The 2024/25 Para-Snowboard season has kicked off again, this northern hemisphere winter is set to see events in the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Serbia(unconfirmed) and rounding out with World Championships in Big White Canada.
After missing last season due to injury, I started my comeback with Team Australia in Ruka Finland where we had our preseason training Camp. Ruka is 66 degrees north so at this time of year you only get around 5-6 hours of daylight so a lot of our time on the slopes was in the long evenings under floodlights.
It was early season so not much snow had fallen yet which made for some really variable and mostly icy conditions. This makes for some really good training conditions if you can snowboard on ice you can snowboard on snow. I recorded our training sessions via strava and in 3 weeks we clocked up over 300 runs and 38000 metres of vertical. To keep the body feeling fresh we did recovery sessions in the sauna followed by cold plunge in an ice cold frozen lake.
The camp passed quickly and pretty soon we were moving on to Snowworld in the Netherlands for the first competition of the season. Held indoors at a place affectionately known as “the freezer” we joined up with the rest of the team which included a few development athletes coming through.
After settling in at Snowworld we went and had a look at the banked slalom racecourse which had 14 banked turns over approx. 200metres from start to finish. On race day your allowed two runs with only your fastest time counting towards the end result.
I was happy to get back in the gates and make my return to international competition. After the training runs I decided to take the highline on the course as it felt the quickest. My two runs were within .1 of a second with my quickest time being 36.12s. Against some tough competition this was good enough to have me finish 7th out a field of 22.
My results were good enough to collect the required points to wild card into the world championships coming up in Big White Canada next March. So pretty happy with first leg of the season. Now it’s time for a short Christmas break at home before heading back to Finland for the next competition.
Thanks for reading!!