Pathways - Jeri Taylor [107]
Things hadn’t improved by the time he and Bruno transported to the top of the run. Even in his polytherm suit, Tom felt the cold, and he knew his muscles were tightening in response. He kept flexing and stamping on the ground to keep himself as limber as possible. He glanced over at Bruno, who didn’t seem affected by the weather.
“Don’t you even feel the cold?” Tom inquired.
“This isn’t cold,” Bruno replied mildly. “When the mucus in your eyeballs freezes—that’s cold.”
Four racers, from Austria, Peru, Canada, and Switzerland, preceded Tom down the course, with the Austrian clocking the best time at 2:21:63. This was well short of the world record of 2:20:04, which had been set over three hundred years ago when downhill racing was still a wildly popular sport.
Tom’s best time on this run was 2:22:87. He’d have to ski a personal best—by well over a second—in order to overtake the leader.
He crouched at the top of the run, within the starting hut, muscles tensed, determined to rise to this occasion. The cold faded away, as did any sense that other people occupied the space. For the seconds before the starter’s chime, Tom was alone on the mountaintop.
Then he was off, springing forward, driving to accelerate right from the top, then bending into a low egg position, shoes parallel, knees and feet apart, hands tucked together in front of his body in an effort to provide as little aerodynamic resistance as possible. He felt the adrenaline surge he always got at the top of a run.
Direction flags denoted the course boundary, red on the left, green on the right. But Tom knew the course by heart. He could stay tucked for nearly five hundred meters on a plunge that averaged a sixteen-degree incline and pick up good speed before he hit the first gates. Those would commence shortly after the first steep plunge of forty-one degrees, when speed had approached maximum.
It was one of those days when he felt at one with the whole experience: he was no longer aware of the cold or the wind, he saw no distractions in his peripheral vision. Skis and poles seemed natural extensions of his own body, and were controlled effortlessly. He felt fluid, jointless.
And yet he felt powerful, too. His legs were strong, as strong as Bruno’s, tireless, ready for whatever challenges lay ahead.
He approached the first of the “bumps” that would propel him airborne briefly. He wanted to spend as little time in the air as possible, as the line of travel while airborne is longer and eats up valuable tenths of seconds. He anticipated the jump carefully, knowing he had to time the prejump exactly: too soon and he might land before he had cleared the bump; too late and he would be thrown higher in the air than if he hadn’t jumped.
Just before he reached the lip of the slope edge, he drew his knees up beneath his body, lifting his shoes off the snow and clearing the edge at the lowest possible height. Then immediately, he stretched out his legs to get his feet back on the snow, flexing forward and downward to absorb the shock and acceleration.
Part of his mind said a silent “merci” to Odile for making him work on this maneuver, for he lost almost no time in the air. Almost immediately, he saw the first of the gates.
Control gates were set to limit average speed, and were marked with orange flags. They had to be at least eight meters wide, and he had to pass through them with both feet. The gates forced a skier into a series of turns, slowing him and forcing him to come out of the egg position in order to have better balance and quicker reactions on the turns.
Initiating turns at high speeds was easier than at slow speeds, because a racer’s higher kinetic energy supplied a lot of the turning force. But steering those turns was much more difficult, and that’s where the legs came into play. Muscle strength was essential to counteract centrifugal force produced by the turn and hold an accurate line.
As he swung into the series of gates, Tom realized that one of the things he loved about skiing was the effort it required. He