Ciao from Cervina Italy, where the expressos are 1 euro and diesel only costs 1.80 euro/liter.
One thing about organizing and budgeting your team’s expenses yourself is that you become a lot more aware of the price differences between countries! Stef and I have gotten quite good as being as thrifty as possible when we can (we spent $350 on groceries for the four of us for a week of breakfast lunch and dinner), but some things like housing, gas, and training fees are simply out of our control. Luckily Europe is actually much cheaper to train than the US!
Yesterday was our first day skiing in Zermatt for what was supposed to be the official World Cup training on the downhill track that we will be racing on in two weeks for the FIS World Cup Speed Opener in Zermatt/Cervinia. This is the first year that this race is happening and it is the first ever cross border World Cup, which is very exciting. It will start in Zermatt, Switzerland and end in Cervinia, Italy. Unfortunately there isn’t enough snow for us to ski down the actual race track right now. So instead we skied on the very top of the dh run, where the men will start. So we won’t be racing the section we trained on, but it was still a really good and productive day. We trained with the Italian World Cup team and one US team member (Breezy Johnson) and one Canadian (Marie Michele Gagnon).
I definitely noticed some big progress in my downhill skiing yesterday after all the hard work in Chile. I felt like I was able to really charge and attack and put together a couple good turns on about half of the runs, and then I started to overthink the course and forgot to think about my actual skiing which made me quite slow. I think this happens to me in dh training runs as well (the more runs I get on the course the more I think about perfecting the line instead of remembering to think about the actual skiing), so it was a good learning lesson for me.
It’s extremely hard to get downhill training at this time in the season because there isn’t enough snow anywhere to run a full downhill course, which is why there has never been a World Cup speed race this early in the season. But its very good for the exposure of the sport and media viewings to have early season races, which is why they are making a really big push to try to get the race off this early in the season.
Another variable that makes early season races hard to prep for is the weather, which is is notoriously bad in Europe in October. We were quite fortunate with a week of mostly sunshine and only a little bit of wind in Saas Fee, but unfortunately our luck has run out. Today which was supposed to be our second of four official dh training days was cancelled due to wind, and a big storm is rolling through which means the next days are almost for sure going to be cancelled too.
One of the bonus’s of being an Independent Athlete is that you are totally in control of your own schedule, and can usually make last minute changes when you need to pretty easily. However this is a bit of a double edged sword as well because then the decision is totally in our hands! There is definitely a lot of stress on days like today when we are trying to juggle a lot of unknown variables and come up with the best plan. Our number one priority is to try to find any sort of speed training, but the weather makes that very uncertain right now so we will likely have to make a gamble of going back to Saas Fee which is only 3.5 hrs away or driving all the way to Austria, 8 hrs away for training. I will keep you posted on what we decide in the next blog :) But for now enjoy some pictures of Saas Fee and our single day in Zermatt!
Did you end up driving to Austria? Long drives between resorts in Europe.
Thanks for the update Tricia! I love looking at the beauty of where you are we sit here in the beauty of fall in the North East. Keep sharing the images. The one of Cervinia on the way back down with the tram towers reminded me of scenes from The Martian. Did you really feed four athletes for a week on $350! Or Euros! Amazing. Well done. Much love and keep getting faster - AA in 13346