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!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 8:42 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.