USASA Nationals - Giant Slalom Day

Today was GS day and the nice thing about it is it has a later start so Whitney could sleep in a bit and meet Chad at 8:30. The field was small, 12 registered but only 10 showed up to race. The top racers use hard boots and alpine race boards, which are different than Whitney's race board. Since Whitney isn't that serious about racing GS she's not willing to invest in a set of board, boots, bindings for GS.

Usually the GS races she's done have been two timed runs down the same course, fastest wins. This was different and I think they said it was World Cup format. This was parallel GS, which means that there's a blue course and a red course next to each other. One reason they don't do parallel races more often is slope space to set up two courses. A lot of resorts either don't have a wide enough slope to set a good parallel course or they don't want to close off that much terrain to the general public for most of a day for a race. So for this race they paired up the riders for the first two runs; each rider had one run on each course and it was against the clock, not the other rider. The riders were then ranked by combined times and Whitney was seventh, which was a pretty good spot. The six riders ahead of her all had FIS points, meaning they've been doing some sort of FIS sanctioned racing, so being seventh was good. She actually wasn't all that far behind the sixth place rider, .28 second, which is a lot in GS but not. I'm not 100% sure how it worked after the two timed runs but I think they took the top 8 riders, 1st vs. 8th, 2nd vs. 7th, etc. I thought it was a one run, first one down moves on, second one is out but Whitney said they had two runs so I'm not sure. The funniest thing is that the top ranked rider today is my age and that's who Whitney ended up riding against; she was the winner today.

Most important for today was that Whitney had fun. This was a race she doesn't really practice for, although she did more this year than she has in the past. It's an event she's done because her college asked her to but she likely wouldn't have otherwise. She's really good at it but it's not her love. A seventh place finish is something to be proud of.

USASA Nationals - Boardercross Day

Boardercross is the reason we come out to Nationals, it's Whitney's love. This year the field was smaller than usual, only 16 competitors. The good news is that they didn't cut anyone and took everyone to brackets and actually on race day there were only 14 riders.

The format at Nationals is a bit different, at least for what Whitney is used to in USASA races. They do time trials for seeding and yesterday they did two timed runs, faster run was the one they used for seeding. Whitney was faster on her first run but most everyone else was faster on their second run; after the first run she was in 8th but after the second she ended up being seeded 10th. From what I got she was riding really well, she was just a hair behind getting out of the start and just couldn't catch the other two girls in her heat and ended in third place so didn't make it to the next race. The good thing was that she got to race this year, some years she hasn't made it out of time trials. A bummer she didn't go farther since she's been riding really well. That's the way things go with bx though.

She had a good time, which is most important, and has been enjoying being coached by Chad again.

Today is GS day. The field is even smaller and she decided to do this kind of on a whim, we'll see how the day goes.