Thursday, October 14, 2010

Hintertux Glacier

Today we trained at Hintertux, about a 1 and a ½ hour drive from Stubai. It is a massive glacier where a large number of ski teams train early on in the season.

Once again we were greeted by hectic gondola lines where Europeans seem to have no concept of what a line actually is. There’s pushing and shoving from everyone, even kids from about the age of 5 (they’re obviously trained young by their parents!) Absolute mayhem to get onto the gondola!

Once we reached the peak at 3250m, the long journey was well worth it. Hintertux has some incredible skiing terrain, with plenty of long steep runs. They are also one of the only resorts in Austria to build a terrain park this early in the season, so we made the most of it and practised our jumping.

We also joined the Norwegian, German and Swedish world cup ski cross teams in some ski cross training. They had a start gate and small course set up with a few turns, rollers and jumps. It was fun to catch up with everyone again, and also to get back into the head-to-head competition. I am now really excited to start racing world cups again in December!

Over the next few days we will be training at Stubai glacier, again working on technical skiing, GS and super g. This camp has been absolutely incredible for my skiing. Long consistent runs with great hard snow, perfect blue bird weather and training all day… I couldn’t have asked for anything more.