Yesterday the 14th Jan, I had my first race back from my 11 months away from the ice. The race was in Igls, near Innsbruck in Austria. It felt like the first day of school when I walked into the start room on the first day of official training, everyone had been away since October and had already done team races and then four other world cup races so were well into the swing of it, so I felt like the new kid!
I soon got back into the routine of things and training had been going really well,I was always in the top three of my training group so was feeling confident about getting a top 6 finish which would have been good for the first race back.
I was aware that my pushing at the start was a bit slower then I have normally done in previous years, but due to lack of summer training I was prepared for this.
Race day was very warm, well the whole week had been warm, and even one of days was severely delayed due to the rain damaging the track, so most of us cancelled training. But race day was about 6 degrees, compared to the week before of -14! I was last off...because your start number is from World Ranking points and I had non due to not having raced this season. The track slows very quickly here because of the warm weather and so a layer of frost comes over the top of the ice...so by the time it came to my first run about 50 minuets after the first slider had gone down, I could feel the sled sticking to the ice,I had a solid run but could only manage 17th place, not good!!
It did mean that then after the track had been prepared and spritzed with water again, I was then 3rd off for my second run, as it goes in reverse order. This gave me the quick ice and I slid another solid run that got me down in the 2nd quickest time out of everyones 2nd runs..but only moved me up to 12th place overall.
I was dissapointed of course, It is hard to come back to racing and not do as well as you are used to. But I have to start somewhere on my journey back to competitive racing, and can now only look forward to next weeks race....Winterberg World Cup race 6. Another track full of unpredictable weather!! what joys!
