Lately I have been mostly traveling. I went to Tofino, BC on Vancouver Island for a week on a surf trip with my brother. Lots of multi-sport days up there. Surfing in the morning, bike ride in the afternoon, some more surfing, a round of golf. Overall the surf was mellow, but really fun. We had a couple awesome mornings where the wind was quiet or even a bit off-shore with some nice shoulder-high waves. Other days were more of a battle to get long rides, but we always rewarded with at least some decent rides each session. Water temp was cold, but not that bad so long as you had the right gear. For me that is a 4-3-2 with a hood, gloves and booties, but with all that, you could do a couple hours in the water no problem.

I recently got SCUBA certified, so I added a dive to my afternoon activities one day. Since you are not as active paddling with SCUBA, we were in 7mm suits with an additional 7mm jacket/shorty. So you end up with 14mm around your core and upper thighs, then the whole bootie/ hood/gloves set up as well. By the time you got on the BCD and your tank, fins and everything else you needed 20-some pounds of weight to actually sink. It was a bit unwieldy, but not bad once we were in the water.

The visibility was okay, but not amazing. We ended up seeing a ton of really cool stuff, you just had to keep fairly close and make sure your buddy didn’t get too far away. At the beginning of dive one, we were trying to get around this point and into this channel between two islands but the current was quite strong and was swirling, so it was kind of a big back-eddy going in the opposite direction of the main current. We tried to power through and I believe we were almost there, but our dive master gave the signal to turn around. I was working so hard against the current, in addition to being a new diver, so had I sucked down almost all of my air by that time. Katie and the two dive masters had a bit left, so after we re-grouped and got around the point on the boat, they had another segment. I ended up just doing some snorkeling until dive 2.

Dive two was a lot better and I really enjoyed seeing all the sea life. Tons of starfish and crab (many dungeness well over eating size), but the highlight were these huge annemies in large pockets together like miniature forests. They were large, some about two feet tall, with huge white cauliflower tops and thick stalks. Really cool to check out and when you were in a large group of them together, the effect was surreal.

More to come on my other adventures. Lots to catch you all up on!

I just finished a very busy week. I went to Park City, UT for some physical testing with the team, along with some meetings with our coaches. After that, I flew to LA to take part in a series of interviews that NBC and the US Olympic Committee organized. It was pretty incredible to be honest. We showed up at 8am and we were assigned a handler. At first I didn’t think I would need a handler, having never needed one in the past. After 10 minutes moving around the various stations set around the studio, I was relying on my handler to remind me of my name. They were there to make sure we were in the place we were meant to be, at the right time and wearing or holding the appropriate attire, helmet and goggles or ski. There were a dozen or so stations, each set up and properly lighted, focused and sound checked. The athletes would show up and stand on the marked line or sit in the chair and it was right to “Action”.

Most of the stations were really fun- well prepared interviews or photo shoots with people running around fixing your collar or taking the shine off your forehead. A few were a touch painful, either reading cue cards or repeating a 5 word line over and over with various inflections of pairs of words. “It takes MORE than… dedication.” vs “It takes more…than dedication” and so forth, if you catch my meaning. Those were less fun, and you felt silly repeating the same sentence over and over until you made mistakes saying “Scott Macartney, Two time Olympian in Alpine Skiing. Watch me in Vancouver” Alpine Sleeing isn’t what I do?

It was crazy though, going from interview to interview for about 6 hours straight. I had to leave early to get back to Park City for these Board meetings, but I was told other athletes had an even longer day in front of the camera- more like 10 plus hours for some.

I am the Alpine Athlete Rep to the USSA Board, so I went to Park City to attend a set of meetings. It is pretty fun and rewarding to be apart of both the Athletes Council and also the Board as a whole. It is much better to try to help fix problems than just complain about them. There were several sets of meetings I attended and then snuck in workouts in the new Center of Excellence- the new home to the USSA.

I have to admit it is a pretty amazing place. Great facility for both recovery and training. I spent some time both on the new aqua-jogging system that helps your transition into plyometrics and running after injury, and on some new bikes that automatically adjust the resistance to keep the wattage the same at different RPM’s. Cool stuff.

Now it is time to get things going here in Washington. Enjoy the spring!

There was supposed to be a picture of me with the beard in my last blog that didn’t make it. I have since shaved it off (getting too itchy) but it was fun to have for a while.

Other than beard growing, I spent some time this past weekend with Special Olympics in Washington. They had their winter games over in Wenatchee (eastern Washington) and had a number of events- skiing, snowboarding, nordic, ice skating and even basketball. I was the “Grand Marshall” of the opening ceremonies and gave a short speech and met a lot of the athletes. It was fun and really cool to be a part of it. Aside from the opening ceremonies speech, I also helped out at the awards ceremony. I helped hand out gold, silver and bronze medals to the athletes who were competing in various ice skating events. I went up to Mission Ridge and watched a few runs of their giant slalom before it got so windy it was unclear if they could continue in the afternoon. They didn’t need me for anything specific, so I decided to head down to Wenatchee and check in with some of the other events, which is how I ended up at the skating events.

All in all it was a really fun weekend and it was great to see all the athletes thoroughly enjoy their time and opportunity to compete. That group tends to have a really great attitude about life and lots of smiles.

Other than that I have been on the rehab trail. I am getting in the pool quite a bit now that I am cleared to do so. I also can do some biking with no resistance on top of the usual stuff- the core (stomach and back) that I usually do. My knee is coming along slowly but surely.

I am already looking forward to getting even more active over the next few weeks! Onward!

So here is the latest from me: I have grown a recovery beard- kind of like a playoff beard in hockey. I actually haven’t shaved since my injury in Wengen. It is kind of fun and friends seem to tolerate it- so far. I think there are several beard growing phases, categorized by the look. First you just look busy, the 5 o’clock shadow. After a few days- lazy. After that you have the “don’t need to shave for my job/ unemployed” look. After unemployed for a few weeks, I believe you hit “homeless”. I think I am just about there.

Next week I get to start more activity- which I am really looking forward to. I have lost about 18lbs from my high in Wengen. I could start a diet trend “Southbeach ACL” maybe. “lose 15lbs without exercise- pounds will melt away before your eyes! I lost more than that in 3 weeks and lost inches off my legs and hips- with no exercise!!!”. I’ll get the guy who is always yelling about some cleaning product to pitch it for me. In small type shown very quickly near the end I will note that your results may vary. And that weight lost was all muscle mass. That will be in even smaller type shown even quicker.

I see it as the new diet trend*!

All that aside I have been enjoying Universal Sports on TV at home. I am lucky- in the Seattle area it is free on over-the-air broadcasting. Channel 5.2.

It’s been great to watch my teammates in action, same day. World Cups, World champs… feel like I am in Europe!

Take care- thanks for reading.

I haven’t blogged in a while. I haven’t felt like I had a lot to add since I am out of skiing for a while. Over the last week or so, I have been talking with people who have told me that I need to anyway, that hearing about the underbelly of the sport, the rehab of injuries is just as valuable to hear.

So I have decided to update what I am up to and be more honest about this side of the sport, at least from my perspective.

Since my crash in Wengen in January, I have been a combination of busy and bored. Initially, I crutched through the airport in Munich, to catch my flight home, stayed at home for a day, then flew out to Vail to get my surgery. I flew out alone as my parents were still in Europe- they couldn’t change their ticket or hotel plans for anything approaching reasonable. My girlfriend couldn’t come either. In their defense, I encouraged them not to come- it just wasn’t going to be that exciting. I drove a rental car around, through a snowstorm in Vail. It is my left knee, so I could drive an automatic. Vail was finally getting some snow after a few weeks of clear skies.

Surgery went well, got a new ACL from a cadaver graft and had my meniscus repaired. Dr. Sterett did the honors. He is the head team doctor for the US women and has worked on me a few times, in addition to squeezing me into his day this time. That meniscus repair was the biggest part of the surgery and remains the dictator of my rehab plan moving forward. I then spent a four day block staying at Randy’s house, one of the doctors I know in Vail. Randy has traveled with us quite a bit, most recently in La Parva, Chile and is an amazing supporter of the team. He put me up and even brought me some dinner in the middle of the couple dozen surgeries he probably did that weekend.

Aside from the amazing support we tend to get at Steadman-Hawkins, surgery is never fun. I miscalculated my ability to wait until I returned for a second rehab appointment (the day after surgery) to pick up my prescriptions. The nerve block wore off while I was away from the hospital and I headed back to the clinic early to pick them up, but not before I was nearly reduced to tears driving to the clinic. I have had a few surgeries before (6 previous) and I have never felt like that before. Dr. Sterett told me that was to be expected with the extent the meniscus needed repair. That was was when I was at my scheduled follow up that afternoon, of course.

All in all it went well. Most painful rehab I have had so far, even worse than my hip surgery two years ago. Instead of easing off the drugs in under a week, I was still popping them to get a couple hours of sleep.

As I was driving back to the Airport in Denver and watching a small SUV that I had just passed fishtail across the highway and then careen off into the median, I realized that I was still pretty lucky. Things could be worse.

When Daniel Albrecht crashed on the exact same jump that I did in Kitzbuhel, almost exactly a year to the day later, I felt for him- in a way that no one else could I am sure- since I had been there. I had been there recently. As the weeks progressed after that accident and he remained in his coma I found myself thinking something I knew and had said but hadn’t really been proved to me so dramatically. I had been lucky. I knew it at the time, but in comparison, getting away from that crash with what I did started to look really good. I guess it is all in your perspective.

So things could be worse. (Say with a positive flair in voice)

So as most of you know, I am out with a knee injury. I had a crash in Wengen in the downhill on race day. It was lame on so many fronts. Not a particularly difficult section of the course, one that ran fairly easy in training and just an awkward fall when I got back off the jump. I gave it little respect after how it ran in training and it obviously deserved a bit more. Since I am just out of surgery and would rather not talk about injuries right now, I am going to go back to my break over New Year’s at Crystal for some better memories.

It snowed about 7 feet in 9 days and I skied great powder with my friends and family for 4 straight days. Crystal cut some new runs and has a new back-country lift in the last two years, and the skiing was epic. I had to dig my car out from the car-shaped blob it was hiding under when it was all over, but it was completely worth it. Choking on the light powder as I made thousands of feet of powder turns seems like a good memory to end on today.

Hello!

Lots to report on as the last few races have been a step up. First, Val Gardena: It was an epic and historical weekend for the US team. We put 5 guys in the top 10 and 6 in the top 15. All the US starters in the DH scored points (top 30). It was awesome to have the team ski so well as a group and enjoy the success together.

For me, it was bittersweet. I was 15th, which is nice and solid, but I was expecting more. I had good training runs, was feeling fast and felt like I had good touch on the snow, good feel for carrying speed. On race day I was a bit unlucky with wind, as were some of the other guys. I had also tasted success on this course just last year. The start was lowered to the reserve start, just a few hundred meters down from the regular start, but it took away the one key section giving you speed on the top flat, assuming you nailed it. You pretty much went out of the gate, dropped in your tuck and hoped that your ski tech had hit the wax right. It made the wind a bit more of a factor than usual up there.

That said, I still skied the Ciaslat the best I had to that point, and skied well in most places. Had a bit of a bobble on the bottom that cost me time, but overall it was a solid race.

After that we celebrated a bit out on the town in Val Gardena, then packed up and headed to Paganella for some rest and training, do some Christmas shopping before we headed to Bormio.

Bormio was impressive this year. It was probably the toughest I had seen it any year I have been at the race. They had plenty of snow this year, but for some reason they considered opening the hill to the public for a few days and then slipping it out while setting the gates preparation. It rained on the bottom 4 days before we arrived, which must have been a tough call as to what to do, so they left it until the race started. The course setter also added more swing to the course, making the turns further across the hill in a few sections. It was hard to tell if the purpose was to control the speed (intention to make it safer?) or to test our fitness (made the course even more tiring).

For those of you that don’t know Bormio’s vertical drop is about 3180ft in just over two minutes. There are no long flat sections, so you are constantly turning over bumpy and icy terrain the entire time. The bottom pitch would not normally be extremely difficult, it just comes after your legs have been burned by lactate into a gelatinous heap. Quite a few racers found the fence down there, which is never a good thing.

On race day I made a huge mistake up on top of the course, getting high-sided out of a relatively easy (but high speed) turn. I nearly missed the next gate and was last on the speed trap on the next turn. I kept my act together, which I was happy about in retrospect and skied the bottom solidly, with top 10 and top 15 splits to finish. I ended up 21st, which isn’t incredible, but I took it gladly considering the mistake and my sordid history with Bormio. I had never scored points there.

With that, went home to take a break, rest and get some workouts in, kind of regroup for the rest of the season. Looking forward to Wengen, Kitzbuhel and Garmisch!

Hello-

So ends another extremely busy week for the Alpine men in Beaver Creek. The load on the team really extended from Lake Louise, where our only day off was a travel day and a 5am wake up to get to the airport. I finally have a few moments to bring everyone up to speed on what has been going on with me.

In the skiing arena, I had some good training up in Lake Louise but had poor race days. I was on the good side of some weather on the last training day, where I was 5th, and on the wrong side of some weather on the race day. It was actually a bit of a joke. The first 10 or so guys had good light and little wind, then the clouds came over, blocking the sun and the wind picked up. The wind was mostly uphill on the flat section in the middle, so between that and the really flat light, the times were affected greatly. No one ranked in the top 7 in the world finished better than the mid-teens in the race, last year’s overall DH champion Cuche didn’t end up in the top 30. I started in the late twenties and made some mistakes and was well off the pace. The whipped topping of the day was that at number 55 or so the sun came out again and 7 guys scored in the top 30 from there, with bib 64 getting second place. Good skiing, for sure, but certainly a generous helping from good light and favorable wind.

The SG was more fair, consistently flat-light for everyone, but I went out at the “Fall-Away” section of the course.

Needless to say I was excited to put something more solid together for Beaver Creek, on home soil and with friends and family there supporting me. We ended up having just one training run, with both the second training run and the Super-Combined canceled due to too much snow. I missed two gates on that one training run (along with 30-some other racers) which wasn’t the best feeling for a single opportunity on the hill.

As the race days approached, I found myself having to deal with another issue: the press. I generally get along with the press fairly well. I know that they are just gathering good material for their stories and trying to find interesting aspects of both skiing and the athlete to present to their readers or their viewers.

I just finally had it with the constant questions about Kitzbuhel and how I was feeling. I am moving on from that, which I have to do in order to ski the way that I want to. Further, I wanted to put that behind me to have a clear mental approach to current races and yet I was finding myself drawn back to those issues by every reporter I talked with, every day. Requests to run them through the crash again, or what it was going to be like to get back in a downhill, or “if that was going to be the defining moment of my career” or “what if you don’t come back” “do you think you will still have it”… all started to grate on me. “How are you feeling?” became the opener, with an imploring look qualifying as a follow up question.

So half way through the first media visit after my first training run at Beaver Creek I decided I was moving on, including talking with the media about that particular point in the past.

I actually felt refreshed and feel like it turned into another step in my comeback. The next two races helped as well. I ended up 21st in the DH, with really not that great skiing on the top, then some solid skiing on the bottom. I realized half way down that I needed to be looking for speed and driving and not let the course ski me. The SG was another step up, with some really good sections, a few mistakes, but a good attack from the back. I ended up 24th starting 46th.

Right now we are training SG on the race hill in Beaver Creek. We got a bit of soft snow, but we still got some great training in. We have one more day, then it is off to Europe and one of my favorite venues- Val Gardena!

First off, I have some pretty cool news. I am now the “Mountain Ambassador” for Crystal Mountain! I grew up at Crystal and have been skiing there my whole life, so it is a natural fit and a great opportunity to represent my home mountain. I end up skiing at Crystal whenever I am back from racing during the year. When I am lucky, I get to break out the big sticks and enjoy the powder in the back country.

I have a few events in the works at Crystal which should be pretty cool. I am planning a “Ski with Scott” day where I will take a small group around the mountain, give feedback and ski tips, do drills or just rip around depending on what people want to do. I did this a few years ago and donated the money to a cancer charity on behalf of my mother and I will again donate the proceeds to charity from this event. I will probably split it between a Cancer charity and the non-profit we started, WinterSolutions (formerly SFI). Should be cool!

Moving on, I am in Copper, Colorado right now in the middle of our last training camp before the season starts up in Lake Louise. The conditions have been good here, but it is always tough training. We train from 6:30am to 9:00am before the lift opens to the public. It is usually still dark the first run, then slowly gets lighter as we warm up. It is mostly light by 7:30am, which is the time we get started on the course. We set speed in the morning, so we take up the whole run… and that whole run is the only run on the bottom of the mountain, so we have to be done by the time the lift opens so people have somewhere to ski. We have been doing double sessions, GS afterward either at the upper lanes in Copper, or over in Loveland. By the time we are off the mountain just after noon, it seems like it should be 3pm.

Training is going well… I could be faster, but I am dialing in boots and testing a lot of different set-ups that I might use during the season. Been spending a lot of time on the boots and have a couple of different things that might work.

I have three more days of SG to end the camp, so I am hopeful that I the best set-up will show itself before then!

Hello!

A few fun things to talk about this week. The ski season is right ahead of me, which is exciting. I have been spending lots of time in the gym, doing PT and at Athletic Engineering (AE) classes, which Olympic PT offers. I do my usual work outs on the bike and in the gym and then once or twice a week I go and get my butt kicked by Ben at “AE.” We do a lot of circuit training with a lot of core and balance. It is good to mix it up. Feeling good though and ready to go to Colorado for some on-snow training!

I do have to mention that I had a ridiculous opportunity last weekend that Audi offered Ted, Marco and me. I flew down to Sonoma, CA and rallied the new Audi R8 around the Infineon raceway. After some instruction in the class room, we started out with some cone drills, a slalom and some larger radius turns to get a feel for the car off track on this clear flat area. I chose the manual transmission, which took a few starts and shifts to get used to, but it was awesome on the track. I drive a manual at home, so it was just getting used to the power.

Our instructor would lead us around the track so we could follow his line and see where he was breaking and generally learn the track. It turned out to be really nice because we learned the track pretty fast and there were sections that I would have been more cautious in that he would hammer through and there were sections that I would have hammered into that he came in slower to get the line on the exit. We followed him (and each other) the whole time, but he started pushing it a bit more each lap. It was also a bit wet, so he would be pushing it as the track was drying out.

All in all though, it was amazing. Racing around a pretty rare and exotic powerful car, pushing its limits, getting some four-wheel drift and correcting our driving mistakes as we went. The biggest thing was learning how much this car could handle. With good driving and a smart line, the R8 would hold on very strong to the radius. There were some pretty obvious similarities between racing cars and skiing. The apex, line and general strategy is all pretty similar.

I am off to Colorado soon. My next update will be on snow!