“A change of career”

Greetings to everyone that follows Team PossAbilities!

For those who are not aware, please refer to my post “Gold Coast World Championships Series – The 2018 Finals”: The sport of triathlon is taking a back seat (not my decision), so I decided to change sports, and I’m reaching out to announce that.

I’ve been in touch with the Brazilian Snow Sports Federation and I have news: I am getting into snowboard racing!!

There’s an indoor competition happening in early November, an indoor course in Dubai (!!!!!!!!). This is a smaller race that I must do, in order to gather points for Finland in March 2019, and to do the medical classification.

I haven’t ‘boarded’ in over a year, so I’m counting on my fitness and (snowboarding) muscle memory.

The BR federation gave me the green light to go after I rushed to submit some paperwork. This is an effort to get into this Paralympic cycle sooner than later. It’s perfect timing as Peyong Chang just happened now, in 2018. Next one up: BEIJING 2022.

It’s no surprise that I’m coming back to snowboarding, a sport I love so much and that cost me my leg. I have been back to the mountain where it happened, for closure, and it was a beautiful, very emotional trip. There are no traumas from the accident.

The tough part for me is breaking the news to my parents. I hope they accept it, knowing this is something I love. If we think about this for a second, everything in life is risky. We’re here today and we may not be here tomorrow, because of any reason. So let’s do what makes us happy.

There’s Slalom and Snowboard Cross, I’m gonna dip my feet in both and check it out. Main thing for me is being safe, so I wanna get a feel for how safe, or dangerous the competitive sport is. Next thing now is tweaking my gym workouts and finding a coach. Keeping my running & cycling now for fitness is in order.

This is it, I’m giving it a go! Thank you all, and I hope we continue to make PossAbilities grow.

I hope that you are all in this journey with me.