Lake Placid America's Cup - Skeleton

This will be a pretty short post, since I don't have any great pictures. I think B took some, so if I find them I'll stick them in.

I arrived in LP the last weekend in March, and hung out at a friend's place for a couple days until I could check into the OTC. Checked in, assembled my sled, and got into the groove of working on final papers (to get a head start - didn't get nearly as much done as I'd hoped), working out / training, and going to the track to slide.

The weather was actually pretty nice, warm-ish but not enough to kill the track, and people were getting some good times.

I had a rough couple days of training, since that track still intimidates me (remember the last time I was there I crashed? yeah).

Finally, the last day of training, I busted my PR (personal record) on the track by over a second! Skipped the 0.59s and went straight to a 0.58.

Now, it wasn't a "real" America's Cup race. The World Championships will be at Lake Placid next year, so a lot of the countries sent their best athletes instead of their lower athletes like me. It was pretty stacked...I was still intimidated.

B showed up that evening, and he was great, helping with race prep, dogging my sled at the start, etc.

Race day #1: FAST ice! So fast that one of the women (this shows how stacked the field was) actually tied the track record! I got super excited, but as it turned out, I was TOO excited.

I threw away that run in turn 2 - decided I didn't like the line I had and tried to fix it, and ended up making things worse. Over-corrected, and ended up tapping walls and skidding all the way to turn 10. Oops...

22nd or so that run, so I didn't get a second run (only the top 20 do). Not happy!

Race day #2: learned from my rookie mistakes, and went into the race excited, but also relaxed. Actually had the exact same line in turn 2 as the day before, but this time I went with it, finished 19th so got a second run, and moved myself up to 15th! Good times.

Started to feel comfortable on that track, finally, and it was a great way to end the season. Phew!