I arrived in Mammoth a few days ago for 6 days of GS training. This is the first real camp of the season for me. I skied 3 days in May but had to get back to school so I only got started on the progression. Now I am taking the drills I worked on in May and applying the concepts to some flat to moderate GS courses. Today I trained on a run that didn’t have lift access so we used a snowmobile to shuttle us to the top of the course. As it worked out, I was the only one training GS today so I had 2 coaches, my technician, a snowmobile and the course all to myself. On top of that, the snow was hard and stayed good for the whole session. I skied 10 runs of GS in 2 hours and was exhausted! It was one of the best days of training I’ve ever had.

I realized with my last post that I haven’t updated everyone in a while. After finishing the season with my best results of the year I headed straight back to school. I am now in the middle of finals week and it seems like I just got here. A couple of weeks ago I was able to get out to Park City then to Mammoth for a few days of skiing with the team to work on some basics and start to dial in my boots for next year. In Park City we had our annual spring meetings. There I learned some really exciting news. I have been named to the B-team again for next year and now I am fully funded! So after two years of injury and struggling to fund myself, I have made it back! It was even more exciting for me to learn that I have been moved up to be a full member of the World Cup team. Now I will be traveling and training with them and when the competition season starts I will stay on and race the full World Cup schedule as well! I would like to thank everyone for all the moral (and financial) support over the last couple of years. I am no longer fundraising for myself so I won’t be asking for money this year but I hope you continue to check the website and follow my progress. For my part I will try to make it as exciting as possible!

I am excited to announce this years Mens Alpine Team fundraiser at Mt. Hood, Oregon! It will be held July 19th and 20th with options to join us for either one or both days of events. A ski clinic hosted by the athletes will be on saturday followed by a banquet at night. Then on Sunday we have the Men’s Alpine Ski and Tee, dual ski race followed by a scramble golf tournament in the afternoon. You can join us for any or all of the events! I will post the official announcement soon with more information. For now contact me with questions kevski13@gmail.com

After the GS at Nationals I jumped in a truck with Andrew Weibrecht and Dave Chodounsky for the 3 hour drive back to Dartmouth. Classes started the day before we returned so it was game on right from the start. It has been a nice break from the season and good to get away from the mountain for a while. I hope everyone got a chance to see the Nationals coverage on VS. network last week. I will try and post some recent pictures of all the excitement soon.

It is the night after the SG at US Nationals and I just wanted to write a quick post. After four days of bad weather we finally got to race the SG today and I won it! I scored the best result of my life and I am National SG Champion! I am really excited and it hasn’t even really sunk it yet. Skiracing.com has some good articles on the race. It is an amazing feeling to win this title and I want to thank everybody who has helped me achieve my goals this year!

We are now in the midst of the Championship season and things have been good so far. I am in Lake Placid, New York racing at Noram Finals. We have had two SuperG’s so far and have two GS’s before we head to Sugarloaf, Maine for National Championships. I came into these SG races in the lead for the overall Noram SG title. I had a good lead but needed to ski well to maintain it. I was nervous before the first race because a lot rides on these titles. If I win the title I am awarded a start spot in World Cup SG for the entire 2008-2009 season. Incredibly, the first race ended up deciding the title for me. I won the race and took the lead by enough that nobody could catch me in the second race even if they won and I didn’t finish. That was really exciting and was a huge weight off my shoulders. The second SG went well too. I was third in that race in bumpy conditions with poor visibility. I won the title and have World Cup starts in all the SG races next year! Now I get to have some fun with these final races and push the limits and see what I can accomplish with the pressure off.

The Bend paper recently did an article about me with some cool pictures. You can see it at:

http://www.bendbulletin.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080309/SPORTS05/803090451/1013/rss

Since Canadian Nationals, a lot has happened. We finally raced the DH and SG and a Super Combined on the last day up in Whistler. I was 4th in the SG and moved up to 3rd after the Super Combined. On the same day as the SG and Super Combi, I drove back down to Portland. I didn’t get in until after midnight and flew to Park City the next day for the last stop before a long midseason break. The races in Park City were put together by the World Cup GS coach and some of the Junior team coaches. It was a special invitation-only race and the idea was to bring together some of the best Juniors in the country with a few of the best US Ski Team athletes. I raced two days of GS and a SL and I did really well. I won the first GS and was 3rd the second day and lowered my points a lot. The sun was shining and the snow was incredible for racing so it was a lot of fun. Now back to the title of the post. Because of my good results over the last couple of weeks, I have been invited to go back up to Whistler for a World Cup Super G next week! I am really excited; it will be great to go into the race skiing well and with a lot of confidence. I am taking a few days off at home right now and I drive up on Tuesday. The race will be aired Thursday on WCSN.com if you want to check it out.

Canadian Nationals is being held at Whistler on the women’s Olympic DH track. We had a couple days off after Europe then I drove up from Portland to race. The Canadian Worldcup team is here to race as well so it is a tough field. The weather has not been very cooperative so far. For the first two days we stood around at the start until 2:30 before they finally cancelled the race due to fog. Today they started the first 5 guys at 11:00 then the fog came back in and they delayed until 12:45 when they ran two more guys down half the course only to be flagged off at a bank of thick fog. Then it cleared off completely and they ran the rest of the field down the whole course. We finally got our first run down a very turny and slow DH. It felt good to get back on a race course after a lot of standing around. Hopefully the weather will cooperate for the next few days and we will race a DH and SG before we head home.

Ok this is part two of the last post except now I’m in France and we are running a more difficult DH on the World Cup hill. The big boys raced on this hill last week and we took over the course from them. This will give you an idea of how we go about analyzing the race and getting ready to go faster in the next race.
After I come through the finish I stop and check my time and ranking which is usually posted on an electronic score board. Sometimes it shows my splits and the top three. I reach down and unbuckle my boots and catch my breath. As soon as I can speak more than a few words at a time, I jump on the radio in our finish and radio to my teammates at the top to give them a course report. I will be able to tell them if there are any changes from inspection or if it runs faster or slower than previous days. Today was the first DH race in Chamonix and the only thing I told them was that it was running faster and the light was flat on the bottom because of the shadows. In a SG race it will be much more in depth because nobody has run the course before. Today we all started very close together so we hung out in the finish together talking about the run and watching to see if anybody else would come down faster. We usually drink some sports drink and eat a bunch of gummi bears/worms/cherries/frogs, right after we get down. Our technician skis down from the top with all of our clothes and training skis and talks to us about the run and how the skis felt. At this point we put our clothes back on and ski down to the van. Today we decided to jump the road that cuts across the bottom of the race hill. It is a road gap left over from the world cup and you just have to make sure that no cars are coming and go real fast and it is easily clearable. We head back to the hotel and eat lunch and rest of a couple of hours. At about 3 I got on the spin bike for a 30 minute recovery routine followed by 20 minutes of stretching and 3 sets of 5 explosive jumps. They call this “pre-race” jumps and it seems to help get the muscles prepared to race the next day. After dry land I went down and helped my technician in the wax room for a while before a shower, meeting and dinner. At the meeting we get our bibs for the next day and hear about the schedule and forecast and any general info we need to go over. We look at split times from the day and results.
Now, we just finished dinner and I walked to the local McDonalds because it seems to be the only place we can get online. After this I’m going to go back and watch video. This is really amazing how much work goes into the 15 minutes I spend watching video. We have six video placements on the hill and only two coaches. Our coaches have worked out a deal with the Brits and the Canadians so we share video and coaching responsibilities on the hill. When each coach gets back after lunch, he hooks his video camera up to the computer and “captures” the video of each athlete, labels and categorizes it. Then the other coaches come over with their hard drives and they all share the video. When I sit down to watch video I have all six sections in order and they play one after the other so I can watch my whole run. Plus, I have several of the fastest guys from other countries to compare my line to. We us a program called Dartfish with full analysis functions like slow motion, overlay and side by sides. You can time and measure distances as well. If there is a major change that needs to be made the coaches will set up side by sides with the faster guys to show where we are loosing time. All in all it is several hours of work everyday to get the video ready to go but it is our best tool to figure out how to be faster. After video I usually try to sit down and visualize the the whole course one more time with all the changes I need to make for the next day. To relax, I watch some Seinfeld and read for a bit and go to sleep around 10:30.