OK ... as promised, the unabbreviated version of my race season to date ...

Canadian Nationals
After Christmas I headed straight back to Calgary for Nationals. We had one week of training before two days of racing. Throughout the week, which was pretty cold, I was having a lot of trouble with skidding, but I didn't think much of it, because I often have trouble in training, but seem to have a knack for pulling it all together on race day. But come race day this day, I ... ummmm ... shall we say ... sucked it up, and pretty hard.

On my first run I had one of my best starts, but after that it kinda went downhill ... and not in good way. I couldn't control my sled through the top half of the track. I was skidding so badly that I dropped from 4th place to 17th, dead last, in the first four corners of the track. Yikes.

On the second run, I made some emergency adjustments to my sled, by lowering the rock (you can put a given amount of bend, or "rock", into the runners of your sled in order to control how much contact they make with the ice. More bend means less contact and therefore less friction, or more speed, but also less control). But it didn't do whole lot of good, and I still found myself pretty close to the bottom of the barrel after the first day of racing.

That evening I did a bunch of measurements on my sled and runners, working with my coaches until all hours of the morning, trying to figure out if the problem was my equipment, or if it was just me. You never want to make excuses for poor performances, but my runs were so sub-par, so below what I am capable of and what I have done in the past, that I couldn't help but think there was something more to it than just an off-day. At 2 a.m. my coach and I decided that the best course of action was to try a new pair of runners for the next day of racing - a little bit of a risky move, because each pair of runners has different characteristics when combined with a new sled and slider. But by that point I was willing to try anything.

The next day, an hour and a half before race time I met my coach at the track and we dug a different pair of runners out of one of the basement lockers. The only ones available were a pair that were made for a different kind of sled, and needed to be filed in order to fit my sled. Plus they didn't come polished.

So there I am, half an hour before I had to have my sled at the start line, bastard file in one hand, sandpaper in the other, and foot bracing my sled as I worked to fit the runners in. Let's just say that it wasn't my most finessed race prep ever ...

I got my sled into parc fermée with five minutes to spare, and, I gotta be honest, after pulling and prying and filing and sanding and hauling my sled up several flights of stairs, I was pretty warmed up ...

I was second off for the second day of races, and all I could really do was keep my fingers crossed and do my best.

I'd like to report that risking the new runners solved my problems and I blazed down the track in record time ... but they didn't and I didn't. Things went a little better than the day before and I ended up 14th of 17th, but more than anything I finished off the weekend frustrated and disappointed.