A few of Cory's runs through the Gatebusters course on Gandy Dancer on Blackcomb... He's working on two things - getting his body over his downhill ski rather than leaning back uphill and being more dynamic - rising and dropping harder onto to his skis as he initiates his turns:
Then in a Kokanee race the next day on the same run on Blackcomb, Cory appears to be a bit cautious on his first run, and posts a time of 1:03.97:
But on the second run, he cranks it up and takes 7 seconds of the time of his first run with a time of 56.47....he was so surprised that he thought they had made a mistake with his time.
Since Cory started racing in the Kokanee series two years ago, we've always joked about his goal being to not finish last. Most of the Kokanee racers are much more experienced than Cory and he usually does finish last in his age group. But not this time, he finishes 7th of the 8 racers that completed the course.
And one of those experienced racers is Rob Boyd, who has worked with Cory when he trains with Whistler Mountain Ski Club. Here's Rob's run through the race course:
A few days later we were back at Whistler, training on a beautiful day with Whistler Mountain Ski Club on Ptarmigan:
Cory keeps increasing his speed and one of his challenges now is to mentally adjust to that speed, to be better prepared as gets through one gate to move into another. On his second run of this video, just as he reaches the camera he does not anticipate the next gate and is too slow to transition as he approaches the blue gate. As a result, he completes his turn well below the gate and must ski across the hill in order to make the following red gate. So he'll need to do as much gate training as possible to get used to his new-found speed through a race course.
The next day Cory gets to practice a little bit of tucking, which he will certainly need for his Super G race at the Nationals next March. But it's obvious he hasn't been using it much as he needs to lower his head and shoulders, move forward on his skis, in order to straighten his back and become more aerodynamic.
Later, he is faced with certainly the most challenging race course he's ever been on...not as icy as the Nor-Am course at Loveland of course but that had no gates. This course had two very steep pitches - which usually means gates that are very much offset in order to slow the racers down, but on this course the gates were more direct and Cory could tell during his course inspection that it would be very fast.
So he starts rather cautiously again but as the day goes on, he really picks up his speed and has an excellent final run:
So now a short Christmas break and back to Whistler Mountain Ski Club for 3 days of Slalom training, then more Gatebuster sessions and a Kokanee race in early January. And 67 days now till the National Games races at Marmot Basin in Jasper.
