MegèveSki

Esquel Day 3 - Dual slalom and park life

I didn't drink a great deal last night but what I did drink seemed to affect me quite a lot. The wine was slightly off, I knew that, but it had a rather nice port-like taste so I drank a glass or two any way... I wasn't feeling that drunk last night but this morning I felt slow all over, mentally and physically. Not the best way to prepare for head-to-head slalom racing.

The morning was taken up with racing on a dual slalom course, head to head. I did OK, better when I was either well ahead of my opponent or when they'd crashed out. I found the fact that I could see them and that they were level with me or ahead distracting... I didn't win many of the races but it was fun.

The afternoon was spent in the terrain park. The La Hoya park is better than the Catedral one, though neither had the equipment required to shape a half-pipe. I started off on the rollers, learning to jump and finally learning to land. It seems that the trick is to pull up your legs when you jump, not only does this make for a compact and stable shape whilst you're in the air but it also means that you can extend your legs on landing and then absorb and this seems to make all the difference.

After we'd played on the rollers for a while we had some lessons on the rails. We started on a box, a rail that was almost as wide as our boots are long. Initially we got used to sliding along the rail in our boots, well that was the plan, but it was more a case of falling over sideways mostly... The trick is to keep your feet apart and to look to the end of the rail and keep your weight forward, towards the front foot, and then just enjoy the ride... After some falling in just our boots we did some falling with skis on as well. It's quite hard to keep the skis flat on the rail, too tempting to edge and that's really bad news... Once we'd mastered falling off the rail on our skis from a standing start we started skiing slowly up to the rail and then jumping, rotating 90 degrees and falling off the rail ... I did manage a few slides almost to the end of the rail but by that point I figured I knew the theory well enough to practice at a time when a knee wrenching fall wasn't likely to be quite so much bad news...

This evening some of us decided to eat at Moes, we'd seen the steaks when we had a drink there last night and it seemed like a good idea. The steaks were great and the evening developed into a little more of a night out than we had expected. Lots of beer, tequila shots and much carnage.