This time of the season is the part of the snowboarding season where snowboarding overlaps with track. And it kinda gets stressful. Later today I’m signing up for track, which marks the first day of spring sports at the high school. On one hand, I’m psyched for it – I’ve been running a few days a week, getting my sprint speed up. Hopefully cross country pays off and I’ll be able to shave a few seconds off all my times. On the other hand, I’m still full committed to snowboarding, with a slopestyle competition at Keystone this Saturday, another slopestyle at Breckenridge on the 25th, Crested Butte boardercross on March 1st through the 4th, possible Hole Shot NorAm Tour cross competitions on March 26th-29th, Rev Tour cross at Ski Cooper on March 30th, and to cap it all off, USASA Nationals sometime during the first week of April.
Whew. That’s a lot of competitions. My track schedule is pretty packed this year, but with one significant detail: We only have two weekend meets all season until the League Championsips. That leaves time for snowboarding, which is pretty awesome. I’ll have to miss some snowboarding every few Fridays for track meets, and miss some track once or twice for Crested Butte and Nationals, but I’m confident that it will all work out in the end.
Anyways, flash back to two weekends ago. I had three boardercross competitions at Copper Mountain, which went pretty well overall. All three days, I only had 5 people in my age group, and, being the top seeded rider, I had a bye to finals, which meant that I waited till around 2 PM for one race. The first two days were pretty bad. On Friday, I collided with the rider in front of me who had fallen, and lost the race. On Saturday, I got beat straight up. I was only a few feet behind third place, but still, it was a bit crushing. Sunday, however, went a bit better. I started the race in first place, through the start and the first turn, but then got cut off around turn two and finished second. I was pretty stoked, as it was my first boardercross podium in my home series ever, having competed in 12 previous competitions with no medals (taking fourth the two prior days and at the final one last year).
Jadyn also did really well, taking second on Friday and Sunday! She’s gotten extremely good at boardercross, but if she had a race board, she’d definitely be much faster.
On Sunday, we went to Keystone to train for the slopestyle competition, and it was really beneficial. After running a slalom course made out of tree shrubs that we made (:P), I started practicing my slopestyle run, which is probably going to be switch backside 180, backflip, frontside 540.
Well, that’s just another update on my life! Hopefully I’ll get a chance to write another post next week after slopestyle!
You have a full plate and you are managing all that pressure well!
It’s a real treat to watch you manage it all, Gabe. I love seeing your excitement about things you care about. Wishing you the best in all your races and comps!
Spring won’t be here till may. Winter just got going