So here we are: the first big important competition is over, what I trained for all summer has come and gone and now it's time to shift focus to the next one. But first I'm going to tell you all about my emotional National Qualifier experience.
(yay!)
National Qualifier this year qualifies the people who didn't make Olympic trials for Canadian Open aka national team selections #1. Basically this year I had to finish somewhere around top 12 to make Canadian Open.
The first day (Thursday) we skated the preliminary rounds of the 1500 and 500 to qualify us for the final rounds which would be later in the weekend. Only 14 skaters in the 1500 and 12 in the 500 out of 48 made it to the final rounds on the first day. This should have been completely do-able for me since I went in to the competition ranked 9th but then in the first race of the day, the first round of the 1500s I fell.
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| posted to my tumblr shortly after the fall |
I tend to be a rather emotional skater so after this happened I was rather upset. I will admit that I cried and I saw my chances of skating Canadian Open fading off into the distance. At one point I walked by the coaches box and told the coaches to yell at me so I would stop crying because I still had to skate 500s later in the day. I managed to make it through to the top in the 500 even though it's not my best distance and then day 1 was over.
The second day (Friday) was 1500 day. Because I didn't make the top on Thursday I had to skate what's called the repechage. Basically everyone who didn't make it through on Thursday skated three extra rounds and the top 4 from that got to compete against the top 14 in the final rounds. I made it out of the repechage and then had an amazing race to get me into the A final and ended up 6th overall in the 1500 (even though I was so tired from skating three more rounds than everybody else in the final that I didn't really do much).
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| (after making it out of the semi and into the A final) |
I finished 9th in the 500 after a kind of uneventful Saturday and then 5th in the 1000 on Sunday. In the 1000 final (and also last race of the competition) I had what was probably the best race of my life winning the B final when almost no one expected me to.
I ended the competition in 6th overall and earned myself a spot in Canadian Open next month. All in all the competition was probably one of the best ones I've ever had and while I'm currently physically and emotionally drained I'm still buzzing over how well it went and excited for the races coming up.
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| text message I sent to my friend Monday after the competition |
