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Justin Taylor-Tipton Blog March/April 2022

Justin Taylor-Tipton Blog March/April 2022

Georgina Clark |

I started the month of March out in easily my favourite place to ski, Laax. At the beginning of the month, some more GB snowsports athletes came out with Coach Jamie Matthew to ski. This was so sick because there was now a little crew of us skiing together! We worked on both the jumps and rails. For rails we shredded the infamous P60 rail lap, this lap has a very long chairlift which can get freezing but it’s worth it for the 20 rail hits a run that you get. On a couple of the days we got sled laps for the jumps. Just in case you don’t get what I mean by ‘sled laps’ you ski down to the bottom of all of the jumps and then you get taken back up on a snowmobile/quad thing, they’re so sick and means you get more laps in in a short space of time. Around this time, because I hadn’t skied much before this, I was getting my jump tricks back and getting more comfortable on them.  

 

I then spent a week back home before returning back to Laax to train more, before going to the last competition of the winter. I was out in Laax for 2 weeks in the nice sunny weather, it was so nice and slushy. These 2 weeks were fun but I knew I had to train for the upcoming competition which definitely stressed me out a fair amount so after skiing I always gave myself time to wind down and destress. Not a lot of people know this about me but I struggle with anxiety so sometimes when I get stressed I struggle to do even the most basic of tasks. I have my ways of coping with it like listening to my favourite music (mainly 90s hip hop), watching movies, reading, meditation and using quotes I’ve found and written down. Because of this, the whole ‘relaxing’ thing after skiing is very important to me.

 

At the beginning of April I traveled from Laax to Corvatsch for the Swiss Champs. I woke up early on the practice day to travel there with my friend Jasper where we met up with our coach Murray. Because we traveled on practice day we didn’t start skiing until around 12 but we both did what we needed to get done. Then the next day we had slopestyle qualification. This being my first comp of the season I was obviously anxious but I just put my music in and did what I needed, laced my runs and ended up qualifying for finals so I was hyped. Finals was the day after so after qualies we went down, chilled, ate and Murray waxed skis for finals. Slopestyle finals were in the afternoon because the women's qualies were in the morning so we got a lazy-ish morning. I put down a decent first run and then panicked on my second so it was a little sloppy but my first run was clean and I ended up coming 10th in the slope comp so I was mad hyped, especially for the first comp  of the season. The day after was Big-air (my favourite one because it’s just 1 jump). I knew exactly what I wanted to do for my run (double cork 1440 mute grab) even though I hadn’t done it in a while. 4th run in practice came and Murray told me to give it a swing so I did and accidentally did a double cork 1620 for the first time but I wanted to stick with the double 1440. The practice was super windy conditions but luckily it calmed down for the actual competition. Unfortunately for me I didn’t put down the cleanest of runs, nearly catching my tip on the first run and then landing right leg heavy on the second, which meant that I didn’t qualify for the finals but I was still happy with myself.

 

 

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