Pennsylvania

Phew! Good-ole soiled American soil!!! No, actually Seven Springs is quite a pleasantly lush little ski resort in the hills of Pennsylvania, Transylvania’s step-sister I’m told. In fact, I did hear one of the other teams had a bat invade their condo. The hill that we race on is about 600 feet high, so there’s not much of a course. It ended up being a nice respite in light of our jetlag. I climbed the thing six times on one of my training rides, and even beat the charilift in a race to the top once. So when we started our downhill practice, I’d bring up a Nintendo, embarrassing as it is, and a then a book after I broke the Nintendo, just for the long ride up. The course was pedally and had two and a half technical sections to keep us busy. The worst of the two rock gardens had about a 30% success rate. But I wasn’t worried, I won here last year and I should easily repeat that win, I thought.

And that rock garden, which I’ll call Dracula, was the one that bit me the day before the race and after that I was infected. I had been nailing it all week and now I couldn’t hike through if I tried. After my qualifier, which included an endo in that black, granite-infested rock garden, I went up to check my lines again and found no recourse. I think I instant replayed the qualy in the final, to lose to Elke by a few seconds. I even went back up to that ridiculous rock section and stomped on those rocks, calling them just what they were. Bad rocks. Oaky, I’m getting tired now. Until next time, in Big Bear in fact, adios.