After the season is before the season: if you’re wondering what I’ve been up to between the end of last season and the start of the new race calendar, here are the answers.

In my head I’m already standing in the start hut, hungry for the new season. And it won’t be long now until the race calendar gets going again. But what happened between the old season and the new one? Do ski racers get withdrawal symptoms when they’re off the snow for a while? Not in my case. I deliberately take three months off skis, for three reasons: at the end of a season you don’t want to see skis anymore anyway; the break is necessary to get really hungry for skiing again; and it does the body good. Speaking of the body: just because the skis are locked away for three months doesn’t mean an athlete gets to lie around. At the beginning of May, about a month after the end of last season, physical training started. During the time without skis there are ten training sessions a week, plus training blocks with my private coaches. They work on my individual weaknesses and help me get rid of them. Like last year, the focus this year was on core and strength training. Since the beginning of August I’ve been training with the Austrian Ski Federation (ÖSV) and my teammates again. Even during the hardest sessions we have a lot of fun – we all get along really well. Skiing may be an individual sport first and foremost, but you shouldn’t underestimate team spirit.

With the team it’s back onto the snow, up on the glacier, where we mainly work on technique. The place is swarming with ski racers. Every training session is analysed on video so we can keep improving technically, and we try out different course settings. At first you do lots of runs – I started with nine a day – and then gradually reduce them to just three a day. The idea is to steadily increase quality and energy levels: from quantity to quality, so to speak. The real art is simulating different snow conditions, which by nature is hard on a glacier. But everyone has to deal with that, so it’s the same for all racers.

Speaking of other racers: I’m often asked whether I keep an eye on the competition or just focus on myself. Of course you look at the others a bit, but mainly at how they set up their skis. There are thousands of ways to find the right ski setup, the right grind, the right boot angle. It’s almost like Formula 1. Change the boot setting by just 0.5 degrees and it has a huge effect on your body position. So there’s a lot of tinkering and testing. My skis are custom-tuned for me – for example I ski with an 87-degree edge angle, and we tried all sorts of grinding techniques. As I said, there are countless ways to adapt the base tuning of a ski, and it’s fine-tuned depending on the surface. We made the most of the summer and everyone did a great job. We analysed last season’s races in detail, learned from the mistakes and took the positives with us. Now I’m glad it’s starting again, because I’m really hungry for my skis.

I hope you got a few impressions of my season preparation. From now on the excitement and focus build day by day until the first race.

So stay tuned and keep your fingers crossed for me.
Yours, Michi