Some Good Results

It may be an off-year for important competitions, but Cory is staying in tune with a few races during the season. This time it's a fun race organized by Special Olympics British Columbia at Crystal Mountain in Westbank, BC. This has been a regular venue for Special Olympics ski racing, having been the location of the last Provincial Winter Games in 2011. As Cory knows very well now, ski racing involves a lot of
baggage handling....loading the bus for departure....



 


And then unpacking at the Green Bay Bible Camp, our home for a couple of days...

 

 which is located on the shores of Okanagan Lake....

 


 a bit of broken cloud to start race day...

 


 But first some breakfast, where Cory shows he can be as quick-moving in the buffet line as he is on a ski
hill!

 

Then it's on to the race course...

 

 where he joins his old rival Jesse for a first look at the race course...

 


 It will be two races on the day, each with two runs. Cory has not trained very much this year, compared to the last few years, and in fact it is only his 3rd time in gates all season. So we're very curious to see how he does against Jesse who has continued with regular training. And in the first run of the first race, Jesse shows that his training is paying off by beating Cory by 1.4 seconds, quite a significant margin. Cory's run, which actually looks pretty good...

  

 So we have a chat on the chair back up to the race course and while we wait for Cory's second run.  He knows it's not an important race, not a qualifier, so he doesn't mind that he's not winning.  It did cross my mind that he does have a way of upping his intensity and performance during important competitions, so perhaps there is no reason to be concerned about the disparity with Jesse's time.

But Cory does crank things up in his second run and beats Jesse by 1.7 seconds for a win with an overall time advantage of .28 seconds.




In the second race, well Cory seems to crank it up even more, scooting through the slalom race course with an excellent pendulum motion of his legs so that his upper body stays pretty much in a vertical line right to the finish...two excellent runs and Cory wins by a rather astonishing 6.65 seconds...







So two races and two wins, and a comforting reassurance that the time off from training isn't hurting Cory's performance at this time.

Next up is a Kokanee race - the ones that include a free beer! - and then Cory is off to Hawaii.  Definitely not for ski training, but maybe some surfing!