Windy City

11th Sept 2010

Hey Hey hey!! Here’s koo providing your weekly update on the good times I have been having. So I ended up spending a few days resting my knee as the mountain was closed on Monday and Tuesday, we did some indoor training looking at Pedagogy again writing session plans etc..etc.. It was really good. Didnt do much else on the closed days apart from hang with Josh and chill with other people.
The training commensed on Wednesday with a full on day of freeriding it was good but I am getting increasingly worried about my standard. I am consistently doing the same things wrong, I will correct them short term but my old habits start creeping into my riding...I need to focus and practise more when I get the opportunities, however with the closed days the opportunities to consolidate and freeride on my own are few and far between. I need to learn how to ski properly as well as I am fully booked for my ski level 1 examination at the end of this winter. We shall see how that goes, it will be a great achievement coming out of this winter with a certification to my name. On Thursday we spend the day training doing our on snow pedagogy sessions. I got some good feedback from my session and found out it was at level 3 standard and would have passed! I was pretty stoked. The only thing that tainted it, was I picked an easy method of presentation as subject matter for my session, and Rob had to steer me into doing a couple of things into doing the session but all in all my delivery worked well and I got to where I needed to be. I now need to nail level 3 riding and teaching and practise other sections of pedagogy.
Josh managed to break his ankle on Thursday which sucked, because he has another 2 weeks here with not alot to do and its going to make getting home very difficult in terms of carrying things!! On the plus side he has integrated really well in Ohakune and made some good friends, he is going out and meeting people and generally having a good time. Socially I havent been out much I have been super tired. There was a night on Wednesday where a producer called Dick Johnson was in town and he was playing some really good elektro! We had a good throw down and I called it quits early.
Teaching has been going good, I was on schedule on Friday and was released with no lessons today because of high winds. I got 3 hours on Fri which was cool. 2 really good hours with South Wellington School kids – 5 of them, and 1 hour private lesson with a kid called Ethan. Both were really progressive and fun, I am starting to really enjoy the teaching side of things for sure.
Not much else going on really, I got my contract through for Japan and I am getting paid really good, started looking into flights which I must book soon as the BA sale ends in a few days. Toby has a friend over called Anna and she is pretty rad, definitely good at Baking and is a lot of fun to have around the house.
My knee is worrying me, I am in a bit of pain a lot I went to the physio and its a meniscus problem, I should really lay off the crazy gym programme, but I am really feeling good results from the training I have been doing and I feel so much stronger. Its not massively severe I just need to keep it moving, I reckon the time between here and Japan I can get it fixed and sussed!!
My new board has arrived in the UK – Ride society UL 154 – very excited its going to be my destroyer in Japan!
Thats all folks