L a t e s t  n e w s ..... Rachel Adcock and Gerard Flahive win both races at Scottish Dry Slope Championships ...

'The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams' (Eleanor Roosevelt).

Benn Hall, one of the promising Junior 1 racers just entering the FIS scene, has agreed to write for Racer Ready about his experiences of FIS races.

Sunday 13^th August

The great training continued for the next couple of days, even with the considerably worse weather conditions. We carried on the GS gate training down the steeper piste, with the French guys, and had productive mornings. On the Wednesday we finished slightly earlier due to the ever worsening weather, however this did not hamper our training, but we decided that we had done enough for the day. That afternoon we did a long session in the gym, warming up with some games of squash and the doing a weights session focusing on the lower body. As this was a third week, considerable improvements could be seen in our technique in regards to the Olympic weightlifting techniques that we had been taught.

For Thursday through to Saturday, our coach had organised for us to do our CSCF Entry Level coaching course (a slightly lower Canadian version of the APC 1). This course would thus certify us to be able to coach any racer at and below the age of ten. The person who came to do the course with us was a Canadian coach called Chris Hillier; he has previously worked as one of the head coaches with the Australian national team, and is a very experienced and knowledgeable coach. The course consisted of about 8 hours of theory which we did on Thursday and Friday afternoons. The theory required us to complete two units, one looking at the planning of a training session, including exercises, a timetable of the day and also skill analysis. The second unit focused on making ethical decisions, and these weren’t examination based units, we just had to complete our booklets.

We skied all three days from Thursday to Saturday, and because we weren’t actually coaches yet, and were still racing, Chris aimed a lot of the things we did on our skiing, and so we weren’t just learning about coaching, we were also improving our own technical ability. On the Friday morning we also did GS gate training as the conditions were perfect and it was too good to miss, so Chris helped out with us there as well and we used video footage from the training to evaluate our own ability and to improve on it. On Saturday we did a full day of skiing, and put in to action a section of our planned practice session (which we had done in theory), where each of us carried out a certain phase (e.g. warm up, activation, cool down etc) and afterwards, as a group we talked about how we thought we had all done and were given pointers as to how to improve our coaching ability.

These three days were definitely invaluable for me and the knowledge I gained from those mere three days was unbelievable, not just for my coaching, but for my own skiing ability as well. From doing this course we achieved ‘Train Status’, and to be certified, we have to coach a young athlete and mentor them at a race, whilst being overseen by a level two or three coach. Today we travelled across to Jindabyne, in South Wales where we are staying for the week, as we are racing at Thredbo, however we are still unsure as to what days we will be racing, even tough it is the night before the planned first race. The reason is that the mountain has only got about half its runs open so they want to have the races finished by 8:30am in order to open the piste for the public.

Sunday 20^th August

It turned out that the race organisers decided to run two races only, instead of the planned four, so both males and females had one race of slalom, and one race of GS. They did the female GS on the Monday, the male’s GS on the Tuesday, then they ran the first run of the slalom for both genders on the Wednesday, and then did the second run on Thursday. We had to get up at four O’clock in the morning in order to be on the hill by 5:45am, as we lived around 35km away from Thredbo. My week didn’t turn out to be the best however there were some good things that I could take away from it. In both races I finished the first runs and in the GS I was placed 16^th, and in the slalom I was placed 15^th, however there was still one more run for me to finish in both races. In the GS I was having another good run, or it felt so anyway, and I was about ten gates from the end when I skied to tight on a gate and hit on the inside of my shoulder, close to my neck, the impact was great and it was too much for me to recover from and I span of the course. In the slalom I only made it to about the sixth gate when I got late the gate before and tried to make up for it by skiing a tighter line. Unfortunately I skied too tight and straddled the next gate…

As expected I was pretty annoyed after that, mainly because I never make such mistakes in training, at all, so it just seems to be bad luck when they happen at the most important times. We travelled back from Thredbo on Friday, and got back to Bright to be welcomed by cloud, wind and rain. Because of this, we didn’t ski at all over the weekend, as the conditions were described as wet and windy, which in Australia, means it won’t be a good day to ski.

Monday 28^th August

On the Monday we went free skiing for the morning, just having a slightly more relaxed day, not focusing greatly on skills or exercises, just lightly thinking about what we needed to do and trying to incorporate it in to our free skiing, we took some video at the end to watch that night. On the Tuesday, we took up both super G skis and slalom skis, as we hadn’t managed to get on the super G skis yet. We started the morning doing super G free ski for about 6 or 7 runs, and then got on the slalom skis and did slalom gate training for the rest of the morning alongside the French. For me personally, I got a lot out of that morning as I felt I was skiing really well and managed to make it down nearly all my runs which I was very happy with. On the Wednesday we did slalom again but moved to the flatter slope after training on the steep the day before. We did slalom stubbies, doing a range of exercises from a extremely wide corridor where we focused on using  the hip, to the complete opposite, traversing across the slope through extremely tight stubbies, focusing on quick feet. The weather was terrible, mainly due to the unrelenting rain, so we were all soaked by the end of the morning.

On Thursday we took the day off because the weather was forecasted to be worse than the day before, so we thought we’d make the most of it and have a day of fitness instead. However the weather turned out to be fairly bearable which is more than can be said for the conditions on Friday, so we ended up taking Friday off as well, again having another fitness day. For fitness we did weightlifting, on Thursday we did lower body again, and then on Friday we did upper body. Each session at the gym lasting around 2 to 3 hours long.

On the Saturday we went up with the Canadian coach who had been training alongside us the whole time. We did stubbies with him down another run which wasn’t particularly steep, but also not flat. We did slow, skidded skiing all day, focusing on keeping as far forward as possible as we had all been tending ski a bit too far back as of late. We skied most the day with our hands behind our back, making the aim of the exercise even harder to accomplish. In the bottom course we tried to develop it in to carving as well. Towards the end of the training session some of the ruts were bearing rocks at their deepest point, and slowly, more and more of these rocks were appearing all over the course, considering we have another two weeks left, this isn’t a good sign. On Sunday we took another day off because it was decided we would ski from Monday all the way through to Friday or Saturday, so we went golfing for the day at the local golf course which was good fun, also quite challenging though…The Canadian coach with us used to be the pro at this course as well so he wasn’t just our ski coach!

Things didn’t quite go to plan today, as we didn’t end up skiing because we decided the night before that the weather was most likely to be bad so it wasn’t worth it. We had a trip instead to Albury/Wodonga the nearest city, and played golf again at a fairly posh course in New South Wales. Golfing took most of the day, so we didn’t get back until about 7 O’clock, and for dinner we had a fondue, specially prepared for us at the hotel.

Monday 4^th September

For the rest of the week up until Friday we had three brilliant days of weather and so skied two days of GS gates on Ruined Castle, the medium terrain slope, and another day of GS on the steep slope. The plan was to do early morning training for the three days, but we only managed to do it on the Tuesday because the resort cancelled it after that. So on the Tuesday we got u there for 6 O’clock and had the entire Ruined Castle slope to ourselves for an hour and a half and so did Super G gate training. The training was really good, especially as the snow was hard, which was a change from what we were used to, as it was now pretty soft as soon as you started. At 8:30am we had to move on the other side of the fence because slope was now open to the public, so we switched to our GS skis and did gate training, at first doing skill exercises, and then finishing with some time trials.

Wednesday was pretty much the same apart from the early morning Super G training. Today we didn’t doing drills and exercises though, instead just running the course for a little while before time trials again. We didn’t bother doing too big a cool down after either as the snow was just ridiculously soft, and it was only about 12:30pm. On Thursday we moved on to the steeper slope, again, just running the course for a while before we did time trials once again to finish off with for a couple of runs. The snow was much harder on this slope, and the snow making was pretty good as well, no sign whatsoever of rocks, thankfully. We didn’t actually start gate training until 10:30am though because the French told our coach that they would train if we trained with, as well as the local race club because there would be too many people…so we negotiated with them, thus giving them an hour in the gates and then us an hour afterwards. On Friday the weather came in after a week long spell of sunshine, so we did about an hour of training stubbies down the flat slope before we decided enough was enough and headed down.

Because we were heading down the mountain by about 12:30, 1:00 we did fitness sessions in the afternoons, varying between weightlifting, plyometrics and games like football, tennis, squash etc. We also did tests in plyometrics like stand and jump, both vertically and horizontally to measure our progress.

We took the weekend off again due to continued rain, carrying on our fitness; this was now becoming a regular occurrence, and a resemblance of just how bad this season has been for the Australians. One of our training pistes had now nearly completely gone, and the amount of runs open at Falls Creek was rapidly dropping. On the Monday we went and played golf again at the local club, we were starting to become quite the pros!

Sunday 10^th September

Tuesday was our last day of skiing as we decided the snow was just getting too bad to accomplish anything from it in training, so we skied on the last available training piste which was the flat one, and did some drills to begin with in fast tight corridors in stubbies that we could barely make, followed by some fun dual slalom to finish off with. In the dual slalom we did both individual races, and team relay, which was good fun, but was ended by my spectacular fall which highlighted the softness of the snow. Tuesday night we got packed and ready to go on Wednesday morning, when we headed down to Phillip Island which is a couple of hours south of Melbourne. We stayed there Wednesday night and then went surfing on Smith’s Beach (renowned for its beginner surfers), the conditions were no better than that of a typical British seaside beach (wind and rain), but nonetheless we still had a brilliant time surfing and we were all standing up and turning by the end! After that we went to a wildlife sanctuary for an hour or two before heading up to Melbourne where we went to the cinema and stayed in a hotel for the night. On Friday we went shopping by ourselves, taking advantage of the exchange rate, and explored the many sights of Melbourne.

That afternoon we headed to the airport where we faced the ever harder task off trying to get two 20kg ski bags on to a planes as well as 35kg worth of luggage…In the end we somehow managed it after some re-calculations and corrections and many complications. Journey home in total took 52 hours because of a “technical fault” with the plane on the runway in Melbourne, meaning that our flight was cancelled until the next day. We then had to spend the next night in a hotel in Dubai because we had missed our connecting flight and had to wait until the morning. But eventually we got in a day later than originally planned.

Now I’ve got just over a month before my next camp which is with the England team in October in Saas Fee, so all focus is now on fitness, as well as school as I start sixth form.

Monday 7^th August 2006

Well as predicted, the bad weather came to Falls Creek and we ended up not skiing on the Monday, and instead chose to do two fitness sessions, one in the morning, and then one in the afternoon. The weather conditions were too bad to do any sort of beneficial race training. Our coach has recently come back from an Olympic weightlifting course, so he has been teaching us all the different moves and skills involved in this. The aim of this was to develop them over the weeks until our techniques are flawless, this obviously is an excellent form of weight training, especially when we are taught all the safety aspects and the dangers associated with weightlifting. Also, during a normal week, we participate in different sports like football, squash, tennis, water polo, and basketball etc, as this is a great away of improving our aerobic fitness levels, as well as other skills that are needed for skiing.

By Tuesday, the weather had cleared, and no clouds were to be seen in the sky in the morning at Falls Creek We trained slalom, and by the end of the morning were training slalom stubbies down a flatter slope. This turned out to be a good day’s training in difficult ruts, which are most likely to form at our races over the coming weeks (especially for our first year FIS racers).

Wednesday proved to be another bad day in regards to the weather, so we ended up free skiing, for around an hour until, and then headed down the hill to do some fitness in the afternoon. Thursday, also was a fairly bad day for weather, raining heavily and high winds, but we made the best we could of it, and skied some slalom stubbies down one of the steeper slopes. By Friday, the weather had once again cleared up and we had a great day of slalom training with a mixture of varied stubby courses (different radius turns in different courses), and then by the end of the morning, a full gate slalom course. This steeper slope was covered with snow making, so the snow conditions were very good, and the courses held up well.

Today was the by far the best day of training yet, due to the perfect weather and snow conditions. We trained with a group of French guys, one of which is the sister of Jean-Pierre Vidal. Some ruts had formed by the end of the morning but altogether it held up very well, considering the amount of people that had skied through the course. We also set up portable timing for the last few runs, just to get and idea of where we all were in relation to each other.

Falls Creek has the best snow depth in the whole of Victoria in the moment, but this week is forecasted to be sunny and cloudless without any snow at all so hopefully after this week there will be another big dump, as it will definitely be needed after this week of constant sunshine and high temperatures. This is also our last week of training before we move to Thredbo for four FIS races starting Monday next week, running through till Thursday, as long as the weather doesn’t intervene.

Read what Benn got up to in 2005 click here 

Benn is training with the Alpine Coaching Academy, for more information visit their web site: www.skifast.co.uk

If you have questions for Benn, please click here and we will pass them on and paste them on the site.