Park City

I spent the past week hanging out in ritzy Park City, UT watching bobsledders and skeleton athletes go flying down ice covered tracks down the side of mountains. I made a pit stop during my trip from Minnesota to San Diego to support my girlfriend, Mia, during her team trials for U.S. World Cup team. It was an impressive week watching everyone run and push 400+ lb. sleds down ice tracks. Hanging around my girlfriend all week gave me an inside look into everything that is involved with the sport. It is quite the production!

Everyday the athletes get to track and start at the bottom of the mile long length of ice track. They start their track walk hours before they actually start sliding to go over the curves and turns and dips. This helps them to get a good mental image of the track and visualize what they are about to drive on at over 80mph! It's pretty amazing. Once they start sliding they get to runs down the track which takes about an hour and a half total depending on the amount of athletes training.

During race day everything is a frenzy. The day before was spent sanding runners. Runners are the blades of steel that the bobsled rides on down the ice. Runners are very complicated from my perspective. To me they are just pieces of metal, to bobsledders they are incredibly important. First of all, the metal needs to be blemish free. There can be no nicks or scratches. It is the smoothest metal I have ever seen. Bobsledders spend hours sanding these steel blades to perfection. They use all kinds of different grades of sandpaper to get the steel ultra smooth. After the blades are sanded, acetone is wiped across the runners to clean them. After the runners have been finished they are basically untouchable. I was not allowed by Mia to handle the runners very much, and if I did, I had to use extreme caution. It was stressful.

The competitions just finished today. There were two days of competitions, with a total of four runs down the hill. Mia did a great job with the equipment she was given to use this year. Not all sleds are created equal which really minimizes ability to get a fair and accurate measure of any individuals skills. It is a long and frustrating problem to explain, but there is a issue that needs to addressed in that sport. I am very proud of Mia though for all the hard work and commitment she has put into her sport, she is a very inspirational woman an amazingly gifted athlete.

Here is a cool video of bobsledding. It is of a 4 man bobsled team. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofzbV9-Nyag


My week long pseudo vacation has come to an end and now it is time for me to get back to work. Tomorrow morning I will be driving 11 hours from Park City to San Diego. It is tough to leave this comfortable resort I have been staying at, but I need to keep from getting soft mentally and physically! I am very excited to start up a new season of training. The only bad thing about leaving tomorrow, which is a Sunday, is...I'm sure you can guess...yup, I will be missing the Viking and Steelers game. It's going to be a long drive...