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February 11, 2008 This Nationals was a great experience. Going in, Bianca and I were very excited to compete in our first year at nationals at the senior level. We had a fun time at the JGP Final in Poland, despite not being completely satisfied with the results. When we returned home, Bianca and I had to immediately began training our senior programs for Nationals. This was somewhat challenging, especially in the short program, however, we felt very confident that we could skate well and earn a spot on the Junior World Team. This goal was particularly important to us because it is my last year that I am eligible. Despite training very hard, we had a great Christmas. My family was able to come down and we had Christmas at my Grandma's. Bianca's family got together also. After the holidays, time seemed to fly by and before we knew it, we were on the plane to Minneapolis. Both Bianca and I have lived in Southern California all of our lives, and even though we travel a lot, neither of us have ever been any where quite as cold. Luckily, Nationals was very well set up so that we could use the cities sky ways to get to and from the arena. Our practices at Nationals went very well. We had been training for the past couple of months on being prepared and confident from the very first practice. We were expecting things to go pretty well. In the short program we had a few problems. On the very first element, both Bianca and I stumbled around on our side by side double axels and Bianca fell on the throw triple sal. With the exception of these two mistakes, we felt that there were some things we did well. We were happy with the triple twist as well as the overall performance artistically. We placed eleventh, and considering the mistakes, Bianca and I both felt satisfied with the placement. The scheduling at nationals was a little weird this year. We skated on Wednesday and Saturday. Bianca and I have never done a competition before that had a two day break between programs, but I feel that it actually helped for the free skate. We were both a little disappointed in the mistakes we had made in the short, but we stayed enthusiastic that we could pull up in the free skate. We skated well on both Thursday and Friday and were relieved to finally make it to Saturday. We both really wanted to pull up to the top of our warm-up group, meaning we would have to pull up two places, and with a pretty decent free skate we were able to. Our long program was in no way perfect, but we wanted to prove that we were capable of doing well in senior so we fought our way through. Despite a fall on the throw salchow, we skated a clean program. The only other real problem was that we must have been a little excited and we made it through the program a little early. Luckily, Bianca is very quick on her feet and she added a few steps in the last few seconds. I kind of just stood there, but when I watched the video it didn't look as bad as I thought. We placed 9th in the free skate and pulled up to 9th overall. This placement was enough to get us selected of the Junior World Team.
Now we are training hard to
leave for Sofia in a couple of weeks. We came back to the rink
with even more desire to work hard and have a good finish at
Junior Worlds. Training has been going very well, and we are
getting comfortable with the small changes we made to our
programs. To add to our excitement, our coaches are both
Bulgarian and will show us around the country after we finish
the competition. We are lucky this competition, pairs is done on
Wednesday but we get to stay until the following Monday. Thank
you for all of the support and we'll let you know how things go
at Junior Worlds in a couple of weeks
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