Its taken about a full year of regular practice to get good enough to move up to the top and before Christmas I moved the last step up from corner 3 to the top. Ive since done about 10 runs from the top (before the track shut down for the Christmas break) and have even competed in the local BC Cup race and came in third... Well that's 3rd out of three contestants :)) so maybe not that impressive...
And on that note, it was in fact a pretty rough week at the track with another guy crashing hard at the same spot on the track (exiting corner 6 is where many of the crashes happen) and he broke his collar bone... Its a mean track when you slide from the top... You have to drive every corner, and if you get it wrong, you can get thrown about 3m in the air and come down onto rock hard ice at a speed of 80-100Kmh... Itll mess you up!
I don't think you could get thrown out of the track and you cant hit any obstacles head on, but dropping 3m onto ice from the prone position can and does do serious damage to the human body.
For myself though, Ive learned to respect the track and Ive been progressing slowly and carefully... But that style does not seem to be very prevalent in other sliders (like those to injuries I mentioned). It seems pretty obvious to me but when you have a rough run and your not sure exactly why then its probably best to take the next run a bit slower. Now its not like you have any brakes on the sled and in fact trying to slow down by dragging feet actually makes your sled very unbalanced and more dangerous (so mostly you should just let the sled run and keep driving it) but its the easiest thing in the world to not run as hard at the start and so have a slower run over-all... But no one seems to do that but me... Those two guys that got hurt... They had both had a series of five or six or more quite rough runs immediately before their crashes... all the warnings were there! But at the start of each run they were still sprinting flat out and trying to launch as fast as possible.... It makes no sense?
There seems to be a huge amount of testosterone in the sport... They seem to think that the most important thing is speed regardless of being out of control?... I think its because you can get away with it on most other sliding tracks where the speeds are lower by 15-25Kmh and your body can survive the hard bumps... but not at Whistler!... But still, if that's their attitude then I guess they got their just deserts!... one is now out for the season and the other for several weeks.
But like I said, I try to take a different approach... slow and careful. When I started from the top I chose a time when the weather was warm which made the ice soft and slow. And for my first few runs I started with zero speed and dragged my feet as much as I dared to keep the speed as low as possible (which as I mentioned can actually make things significantly more difficult it turns out). And Ive only just started to do a few jogging steps now before I lay down onto the sled, and it will still be another 10 runs or so before Im confident enough to realy start to go for faster starts.
My "zero speed and dragging feet" starts gave me a disadvantage of about 10-11 seconds from my friend Matt who has been sliding from the top for a few weeks longer than I have (and hes doing full sprint starts now). And then once I stopped dragging feet but still had a walking speed start it was down to about 5-6 seconds disadvantage. And now with a few jogging steps, my times are only about 1 second slower than his.
Matt loading onto his sled after a sprint start at the top of the track (picture credit Dave Eastwood)
But now we have had a couple of weeks off... It will be very interesting to see how I feel from the top when we get some really cold weather and the track gets fast... scary fast!... Im sure it will scare me then, and Im sure sooner or later Im gonna have a really rough run and probably come off the sled at some point. But when I do, Im not too proud to slow things down again and go back to a walking start. :)
