Preseason and Selection Race 1 - Lake Placid

So at the beginning of October our preseason training started. We were originally meant to be training in Cesana, Italy, however a broken refrigeration system and some very uncharacteristic warm weather in the Italian Alps meant that we had to relocate to Winterberg in Germany. A week was spent here refamiliarising with our sleds, thankfully it all came flooding back and it provided a much needed adrenaline fix after 6 months or so off the ice! From here we travelled to Montreal and drove down to Lake Placid for our first of two selection races which will decide who will be on the World Cup and Intercontinental Cup circuits for this coming season.

The race format is such that we all have 6 training runs on the track spread over 3 days followed by a race day which comprises of two runs down the track, with the cumulative time deciding the winner. Training made it very evident that the race was going to be a close one, I even managed to acheive the fastest downtime on the last training run prior to the race so all was looking good. The race however didn't all go to plan. I had a pretty clean first run that put me with a few tenths of a second of the leader Ant Sawyer, infact 4 tenths spread the field. However a poor second run that started with me almost tripping over my sled at the start due to a sticky start spur and ended with me clattering the right wall out of 14 meant that i finished 4th overall, with Ant managing to claim top spot by one hundredth of a second. A really big congrats to him, as he's my roommate for this fortnight!! However a few lessons to be taken away and learnt from by me for the second race, where absolutely anything could happen. However now only a win will do for me, so pretty straightforward huh?!