Today I felt like a skier again. Sounds funny, I know, considering that I have been a pro skier forat the past 5 years or more. As I wrote early on my blog, I didn’t have a very good season last year, but today was a huge step in putting it all behind me.
I’m in Hintertux, Austria shooting with Kastle for a little video about my new pro models coming out this winter. The jumps are big and in great shape, the sun is shining, and I have Roy Kittler here to session with me. Always nice to have friends to help motivate you to push yourself.
I did a bunch of new tricks and got back a lot of old ones that needed perfecting. Hopefully, today is just one of many awesome days I have in the mountains this coming season. I’ll let you know when the video is released and what my plans are for online content this year by next week.
Two more days of skiing here and then I’m off to Breckenridge, Colorado for Thanksgiving. It’s going to be nice to be home for a change!
Stay tuned for more vids, pics and less writing.
Woo!
Hintertux
Voting
For some reason, most Americans are quite reserved when asked about who they plan to support in the upcoming presidential election. It’s a funny feeling when someone asks who you are voting for. It sort of makes you realize that helping to choose the future of your country and community is an emotional, personal thing. When talking politics with a friend of the opposite political view, things can get heated, to say the least. People take it seriously, which they should. Voting for who runs out country is our right as free citizens of America and it’s one of the biggest privileges we have as citizens of the world.
Don’t worry, I am not writing this to try to convince you that any particular candidate or political party is better than another. I’m more or less writing this because I realize that the amount of people that don’t vote in the United States is staggeringly high. I thought I’d share my thoughts about the importance of your opinion to hopefully spark some interest in learning more about what is going on with the politics that effect your life.
If you live in the States, many things in daily life are effected by the leaders of our communities and our country. It may seem like the world around you is pretty much set in stone no matter who is president, but remember that someone has to make the decisions at the top and they can’t get there without the support of us, the people. Just look around at the things that change right before your eyes. The way our children are educated in public schools, the legalization of marijuana, and even the price of gasoline are all examples of things that are influenced by the masses through politicians that they have selected. The opportunity to help choose someone for the job that has a similar agenda that you do, makes it worth getting educated on at least the subjects that effect you and the people around you.
I hope you choose to learn about the candidates this time around. Listen to their debates and become familiar with their pasts and their future plans in order to formulate your own opinions. I hope you vote. It’s a big deal and we are lucky as human beings to even have the chance to influence our world in such an important way.
Thanks for reading, or at least skimming.
The Highest Mountains
I just got done in Austria at the annual sales meeting with Kastle. We had a great time. My skis are looking good for this season and I’m proud to say they came out exactly as I was hoping. Oliver Binder, the Kastle head of ski engineering, did a great job. I am excited to see what the rest of the ski world thinks of our work.
On one of the last nights we had an amazing presentation from Chris Davenport, one of my teammates on the Kastle program. He showed slides and told the story of his summiting of Everest. Listening to his story got me thinking about where I want my ski career to be heading. I hope I can keep it up for as long as he has and with just as much passion and enthusiasm. There is always something fun and interesting to be done in our sport; enough to fill a lifetime and more.
If you ever get the chance to hear Chris speak or read one of his books, do it. Learning about his adventures is quite inspiring and he is a true professional in his career as a skier, mountaineer, and entertainer.
http://chrisdavenport.com/
Ski Wars, A New Hope
Time for another winter of skiing and traveling! It seems like my season never ended, to be honest. Right now, I’m in New Zealand finishing up a two week training camp at Cardrona and headed to Austria tomorrow for some fun with Kastle.
This coming season is going to be very different from the past six that I have been through as a pro skier. I feel a little bit afraid, but very excited and definitely more confident than I have been in a long time. Last year was full of frustration, distraction, and anxiety for me. I had injuries, poor results in contests, and an overload of work, which was all brought into my life by me. I won’t lie, it wasn’t fun and I definitely bit off a little more than I could chew. I guess you’d wonder how being a pro skier could possibly not be fun, but let me elaborate just a bit.
When the season started, I was feeling ready for the contests. I had a spot in the Breckenridge Dew Tour for both Pipe and Slope which was really my one shot to get into X Games and the rest of the Tour. During practice I was skiing the best I had all summer and had a great run together. In my first run of the slopestyle qualifiers, on the first feature, I hooked my ski on the rail, almost broke my leg, and smashed my head really hard. I ended up in the hospital and had my first ever IV since I couldn’t drink liquid without gagging from my severe concussion. After that incident, I chilled out for three weeks. Didn’t do a thing, but plan some fun videos and do voice overs. Anything to distract my mind from my terrible early season performance.
Somehow, I managed to talk my way into the rest of the Dew Tours and X Games slopestyle. Needless to say, with my recent lack of practice, I was very ill prepared for the Games and ended up not making finals. My leg still hurt, I hadn’t been practicing any new tricks, and a film crew was trying to film with me DURING the contest, ON the contest course! The filming alone was a disaster for my mind. I had fun doing it, of course, but it wrote me off mentally for the entire trip. I managed to make it a distraction from the painful loss in the contest which I was trying to shrug off.
By the time the final Dew Tour stop came around, I was over it. Nothing seemed to be going my way. I hadn’t even started filming with MSP for my segment, I had no contest results, and the only productive thing that I had done was some character and advertisement online videos for my sponsors. The stress of doing well at this last contest really started to get to me. I was doomed before practice even started.
By the time I was getting ready for my second run of slopestyle qualifiers, I knew I wasn’t in contention for finals. I had nothing trick-wise that compared to what everyone else was doing and my confidence was shattered as well as my mood. I under rotated a double 1260 on the final jump and landed on the knuckle on the side of my left knee. My MCL was partially torn and I knew it immediately. It was the first real injury I have had besides concussions or sprained ankles and it all stemmed from my tattered mental state of mind.
Not fun.
I tried to put it behind me and look toward filming with MSP, doing more voice overs, and funny internet videos, but of course none of that worked to curb my terrible mental state. I was depressed as hell while trying to get my knee better so I could ski again. My mind drifted away and I didn’t care to even try to hold onto it. I had all but given up hope on competing and I started to do even more funny commercials and videos. I was subconsciously trying to pull myself away from the pain of what felt like an entire season of failure.
Needless to say, I lost a lot of confidence, but I found some of my stubborn ambition starting to push through around the time when the introduction of Slopestyle skiing into the Olympics was announced. Suddenly, I wanted to be part of it all again. I went straight to work on my MSP segment and managed to pull something fun together for the film. Another ray of hope came in email form from the people at the Telus Festival in Whistler. They wanted me to do the slopestyle and big air for the World Skiing Invitational. I suddenly had a new skiing goal. The season was not finished yet and this time I was an underdog again. When I first started trying to be a pro skier, ten years ago, the odds were stacked against me, and stacked high. I had that old familiar “under-the-radar” feeling when I headed up to Canada. I wasn’t a threat to anyone and I wasn’t considered a contender. I actually like it that way, I realized. My stubborn “I’ll show them” attitude got me into the finals at the WSI Big Air, my best result all season. Still not amazing, but a good boost of positivity. The motivation came flooding back after that and I have been pushing hard since then. With the growth of my confidence has come new tricks and new ideas for the upcoming season.
Sometimes things don’t go your way and life turns out to be a little short on fun and games, no matter how awesome it may have been going at the moment. Hang in there, it’ll get better. I promise.
I am not a huge fan of quoting people, but I stumbled apon this one from a guy named John Wooden, which seems rather appropriate at the moment…
“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
I get one shot at being a pro skier and maybe just one shot at the Olympics. Now is my chance to do it right because there is no doing it over.
Stay tuned! I’m starting up the ol’ blog machine again! Lots of fun shit, including a possible internet web-series.
If you’d like to check out my silly segment in the new Matchstick Productions film, here is the tour schedule. Good times at those events. Lots of pimp Mo’Fo’s.
http://www.skimovie.com/index.php/tour/schedule/
Have fun out there in the mountains. Winter is almost here. See you out there!
Colby
Whistler
Still on the coach at Momentum. Havin’ some fun with the skiing family. Pictures of the last few days.
Paparazzi. Can't even stroll through the woods these days.
Van-City lookin' good.
Tigers and Blondes
Ninja Skier
Riding down to the villiage.
Bear from the lift!
Back to Breck
Headed back to Colorado for a day to shoot the ad with Breckenridge. Funny theme this year and somehow I ended up in my underwear. Reminds of the “My Friend is a Pro” shoot.
Planes and Fast food. Yup.
Duncan looking like a half-way man.
Heavy Metal
Been working hard on my MSP segment for this season. It’s about halfway done, I’d say. Yesterday, we worked for a few hours on the original song that we will score for the action.
This year, I actually had a few opportunities, in between contests and injuries, to get out and ski some serious stuff. Huge cliffs, big jumps, and some creative technical features as well.
It’s shaping up to be one of my better segments, so I hope you enjoy!
Matt Reardon working on a riff.
Jaco, slaying a ridiculous solo.
Cali green.
Downtown from the sign.
Final Mamdog Days
We’re done! The weather did cooperate, unfortunately, but we did get at least a day out of this week. Sometimes that is the way the cookies crumbles/the way the chips fall/…the way the ski carves?
We didn’t get much done, but we sure had fun.
Wallisch and Nabbott came up with a crazy creation that I think you will enjoy seeing in the movies. I wanted to post a picture, but it would ruin the surprise, says Nate. Sorry!
I’ll be filming with MSP this week. Can’t wait to bust out some funny ski stuffs!
The amazing sunset to end a great day:
Shooting in the dark.
Still Snowing
It’s still snowing… June is in 3 days.
We are making do, though. With pretty much everything that we can find.
Arts and crafts!
Exercising!
...and a little bit of cloudy skiing.