Tyler Walker » austria http://tylerwalker.org Mon, 26 Apr 2010 01:25:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8 en hourly 1 World Cup in Rinn/Patscherkofel, Austria http://tylerwalker.org/blog/world-cup-in-rinnpatscherkofel-austria/ http://tylerwalker.org/blog/world-cup-in-rinnpatscherkofel-austria/#comments Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:42:35 +0000 tylerwalker http://tylerwalker.org/?p=340 I just finished the first World Cup stop of the season at Patscherkofel, Austria. We raced on the same hill that held the downhill for the 1964 and 1976 Olympics, but we instead ran a slalom and giant slalom. The track was mostly boiler-plate ice which has proved exceedingly difficult for me to manage. I have not been able to hold an edge reliably at all which has caused me to have disappointing results in both races (second to last in GS, 8th in SL). Each run has had me sliding all over the place with very little control and has even involved a few instances where I slid out completely, slid down the course a ways, pop up again when my edge caught, and continue down the run, having to re-generate all the speed I was carrying. Since these races I have been trying to trouble-shoot the problem without much success. My edges are extremely sharp and my technique is good enough (when I am not sliding out of control) to be able to grip on the ice, yet I still can’t do it. Every coach I talk to seems to be telling me something different about how to correct my problem, but nothing yet has helped.

img_1807The base area of Patscherkofel.

img_1805Betty-Lynn, the guide dog of Danielle Umstead, one of my teammates. Betty-Lynn and I share a bench seat every day when we go to the hill.

img_1815We are staying in the town of Rum, about 3 miles from the center of Innsbruck. This is a view of the Olympic ski jumps above the city.

img_1820My roommate, Chris Devlin-Young, aka Captain World Cup.

Tomorrow we are off to Abtenau, Austria for another series of races. Should be fun.

]]> http://tylerwalker.org/blog/world-cup-in-rinnpatscherkofel-austria/feed/ 1 Training Camp in Hintertux, Austria with Challenge Aspen http://tylerwalker.org/blog/training-camp-in-hintertux-austria-with-challenge-aspen/ http://tylerwalker.org/blog/training-camp-in-hintertux-austria-with-challenge-aspen/#comments Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:40:23 +0000 tylerwalker http://tylerwalker.org/?p=263 I just got back from one of the best camps ever. I travelled with the team from Challenge Aspen to Hintertux, Austria where we had two weeks of slalom and GS training on the Hintertuxer glacier. The conditions were great meaning solid glacial ice with tons of pre-made ruts. The glacier, it turns out, is rapidly melting. I was here about 4 years ago and we could ski much further down then we can now. There are many little streams running over and under the glacier, carrying away ice that probably has been building up for at least hundreds of years. Hintertux is still an epic place, but I think that it might have to advertise mountain biking a few summers from now instead of skiing.

I learned some very valuable lessons this camp, mainly that everything I have learned about ski racing is wrong. Allow me to explain. Usually there is a fine line between turning high and early enough to make sure you make the gate and are still able to make the next one and going direct enough so that you don’t travel an unnessesary distance from gate to gate. In reality, the more direct you go at the next gate, the faster your time will be, high and early be damned. I found that if I went super direct at the gates of a course and ripped a turn just barely before the gate, and put as much pressure as I possibly could into the turn, the faster my time was. Absolutely rediculous. If you have no idea of the fundamentals of ski racing, what I just described is usually what your coaches spend hours demanding that you not do.

We also spent lots of time going on very long pushes and doing workouts. The pushes were usually tons of fun, except the day we had to go on a road that went through a cow pasture (there are lots of cows in Hintertux), and our wheels and subsequently us got covered in bovine excrement. Delicious.

img_1678This is the view from my hotel towards the Hintertuxer Gletscherbahn.

img_1685The town of Tux. Everything is very green because it is sprayed every fall with liberal amounts of liquified bovine excrement.

img_1697Me at the Walfischmaul, or Whale’s jaws. This was along one of our long pushes up the mountain side.

img_1698My teammate performing surgery on his skis after he stripped the screw heads in an attempt to take the bindings off.

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