It’s Blue as, bro!

November 20, 2009

Mt. Ruapehu is famous for its crazy nasty weather and I got a taste of it last Friday.  At the base of the ski area, it was raining but at the top of the first lift, it was snowing with visibility limited to about 50m.  We’d already missed two days that week due to bad weather, so we had to take what we could get.  At least it wasn’t windy.

Despite how ugly it was on Friday, the forecast for the weekend was ‘blue as’… this will make more sense if you watch this video on YouTube… Kiwis seriously talk like that.

And blue it was!  Saturday morning we drove out of Ohakune at 6.30am to Whakapapa for the first SL races of the season.  It was still dark, but I could see the frost on the ground.  Above, the sky was clear and full of stars I’ve never seen before.  We boarded the chairlift as the sun lit up the highest peaks of the volcano like a massive candle flame.  It was windy though, and cold on the race course which was in the shade until the end of the first run.  I made the mistake of volunteering to video our kids while all the other coaches were up at the start in the sun!  When I did finally get up there for the second run, I got to put on my sunglasses for the first time this winter.  The weather held out, and after the race finished, we got to relax at the base, sitting on the patio with a Kiwi beer.

Sunday was another early start, but the clear sky driving up to Whakapapa gave us the energy to pull on our gear and head up the lift.  My group had had kind of a rough day racing on Saturday, so we went up for some freeskiing, drills, a little mental imagery and a pep talk about doing their best.   There were only 50 kids in the race, in four age groups from 8-16 years… that’s almost as many as we get in Lithuania, and 4 times less than we face in Latvia.  So even if the kids crash and hike, they can potentially still “win.”  I told them that it wasn’t enough to win the race.  If they haven’t skied their best, then they have not won at all.  I stayed at the start for that first run, and it seemed the work we had done in the morning paid off, because they all had strong, clean runs.

As the kids headed into the cafe for lunch, I grabbed a drill, and set a race course for the first time.  I’ve been called several times in FIS and FIS children’s races to set, and always politely declined, so even though this was a small race, I was still as nervous as I would have been if I was actually racing.  In training I’ve been setting royal flushes, which means 4 vertical gates in a line… the kids requested that I set one in the race since they’ve had plenty of experience on it in training.  The course was quite technical, with the royal flush, plus two tight hairpins (two vertical gates set in a line), but it ran well, and most of the kids skied it clean.  Whew!  Well, it was a great weekend, and on Sunday they did all ski to their potential and beyond.  I was standing on course next to John Armstrong, the program director, to watch the second run, and he had several positive comments on the progress of my group.

The weather at Mt. Ruapehu can be horrible, but when it’s good, it’s blue as!

 

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