Summer Training 2015

Cory has begun his preparation for Special Olympics National Winter Games next March in Newfoundland by attending a 5-day summer race camp with Whistler Mountain Ski Club.  This is the second time he has been to a WMSC Summer Camp, the last one in 2011 as he prepared for the last National Games in 2012.

Cory continues to be the only athlete with a disability to ever train with Whistler Mountain Ski Club - where many World Cup champions have trained.

The Aspens, our home for 5 nights...we've stayed here several times now, great location for summer training as it is right next to the Wizard Chair, the first chair we need to take each morning.

The next morning - Monday, June 22 - and the sun is shining on Blackcomb as we prepare to leave the condo...

As Cory learned at his first ever summer camp on Mount Hood in 2007, summer training is a lot of gear schlepping...

The Aspens is a convenient location with just a short walk down to Wizard Chair at Blackcomb...

And early morning starts to take advantage of harder snow before the sun softens it...

Training will take place on Horstmann Glacier at the very top of Blackcomb Mountain.  It requires 3 chairlift rides, with a bus ride connecting two of the chairs.  Wizard Chair is first, and alpine flowers make for a colourful ride up.




And then we've arrived - to a spectacular venue!  Cory will be training on the section to the left of the Horstmann T Bar in the middle of the photo.

After a couple of warm-up runs, Cory gets right to work, starting with a hands-in front drill.  The goal here is to keep his hands in front of his body while he uses the bottom half of his body to turn.  While Cory is quite good at this lower-upper body separation, it is a good drill for him to start with as he had developed a bad habit last winter of dropping his inside hand as he turned, as you can see in this photo taken at the Provincial Games last March.

By dropping his hand, Cory is allowing some of his weight to move backwards rather than be forward which reduces his ability to carve properly.  Plus, it forces him to turn further away from the gates then he would otherwise.

In fact, this is Cory's goal for the week - to eliminate his habit of dropping his inside hand as he turns.

And for the next couple of hours, Cory worked with Coach Jordan on body position as well as trying to keep his hands - his right hand in particular - from dropping:

And comments from Coach Jordan to end Cory's first day....

and the ride back down starts...

After lunch, it's time for a leisurely bike ride




And of course, what's summer camp without a beer in the hot tub back at the condo??

Next morning...

well our home computer crashed....and only a few videos saved thanks to Whistler Mountain Ski Club....thank goodness it was just training and not video from the National Games next year!


Cory started the next morning with the boot touch drill.  After working the previous day on keeping his hands up and in front, now it's time to work on his torso position,  This drill forces the skier into a deep knee bend in order to touch his boots.  Cory tends to touch the front of his boots a bit, forcing the upper part of his body forward.  The preference is to touch the side of each boot, making the upper body bend down sideways, not forward, forcing the skis to get up on edge while keeping the body centred over the boots and skis.






Then working through a fairly tight slalom course, with commentary from Coach Jordan.  Loading the ski with pressure into a turn,

June 24 (Happy 37th Anniversary to Cory's mum Jenni!)

Into the next day with more slalom gate training, like all sports repetition is critical for muscle memory.  Cory learned that in 2010 in 5 pin bowling when he bowled over 200 games over several months to prepare for the Summer National Games that year.  Skiing is no different but getting access to race courses - in safe conditions with good snow - is certainly more difficult that driving to a bowling alley.  So each run through a race course is gold - or at least hopefully it will lead to gold.

Cory does something at the end of this video that he worked on last winter - putting his hand down near his boots at the finish line in order to stop the clock as soon as possible.  So muscle memory is working here!





More commentary from Coach Jordan.  It's a good reminder that racing is about skiing fast and sometimes too much attention to detail can actually slow a racer down.  And sometimes there's just no such thing as pole planting too early.  It gets a turn initiated and completed sooner so that there is a fraction of a second longer for a ski to remain flat entering the next turn...a flat ski is a fast ski.








Starting the next day with tuck turns.  A good exercise for Cory to keep his hands up and forward while using his lower body to turn the skis.  The idea here is to keep those hands pointing at the finish line so that the upper body doesn't turn with the lower body and keeping his hands from dropping to his sides.




Then into a Giant Slalom race course, really concentrating on keeping his hands forward and not dropping down by his boots.  Good work for sure!




Here he does a great job keeping his hands up early in the course but they drop once he gets past Coach Jordan.




Then on our last day on snow until probably December...hands looking good...Coach Jordan likes it too...




Hands look terrific here, much better, mission accomplished!





So good in fact that I showed Cory this video later back at the condo....there is a definite similarity in the hand positioning here....hands out for balance in between gates, then up and in at each gate to allow for a tighter line, but not quite at light speed like Ted!



And then a good little video from Coach Jordan explaining how the position of the brushes on the course can be a good training tool to learn to initiate turns early, a very common error and something which Cory will need to work on.





But that's about it for a few months.  Cory will begin dryland training with a Special Olympics Training Coach in August or September so we may update when that happens.