Calgary World Cup - the adventure continues!

The next stop on the World Cup tour was Calgary, in Alberta Canada. I was SO looking forward to a track with less teeth, and Calgary is just that, a gentler slower smoother ride.

(Side note. Again, it's weird how much less time and mental energy I have for other things on tour this year. The added pressure (mostly self imposed, I'll admit), spending more time watching video with the coaches, more time with the PT getting recovery treatment, more time in general spent on all things sliding. So I haven't worked as much, written here as much, even taken as many pictures! Whoops....)

The start in Calgary is one of the longer starts. I.e. in Park City my goal time is in the low teens (5.13, 5.12 were my personal best pushes coming out of Trials) but in Calgary my personal best was a 5.67.

They had some groove issues all week - the left groove would pull left into the wall before curve 1, and the right groove would pull right, or vice versa depending on the day, and almost never went straight. Here they are working at the start:


Cutting the grooves. If I could choose a job, I'd be the one that gets to ride on the cutter.


And here they are finessing the groove.


Here's a video of the push in Calgary, just during training.


Coming out of the Calgary kreisel (a 280 or 360 degree curve) there is usually a pretty large tap, lefthanded, that I was worried about affecting my sore left ribs. But then, when I hit, I remember thinking "This is like a mosquito bite!" Compared to Whistler, that is. Heh.

This is the trickiest part of the track, the 8-kreisel portion:

• It's super flat, so if you skid at ALL your speed plummets
• There is a long straightaway before kreisel with opportunity for drifting and skidding
• Curve 8 has funky pressures and is the one infamous for YouTube crashes (do a search for "Calgary Crash Reel" and this is that curve) making it hard to grease the straight

Here's the exit of 8 and through kreisel. The left handed hit is directly below the camera so you can't see it but can hear it a bit, and you can see me bouncing toward the right as I come back into view. It's hard to get right, but is still a fun section. I was doing alright down here, but was struggling 1-2 and 4-5, and this is one of those tracks where a SINGLE mistake means you lose huge time.


Here is my 4-5 transition - since most of you aren't used to watching lines it may LOOK ok, but listen and you can HEAR the sound of me washing out and losing time. Sounds like making shaved ice...


Race day, I was finally able to get my pushes down and set new Personal Bests / Personal Records (PRs / PBs, for those that haven't seen the acronyms yet)in the low 5.60s, finally cleaned up my 1-2 and 4-5, and after the first run was in 14th position! Very excited.

Second run, I again washed out of curve 4 and messed up my 8-9, sigh, and dropped back to 16th. Oh well, I had Park City and home ice to look forward to!

Here's Matt again, podiuming:


Plus, to help move on there was a party / reception at our hotel after the races. Where I spent most of the night dancing with Byron, the bobsled physio, since he knew how to swing dance! It had been a while for me, but started coming back.


And was a blast.


We roped Julie, the team chiro, into joining us.






Then hopped into the hot tub and went down the water slide at the hotel pool. Oops - I forgot about my mascara! That there is a scary Kimber...


Then it was time to throw my sled and runners in the van, crash for a couple hours of sleep, then get up at 4am to head to the airport. The travel to park City was long, but coming into Utah was just lovely.


It's a never ending journey!