First off, I would like to thank Sue Manter for taking care of me forthe last few days. We, Team SRI (Ski Racing International), reallyappreciated your company and generosity.

The last few days at the Loaf were great. Winning a few races was abig confidence booster; yet more importantly, lessons were learned. Ilearned a great deal about finding the thin line between fast skiingand imminent devastation on the race course. Basically the key, in myview, is finding the one or two problem sections of each course andbeing able to slow down in those sections while still going fullthrottle in the others. Finding the thin line has been an ongoingprocess for the past year so it is nice to see some progress. It'snot perfect yet, but it's a step in the right direction.

Tuesday in the GS I found the happy medium. This line choice wasdefinitely slower in certain sections, but it was fast on the day. Wewon the race by nearly 1.4 seconds and scored a 16 point race (whichis a personal best in GS). The most exciting part of the day wasseeing SRI dominate the top 5. Mark Heinrich Wallace was 3rd and ChrisFrank was 4th.

Yesterday we raced Super G, which is a bit straighter than GS andallows each racer to negotiate turns at a much faster clip- which isalways a fun. After some fast skiing we were lucky enough to win therace by barely beating out some good competition (two tenths of asecond).

All and all, we walked away with some good hardware and as a smarter skier.Now it's time to hit the malls and finish shopping for season.

MerryChristmas, Happy Hanukah, and all the rest!

Take care, w