| Nukabira - January 2013 |
| January 7th 2013 |
My alarm was set for 3.15am on New Years Eve and we set off at 4am for our flight from Heathrow to Tokyo. On arrival at Heathrow we were advised that there was a problem with our aircraft and that a replacement was on its way but this would result in a delayed arrival into Tokyo - this meant that we would miss our domestic connection to Obihiro in the northern island of Japan. Sure enough, our 7am flight to Obihiro departed without us and we had a 5hr wait for the midday flight. We eventually arrived in Obihiro, picked-up the hire car and an hour and half later we were in Nukabira. After recovering from the initial shock of finding that we have no shower, toilet,, wash hand basin or even wadrobe in our room, we headed downstairs for the special New Year's Day dinner which consisted mostly of tiny fish dishes; generally raw or pickled!! We had 3 days of excellent GS training in Nukabira in extremely cold conditions of -22 degrees. The abundant quantity of snow coupled with the cold temperatures made the snow very, very grippy. My 2 races went really well thanks to a combination of excellent training, the right wax and the undoubted incentive of getting down the hill fast rather than hanging around in a cat suit in sub minus 20 degrees! In the first race, I scored 63.60 (just 3.43 seconds off the winner) and in the second race I scored 66.69, finishing in 17th place from bib number 31. This puts me on 65.15 points in GS!  After saying a fond farewell to our lovely hosts, we set off for Obihiro to catch our flight back to Tokyo. Looking foward to seeing what Shigakogen is like,  |