suspension, but other than that it was ok. I did it again, but this time I nailed it. Feeling accomplished, we went and rode some other stuff. Yesterday, I wanted to hit it again, so when I got there, I did some more run-ins, and realized it was pretty windy. I’ve had experience with windy jumps and although I’ve come close, I’ve never crashed because of wind up until this point. This drop was one of the biggest free falling drop that I’ve done and it was out in the open so I was exposed to a lot of wind. I timed it to where I thought it had died down a little and started to gain speed for it but right as I was about to take off, I could feel the wind pick up again. When I was in the air, I was blown a little bit to the left and landed on the side of the landing. That caused me to try and correct but I ended up turning too much and went off the trail and almost hit a tree. I was still trying to control myself in the long grass, but I hit something which caused me to go flying off and shoulder-plant into the ground. As I was laying there and trying to answer caleb’s silly questions and comments (“Oh sure, blame it on the wind…”) I realized that I couldn’t bend my knee that easily. I got up and tried moving around and realized that my right collarbone was sticking out more than usual. It hurt a bit, but I was more concerned with my knee. We pushed back up the hill and met a friend at the top and talked for a while before going home. My knee was working fine, so I started to wonder about my shoulder. It hurt quite a bit from just riding home and once we got there, my dad said it was broken and that we should go to the doctor. Long story short, we got it X-rayed and put a sling on it and now I’m just waiting for it to heal so I can go biking!
Here’s the video.
This is how you should do it.
This is how you shouldn’t do it.
This is what I look like now…
This is called a “Scrum”. Where the players bind together and the two teams engage for a rough battle for possession of the ball.
This is a called a “line out”. This happens if the ball goes out of bounds. The two teams lift one of their team members (on my team it’s me) to catch the ball. After I catch it, I pass it to a player on the ground to be moved back into play.
Here is me running with the ball about to go into contact. After I got past the first few guys I had a clear run to the goal line. But someone got in the way…
You can see that I got tackled and I dropped the ball. I didn’t even know I got hit, I thought I just dropped the ball. If you look close, you can see that the angle in which my ankle is in is not the right angle it should be. I rolled it in the game and I didn’t even realize it until that night. When adrenaline gets going, you don’t feel anything.
On January 29 and 30th we went to Castle Mountain to go skiing with some friends. It had rained the day before and the bottom of the mountain was a bit slippery, but at the top there was powder. We were used to skiing on ice at Sunridge, so skiing on powder took a little longer to get used to. After I got the hang of it, it was amazing! The second night it snowed two inches and continued to snow throughout the day, so there was a lot of powder. That was definitely the best time I’ve had skiing and I hope we go again next year.