Saturday, July 2, 2022

20k3

We're in the Salt Lake City airport returning from a very pleasant trip to Park City, Utah. While we were on vacation, we engaged in various mountain adventures.

One highlight was a tour of Utah Olympic Park, site of the 2002 Olympic Ski Jumping, Bobsledding, and Luge Competitions. Our guide was two-time Olympian Casey Larson. He told us he is 5'10 and 135 pounds. These stats were relevant to our tour because ski jumpers are better if they're very small. The minimum BMI for men is 18.5, which is not a very big BMI. I wanted to ask, but did not, about the prevalence of eating disorders among ski jumpers.

In addition to these facts about jumping, I discovered that luge is the most dangerous of the winter sports. Conversely, Casey claims that ski jumping has the lowest rate of injury. I specifically asked about regular cross country skiing, as I was skeptical of the safety of launching oneself off a ramp into the air. But Casey said that even though they're going fast down that very steep jumping ramp, they're not that high above the ground in their flying squirrel positions. He also said that the regular nordic skiiers are more prone to overuse injuries.

Later, I got to ride a tube down the ski jump hill (not the ramp part, but the part you land on out of the air). It was extremely steep and scary, and I screamed the whole way down. I had to wear a helmet to do that, so it seemed plenty dangerous to me.

Now that I'm finished with vacation, I'm committing to writing 20 thousand words in the next three weeks on my fourth novel. So, there will likely be a whole lot of blogging along with that.

1 comment:

LH said...

Wow. What a cool field trip.

I would like to go there.

I don't ski, but I like learning new things.

Welcome home and Write on!