I am Kat & this is my blog of day to day randomness

Happy birthday!

Well not all of it, but 2 slices

Smells so good

I love new snowboarding kit, new pants and a new board :-) stoked

Moo, originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway.

I love this shot, it reminds me of the postcards my Grandparents used to send me when they went on trips back home to Scotland

A bad music day!

I've mentioned before that I'm a bit odd when it comes to music, but recently I've been playing with Blip.fm the great thing about Blip is that as my friends listen to music and blip it I can listen to what their listening to, either by being on the Blip site and listening to what ever comes up or by seeing their Blips appear in the other social networks I use (Twitter, Jaiku etc) and if I spot something I like the look of then I can click the link and have a listen.

One time that music is really important to me is when I'm snowboarding, if the music that's playing over the speakers isn't right then it can put me off and I'll ride really badly. It's all mental of course but I find that the right music helps me to get my rhythm and settle down to do a good run. I have a number of playlists on my iPod for snowboarding, there's my general riding playlist and then there's my comp list. I've recently re-done this one and of the 7 tunes on it 4 I've found through my social networks.

It's funny really but on reflection I get very attached to music, and if I like a track and it spurs me on then I can happily listen to it over and over (as my followers on Last.FM may have spotted), so it didn't bother me that over the course of Saturday's comp (9:30 - 15:30) I listened to just 7 tracks on shuffle. I was just happy to know that no matter what point I had to dro pin for my 2 runs I would have music playing that would make me happy, and that would just be there in the background to help me ride my best. It has to be said that DJ Tony who does the Snow Tour events plays awesome music, and in fact a lot of the tunes I have on my standard riding list I've heard him play at comps but I want to make sure I'm safe guarded against power/sound cuts like happened at Breahead earlier this season or just against the odd rogue track that gets through that just doesn't click with me.

So here's the list and where I found them, many thanks to those of you who Blipped them and helped me on my way to glory on Saturday (well 2nd in Masters & 5th Overall)

Point of No Return by Immortal Technique (random web searches for Immortal Technique)
Ante Up by M.O.P (not sure where I got this one but it's been a fave for years)
Don't Stop Me Now by Queen (The last song to play in the Crap Bar one night Brits 2006 with Sansom & Callie)
Amores Bongo by The Herbaliser (not a Blip but a Tweet by Joanna Geary)
Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton (Blip by Alfie)
Handlebars by Flobots (Blip by TomVS)
Life Gets Better by Ed Solo & Skool of Thought (Blip/Tweet by Mark Media for Joanna Geary)

There are other songs I've listened too that I've added to my general playlists but these are the 7 I currently love!

So if you have any songs you think I should be listening then Blip me or leave a comment and I'll check them out.

He lives in my drawer because we can't have toys on our desks

"That's awesome, just switched on Nokia vine to plot my journey to work and it's now showing the map. Brilliant stuff."

spoken through SpinVox

Overall Men's winner, Jamie Nicholls going huge over the gap of doom (Jools has just informed me it was actually a chasm of doom but he didn't say so earlier in case it scared me even more!)

On Saturday the 2008 Quiksilver British Big Air Championships took place at Milton Keynes SNO!zone. This was the second of the 2 star TTR ranked indoor events of the British Snow Tour and as such it was important for me to ride (only for myself and my mission to finish higher than 155th this season, but still important).

Over the week I'd convinced myself that I'd be fine to ride with my injured foot, the swelling had gone down, I was walking much better than I had been after Castleford and I even managed to put my boots on and bounce round the living room strapped to my board on Thursday night without being in too much pain. The diagram of the kicker set up helped convince me too....How could I go wrong with a choice of two sizes of table top kicker. If I didn't feel like I was up to hitting the 9m then I could go for the 5m and even then if I came up a bit short it wouldn't matter, I could ride over the table and onto the landing and no one would think any less of me.

So you can imagine how I felt when I logged onto the Snowboard Club site on Friday night to see that they were in the middle of building a 10m GAP kicker! Yeah, no table, just a big ditch between me, the jump and a safe landing! Of course by now it was too late to pull out and get my money back (and £40's worth getting back) so at 6:30am Saturday we left the house and drove to MK.

Jools was of course being supportive and giving it the old "well if we get there and your foot doesn't feel right then it doesn't matter, you don't have to do it" line, but I think we both knew, after last week's performance, that by going I'd committed myself and it was 99% certain I'd be riding in the comp.

That was of course until I got there and saw the size of it....

click through to Flickr to see notes on the dimensions

Click through to Flickr to see the notes on the dimensions

Then the butterflies kicked in and I started to dither. Obviously someone had pointed out that this was a mixed ability comp and that there was no way the little kids would be able to get the speed to get over 8m of empty space so there was an after-thought kicker on the right hand side. This at least gave me the chance to check that my foot was working OK, it seemed it was and after a few warm up runs over the small kicker I did a few runs into the left side step up kicker to get a feel for the speed I'd need to clear the gap and to smooth out some of the bumps on the run in. Chicken that I am though I admit I did pull my normal comp trick of not hitting the jump in the warm up. I wanted to make sure that if my foot only had enough strength in it for one landing off a kicker this size that it'd be in the comp so I could claim a prize in the Master's category (there were only 2 of us that had entered!)

So my time came and I dropped in for my 1st qualification run (everyone gets 2) and pretty much straight-lined it in from the top, talking to myself all the way down to convince myself not to bottle it. I hit the jump (the one on the left in the pic), was in the air, over the gap (6.5m) and landed on the table, just short of the actual landing. I didn't care though, I was in one piece, the right way up and not in any pain! Then the shakes kicked in and I started to feel sick (adrenalin's a wonderful thing). So back I went to the top to await my second run. Again I hit the midsized step up kicker, this basically means that the landing is higher than the jump, so you really have to bend your knees to make sure you don't clip your board on the edge and fall. Although I didn't grab the board, I did make the landing and was more than happy with my performance.

Me!

So I settled down to watch the men's comp, and was merrily enjoying the show when they announced the 5 finalists for the women's comp, had I heard right? Yes it appears I had, I was through, having qualified in 4th place behind, Sam Rogers (front flip over the biggest jump), Lynsey Ashdown (Indy/straight air over the big kicker), Mel Kern (360 over the small kicker) and in 5th was Sophie Nicholls (Cab180 over the small kicker). The age range of the finalists spanned 19 years with me at 33 and Sophie at 14!

So I had to do it again! James Thorne the MC tried to convince me to give the big kicker a go but in the end I stuck to the mid-sized step up. I'd have loved to have tried it but I think the niggling thought about my bad foot would have put me off just enough to have a nasty fall, and it just wasn't worth it.

I survived the final in one piece, I'm in no more pain than I was when I started and my foot's only a tiny bit blacker! I placed second in the Masters behind Lynsey and the top 3 overall slots stayed the same as qualifications. I won't know if I finished fourth or fifth until the full results are posted next week but I have a sneaky feeling Sophie was riding well enough to push me down into 5th.

Thanks must go to everyone who was there supporting me, and my fellow Twitterers whose replies to my Tweets throughout the day really helped spur me on. Also thanks to Jools Smith for standing in the cold all day and taking shots for me and all our friends.

You can also check out Jamie Nicholls' blog for his perspective on the day.