My life has more or less officially shifted gears into the off-season. I have been out of competition mode for a few months now, but I was still hanging onto winter vicariously, watching races on WCSN and talking with all my teammates. I am starting to train again. It has been 4 weeks since my knee surgery so I have been back in the gym for about a week and a half or so. I am starting fairly slow, but it has been nice to be active again.

I went down to LA again to announce the “Nature Valley US Alpine Championships on Versus”. It was pretty fun and a great experience but way, way more difficult than the show I did with WCSN. Just a different format. WCSN was basically live so if you messed up you just corrected and rolled with it and all the timing was the rhythm of the race, which I am very used to.

This show was already “cut” with features we did not talk over and commercial breaks and interviews from the finish, but we did not know when those were coming up in the program. They would just appear… and we would mess up and start that section over. Steve Porino and I spent most of our time trying to end our comments and pass it off to Caroline Lalive in the finish or to commercial break or whatever in the right amount of time. It was tough.

Luckily, Porino had most of the “welcome to the US Alpine Championships intros….” and “passing duties” but I had to be on my game as well — passing back and forth on comments with Porino as well as coming up with something relevant to say for everyone. It ended up being tough to focus on the skiing. We ended up watching each racer at least 3 times on course, so the “live feel” was diminished a bit. By the end, I didn’t have any idea what I had said for a guy at the top of the course since we had done so many takes in different stages along the way. I hope it came off ok. We ended up in the studio for 5 hours to put a 45-minute show together. I made my flight back to Seattle out of Burbank by minutes. I showed up to the airport (outside) 10 minutes before the flight left. They were calling my name as I ran to the gate…it was tight.

The show aired on Sunday on Versus…I missed it. Anyone out there see it? How was the show?

If I sucked but the show was great, or any combination there of, you can tell me. I will be fine with that.

I am also working on my medical bills…it is awful. I might have a rant on that coming up soon. We will see how long I can take it.

Enjoy the transition into spring!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 7:10 am and is filed under scottmacartney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.