Reflection
My boot set up and canting has been a big weakness of mine for a long time. I broke my ankle when I was younger, and since then my alignment on my right side is extremely different than my alignment on my left. Another problem is that I feel like my ankle mobility changes day by day and as a result my boots always feel a little different each time I put them on.
Every year I try to work on both my ankle mobility and stability in the gym and in pt, and I try to come up with a solid boot set-up that I feel good in consistently. I try to find a balance between focusing on my skiing and focusing on the equipment, but I’ve struggled to find a solution that I am both confident and comfortable in. This has been a HUGE pain point for me in the past, and often leads to mid-season boot tweaks - which is never ideal. This has truly been my achilles heal (in my mind) and every time my boots feel a little off during training or races, it has made me feel very disappointed in myself for not doing enough in the pre season to address this weakness.
My goal for this season was to do as much testing as possible in the pre season and decide on a set up (with a couple different boot options for different conditions etc.), commit to that set-up and trust it for the entire season. I’ve made this a huge priority at every training camp so far, which I’m very proud of, but the biggest realization has been that no matter how hard I try, there will never be a perfect solution. My legs are so different, and there are so many variables in skiing, that even if I did have perfect alignment - no set up is always going to feel 100% right.
I’ve made a ton of progress on the boot front with the help of a lot of people, and I feel very confident in my set up now. But the real progress has been in accepting that sometimes you need to just be okay with knowing that you have done all you can and even though the solution isn’t perfect, you just have to go with what you have. A good lesson to carry with me this season on a number of different fronts.
Update
Tomorrow is the first training run for the women in the new Zermatt/Cervinia WC Downhill - the first cross border WC. Unfortunately I won’t be racing, as I decided with my coaches, that my time is better spent in Colorado getting high-quality full length speed training. This was a really hard decision for me because 1. I absolutely LOVE racing, and the thought of sitting out on an opportunity is really hard to swallow, and 2. I feel more prepared and ready than I ever have going into a season. But my coaches felt strongly that I would be better off for the rest of the season if I went to Copper. The Zermatt/Cervinia race also had a large chance of getting cancelled due to weather - the men were supposed to race this past weekend but only got in one training run before the other two training runs and both races were cancelled. The weather does look much better for the women this week, so fingers crossed they are able to pull off the race. (Last year both men’s and women’s races were cancelled due to lack of snow.)
It will definitely be hard to watch the races from the sidelines, especially feeling like I should be there, but I’m hoping that this sacrifice will pay dividends down the road. And as I wrote above - this block of training has been a really great opportunity to finally get my boot set up dialed!
We have been having awesome gs training in Copper already and start on the speed skis today :)
Photo Update
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P.S. A couple blogs ago I wrote about how my motto for this season is to be Hungry and Happy. I just read a great article that does a much better job explaining the premise behind my motto here. They refer to it as Driven and Happy, but I still prefer Hungry and Happy :)