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This past weekend I competed in the BCBSA BC Championship Race up in Whistler. It was a big race for all the different levels of skeleton and bobsled to wrap up the sliding season. Provincials! We had official training on Friday night, then heats 1 & 2 on Saturday, and heats 3 & 4 on Sunday.

There were 7 of us sliding from corner 3. Our coach said we would do a consistency race since we are all different sliding levels. The person with the smallest time difference between their slowest and fastest run would win. Maybe not the best way to calculate consistency in a four heat race, since the track had quite different conditions each day, but that’s what they decided on.

Training went fine, and my first and second runs were okay. They weren’t my best runs ever by any means, but they were very consistent. I was sitting in 2nd place with a time difference of 0.12 seconds after heats 1 & 2. Unfortunately my third run was very very slow. The ice was very soft and there was snow on the track. My gap widened to ~2.5 seconds!!!! For my fourth run I just tried to slide something in that (very large) window between my first couple runs and my third run, which I did. But that 2.5 second difference put me out of the running for medals. Bummer.

Ah well, it was still fun hanging out with all the other sliders. No one crashed and everyone had a good day. All in all it was a very enjoyable race experience. I will have to wait till next year to try and get my first skele medal!!

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Last last week I was lucky enough to be able to take part of Can-Am week at the COP in Calgary. It was a week intended to give extra coaching and training to new sliders. That being said, Matt and I were definitely the most new out of everyone. Most of the other people had been sliding for a couple years and already had experience on a bunch of different tracks, or at least had a lot of experience on the Calgary track. There were a few guys from USA, a few from Ontario, a whole bunch of people from Alberta, and the four of us from BC.

The Calgary track is not near as fast as Whistler. But it does have its own challenges. The main one for us was that it is REALLY REALLY BUMPY. Also really really dirty. Because it is so close to the city a lot of dirt blows in. Also the track workers just aren’t as awesome as at Whistler. We are so spoiled at Whistler. There was bird poo frozen onto the track, and also sawdust? Yuck.

ANYWAY because it wasn’t so fast we were able to start from the top on our second run! This meant doing my first ever running start!! (My skeleton/life goal for this season!) The first few runs I did two-handed “running” starts (really I was pretty much walking). Fun! Later we had a couple sessions in the icehouse (an indoor push track practice thingy) where Ivo helped us work on our real one-handed running starts. It did help a lot but I will admit I still pushed somewhat tentatively on the real track because I was terrified of popping the groove and also crashing. PS you can see a video of me doing a running start on my Facebook wall.

The best part of the week was that there were always at least 3 coaches watching our runs. One coach even took videos. Then after each run they would come give us feedback on how we did and how we can improve. Very cool and very helpful. A lot of the pictures in this post are stills from the videos.

Like I said, the track is not super hard. There are only two parts that I had to worry about. 1) corner 8, which has the potential to flip you over if you go into it too late. I came close to flipping but managed to stay right-side-up the entire week. And 2) the kreisel (a 270 degree corner 3 pressure corner), which I also survived fine. Maybe just because I did “safety steers” though, which helped me but also slowed me down a lot. The fastest speed I got was only 107.9 km/hr!! (The good dudes were getting around 114 km/hr). One time I was NINE SECONDS slower than Mitch. NINE SECONDS!! Was I even on the same track?? I swear there was a short-cut I didn’t know about, haha.

On the last day of the week we had a fun race. I expected I was going to come in last place, and I did, but they were some of my best runs of the whole week so I still felt pretty good. They were my quickest and cleanest runs with my best push times. That’s success for me. Also it was really awesome that Lesley was able to come watch, it made me feel supported.

COLD KATRINA.

All in all it was a successful week. I learned SO MUCH. LIKE, SO MUCH. Everything makes a lot more sense now. It was tiring and challenging at times, but also super fun. While it was extremely embarrassing being so bad/new sometimes, the coaches and other sliders were always really encouraging and friendly. I loved meeting other sliders and making new friends. I’m so glad I was given the opportunity to take part in the training week.

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When was the last time you went tobogganing??

A helpful shove.

This was me practising skeleton running starts hahahhaaaa. Not quite the same as skeleton but it was fun launching myself face first down the hill on the big plastic toboggan.

Rosemarie and I trying doubles luge. I couldn’t stop laughing. THE BIG PERSON GOES ON THE TOP!!

That was a fun night. I’m glad so many people came over to have silly fun with me. PS thanks to Callum for taking so many pictures!

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Scott had never been to a wintery place before so we crammed our time in Ottawa with tons of snowy activities. It’s even been a pretty long time since I have been in real snow (on purpose!!)! It ended up being a really fun week.

Rosemarie, Scott and I spent one morning building a snow fort on the front lawn. It even had a slide attached. It amused me how fast we built the fort…. there is a big difference between what three adults with adult shovels can build and what kids with kids shovels can build, haha. Scott spent another morning working on it himself (I stayed indoors and took pictures), and then another whole morning digging deeper into the snow as well.

I think it was a pretty sweet fort. So much seating!

We also spent a significant amount of the trip watching the Olympics. My dad had a two TV (plus picture-in-picture) set up so we could watch maximum sports all the time. I really enjoyed watching curling this year, and of course skeleton.

Rosemarie’s friend Liz (who was on exchange in Fiji with her) came to visit us in Ottawa. Dad and Kate suggested that we go for a skate on the canal immediately after picking her up from the bus station. I didn’t even know you were allowed to skate on the canal at night but I’m glad we went because it was so empty! We pretty much had the ice to ourselves, although the Beaver Tail stands were closed so that was a bummer. Scott improved his skating quite a lot that night. I think we skated 4 km in total.

The next day we went downtown again to check out Winterlude stuff. Look how busy the canal was that afternoon! I’m so glad we did our skating at midnight cuz that is wacko busy. You can’t even see the ice after the bridge!!

We checked out the ice sculptures and ate shawarma and then finally got our Beaver Tails. I had a nutella one and it was delicious. Scott stuck with the classic Killaloe Sunrise.

Unpictured…

  • Cross country skiing: HILARIOUS. It was Scott’s first time on any kind of ski-like equipment and he was SO BAD at first, hahha. He fell a lot, hahaha. Poor Scott.
  • Snowshoeing: Meh.
  • Curling: Kate, Rosemarie, Scott and I got to fill in for a team in my dad’s curling league. It was a lot of fun, we actually did pretty well… ended up with a tie!
  • Maple syrup on snow: Successful once we figured out you need to let the maple syrup reduction cool down a fair bit before you pour it on the snow.
  • Hockey: Callum took Scott out to an outdoor rink to shoot some pucks for the first time. They were gone for like 2.5 hours so I guess it was fun!!!
  • Tobogganing: Hilarious. I’m going to make a whole post about it, haha.

Ah and it’s March 1st so here is my second 1 Second Everyday video!

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Rosemarie got Scott (and me) a voucher for EXTREME trampolining for Christmas. It was way harder than we expected. We were there for 1.5 hours and got so tired. It was fun trying to bounce from one side of the room to the other without stopping, and flipping into the foam pit. If I ever go there again I know I need to bring tape to wrap around my socks… they come off soooooo easy in the foam pit!!!

They randomly turned the lights off for about ten minutes. For once I was actually wearing the right clothes for black lights. I felt like I was in a Sia performance.

I donated blood for the first time this week. I always thought people were exaggerating when they talked about how big the needles are there…. they are not!! The needles are like straws!! But anyway it was fine and I enjoyed my juice box and cookies at the end. I will most likely go again in 58 days when I am allowed to come back. Why not?

I also recently signed up to be a bone marrow donor. Did you know that donating bone marrow is a lot less painful than it used to be? Sometimes they can get the stem cells via a vein in your arm. They even give you back the parts of the blood that they don’t need. Sometimes they still have to tap the bone, but if it’s going to change someone’s life then a little bit of pain is worth it, in my opinion. They really need donors, especially young ethnic males. You have to be between the ages of 17 and 35. When you sign up for One Match you do a little online quiz, then they mail you a cheek swab kit, which you mail back with your samples. Pretty easy and pretty cool! I hope some day I get a call.

Leslie, Rosemarie and I went to Ladies Night at Mount Seymour last Monday. In case you haven’t heard: winter here in Vancouver was been extremely mild. The mountains barely have any snow at all. Whistler’s base is about one quarter as deep as it was last year at this point. I guess most people have given up on winter sports because Ladies Night was deserted. There were like 12 people on the whole mountain, haha.

I was a little overdressed in my (new) parka. The snow was more like little balls of ice water. We could take our gloves off no problem. We couldn’t even see our breath. It was still fun-ish, although Leslie was having equiptment issues and my toe was realllllly hurting (more about this later). We stayed a few hours but left early. Still okay for $5 (for charity!).