The Day We Met Benny Raich

Welcome back!

This was by far one of our most active days as we began with a rather competitive early morning game of soccer before some stretching and breakfast. After a quick meal, we headed out to the Lionshead area to do some more Giant Slalom freesking for a few highly concentrated runs. While the past four days have been filled with lots of mileage, today's focus was more on the quality of our skiing as opposed to a high quantity of runs. We finished our morning session and returned to the lodge for a hot lunch before heading out to the Golden Peak Race Arena for some training with the U18 Women's program.

Ready to Run!

Our group fit right in as we were both working on developing an understanding of the apex in a Giant Slalom turn. The apex drill involves replacing the gate with two brushes placed in a vertical format spaced about 2 meters apart. The key is to have the skis pointed out above the top brush and to be building pressure on the outside ski and having the skis moving back towards the next apex as the racer passes the bottom brush.

After a great afternoon session, athletes returned to the lodge to perform regular maintenance on their equipment to ensure that they would be ready for the next days' adventures. Once everyone had finished tuning and waxing their skis, we headed out for a quick jog through a park located right behind our lodge. After running around for a little while, we began to play an adapted version of dodgeball that kept everyone moving very fast. It seemed as though we could have played the game until dark fell around us, so we decided to head into town to complete some holiday shopping for family and friends.

Oh and didn't I say something about Benny Raich? He only has 88 FIS worldcup podiums...

Tomorrow morning we will be training on the Golden Peak Race Arena following the progression that has been put into place. We will begin again with the apex drill with a few gates placed in between the two brushes, and hopefully will be able to add more gates to fill in the desired apex of each turn. After that, we will be enjoying some well needed rest as we will be taking the afternoon off.

Not a bad view!

Until next time!