Hello,
I'm now in Lofer in Austria where I'm taking a couple of days off to recover a little after the world champs which, as you may know, finished at the weekend with me skiing my best result of my career so far in slalom which was great! The course was probably the longest slalom I have ever skied and that came after a long hard 2 weeks of racing in all but one of the events.
It was quite an exciting and eventful race with a lot of people not able to finish the course, in my view the snow or slope were not so tough but the extreme flat light was catching a lot of people out. Also for me on the 2nd run 2 of the 4 screws in the heel piece of my binding came out so my binding was lifting up off the ski which as you can imagine is far from ideal!!! However I was feeling so determined that it didn't seem to really affect me much but left me knowing that a lot better is definitely within my grasp. Actually my whole binding has come off my ski twice this year in training and my race ski broke last month so things haven't been the best for me on the equipment side this year.
On the whole I found my programme at the championships fairly tough but I enjoyed so much taking part in the GS and Super-g for the first time at a major champs, the super-g was really encouraging for me to finish just over 2 secs from the gold medal position. In the Gs race I was very confident going in to it but I did have a slight problem with my back which on another day I would not have raced with but it was a big event for me so I tried to push through it, to be honest I was disappointed to crash but it only made me more determined to really attack the slalom after taking a day of to have al ot of physio.
Up next is some training here at our base then I will take part in a couple of FIS slaloms at the end of the week in Kreischberg before heading to Garmisch for the next World cup race on Sunday 25th.
Hope all is well with everyone and you are getting some decent snow this winter.
Noelie
