Normally by now my instagram feed would have pictures of blue bird skies over the Austrian alps and I would be choking down schnitzel on the daily. However, that is not the case; if you’ve been living under a rock or somewhere deep in the woods then you might not have heard that most of Europe has almost no snow! So instead of attending grass skiing world championships we decided to stay in Canada and stick to what we know!
Other than not crossing the Atlantic our plans didn’t change, get as much high intensity training and racing in as possible before the end of the month! (Based on how tired my legs are, I think we did a pretty good job.)
Our “Mega Road Trip” started out by heading to Whistler for some training but on arrival the snow was worse than forecasted and we quickly doubled back to Sun Peaks. From there we ventured further East, to Banff, for the first races of 2014. I was quite happy with this race series as things started to fall into place; I walked away with a win in the GS and second place finish in the slalom. This was also my first ever FIS win so I was very pumped about finally catching the elusive “W”.
From Banff we headed to Panorama for a week of training capped off with four days of racing. It was a tough week for me and I struggled to finish training runs, letting my head get in the way and over complicating the process of my skiing. Thats ski racing though and you just have to keep on pushing and trust that it will come along.
The last day of racing felt normal again and both my runs had patches of brilliance in them, especially my last run, pushed hard top to bottom and just got caught up in the last hairpin which killed any chance of a podium. This past week definitely put some fuel on the fire so excited to see what I can do with it!
All for now! Headed to Quebec and Vermont for the month of February so look for a couple updates in the next little while.
-Dominic
Thanks to Derek and Kali for the Action Shots!
