We’ve been back in the states since Wednesday. It’s certainly nice to be home, but I miss skiing everyday. Nonetheless, out of the last four days down under only one was worth skiing. The final slalom race of the Japanese series was cancelled due to lightning, then we had one good day of training with U.S. guys, and the next two days were warm and foggy making the snow too soft and rotten to ski.

But all and all, it was a great camp. I am officially on Head skis. I have a couple pairs of Bode’s now, but I’m going to get more, softer skis, in October. Sam and I had a great camp with the Treble Cone and now we’re on the same page with most things. We still have to dial in our tuning and waxing work between us, but there will be plenty of time to do that before the races start.

Now it’s time to hammer out the final stage of dryland (more intense lifting and less cardio), dial in the season schedule, finish up budgeting, and make sure we have a huge golf tourney.

Hope all is well, w

It’s probably difficult for all of you – in the northern hemisphere – to think about skiing right now, but that’s all we’re doing down under. It’s good to be back in the gate. We’ve been racing for the last three days (two in GS and one slalom). The snow is pretty soft on the hurdle where we’re racing. The first day I skied alright, but wasn’t able to follow our plan in the soft snow and ended up finishing 7th.

Yesterday, I was drew 3 so I was able to put together a solid first run before the snow started to break through and was up on the field by half a second. On second run, I took a pretty conservative approach on the top in the soft snow, but was able to put together some good turns on the bottom and hold onto the victory by four tenths. It was nice to pick up an early season win, but I was totally psyched to put together a mediocre second run and still be right in there. On my Atomics last season I really struggled on seconds runs so it felt good to ski not great and still be in there. Either way, when the snow is harder the Heads are really good skis.

Today we raced slalom on the same hill and I ended up blowing out after letting my skis run a little too much during the first run. David Chodounsky put together two solid runs and won.

Anyway, tomorrow we have one more day of slalom, a day off, and three days of training with the US guys on some injection before we fly home for another couple days of summer.

Hope all of you are getting your Olympic fix; we’ve been watching a ton down here. I can't believe there are only three more days. Hope all is well, w

I love New Zealand. Every thing down here just seems to work out. When I flew out of Boston two weeks ago I left with a rental car reservation, no slalom skis, only two pairs of Atomic GS skis, and a wall post on facebook tell my buddy Paul Frankham I was in need of housing down under. My only real concern was that I didn’t have many pairs of skis. That all changed the moment I landed in Auckland and ran into Rainer Salzbeber, the race director for Head skis. Within twelve hours Tschunti, Bode’s GS and slalom technician, sent me up for my first day on snow with two pairs of GS skis to try. And for the last two weeks he’s been preparing two pairs of Bode’s skis for me every day- I’ve been mighty spoiled down here.


Sam Damon, Team Maximum Velocity’s Head Coach, flew into town a few days late, but it worked out well because I then had enough time to dial in accommodations before he arrived. We’ve had some great training down here with Treble Cone Race Academy and with their connections we were even able to train with the Austrian men for a day. Having Sam has already proven to be a huge asset and we’ve been dialing everything in. I’ve had 11 days on snow and today is our second day off and travel day over to Queenstown to dive into four days of racing at Coronet Peak starting with GS tomorrow. We’ve been hammer pretty hard with skiing and dryland workouts and the Head skis are pretty sick so the next four days of racing should be a good time.

Hope all is well. We’re racing again. w