Around two o'clock on Saturday, two athletic-looking young men walked into Surefoot wearing Canadian Luge Team vests. Knowing the Viessman World Cup Luge finals were that same day, I asked them "Hey, don't you guys have somewhere to be right now?" "Not until five," they replied.
Long story short, one of the athletes named Jeff Christie needed ski boots. Fitting his boots was dead easy. For instance, to scan the foot to make the orthotic, the ankle has to been in the "neutral" position. Since the neutral position is not the normal position for most people's feet, it is difficult to hold the foot in neutral. Normally, I put the foot in neutral, have the person put equal weight on both feet and securely hold the knee to keep the foot from collapsing when they shift their weight. They simply aren't strong enough to hold their foot in that position when the foot is weighted. Wih an athlete like Jeff, it's a different story. I put his foot in neutral once, and it stayed there, rock solid. On consecutive scans he put his foot in neutral without me having to do anything. I find that most athletes, even non-professional ones, have a much better awareness of their bodies than non-athletes.
Jeff was a very nice guy, and incredibly attentive. He followed all my directions to a "T" and it made things run very smoothly. After he put the boots on he looked like a kid in a candy shop. He even commented "to heck with the race, lets go skiing now!" Presumably, he's out having the time of his life today.
When I walked to the till to have Jeff pay for his boots, Sam was trying to figure something out in the POS. At this point it was around 3:30pm. He said, "it'll only be a moment," to which I quickly replied "yeah, it's ok. These guys don't have a World Cup event in 1.5 hours or anything." Sam quickly rescinded control of the computer, and Jeff said "I guess it's not too often you get to use that line!" Too true.
I got off work at 3:40 with full intention of going to see the race and cheer on my boy. However, around 4:30 I felt absolutely miserable and ended up taking a much needed two-hour nap instead. I'm a little under the weather today as well which is the only reason I'm not skiing as we speak. It's a huge bummer to miss a day of skiing, but there is snow in the forecast for next week so I need to get healthy, fast.
I looked up the race results and Jeff finished 13th out of 30 athletes, .89 seconds behind the leader. 5 of the top 7 spots were taken by Germany, and the top three finishers were Germany, Italy, Germany. Full results are available at www.fil-luge.org.
Long story short, one of the athletes named Jeff Christie needed ski boots. Fitting his boots was dead easy. For instance, to scan the foot to make the orthotic, the ankle has to been in the "neutral" position. Since the neutral position is not the normal position for most people's feet, it is difficult to hold the foot in neutral. Normally, I put the foot in neutral, have the person put equal weight on both feet and securely hold the knee to keep the foot from collapsing when they shift their weight. They simply aren't strong enough to hold their foot in that position when the foot is weighted. Wih an athlete like Jeff, it's a different story. I put his foot in neutral once, and it stayed there, rock solid. On consecutive scans he put his foot in neutral without me having to do anything. I find that most athletes, even non-professional ones, have a much better awareness of their bodies than non-athletes.
Jeff was a very nice guy, and incredibly attentive. He followed all my directions to a "T" and it made things run very smoothly. After he put the boots on he looked like a kid in a candy shop. He even commented "to heck with the race, lets go skiing now!" Presumably, he's out having the time of his life today.
When I walked to the till to have Jeff pay for his boots, Sam was trying to figure something out in the POS. At this point it was around 3:30pm. He said, "it'll only be a moment," to which I quickly replied "yeah, it's ok. These guys don't have a World Cup event in 1.5 hours or anything." Sam quickly rescinded control of the computer, and Jeff said "I guess it's not too often you get to use that line!" Too true.
I got off work at 3:40 with full intention of going to see the race and cheer on my boy. However, around 4:30 I felt absolutely miserable and ended up taking a much needed two-hour nap instead. I'm a little under the weather today as well which is the only reason I'm not skiing as we speak. It's a huge bummer to miss a day of skiing, but there is snow in the forecast for next week so I need to get healthy, fast.
I looked up the race results and Jeff finished 13th out of 30 athletes, .89 seconds behind the leader. 5 of the top 7 spots were taken by Germany, and the top three finishers were Germany, Italy, Germany. Full results are available at www.fil-luge.org.
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