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