theNYCphysio

In January of 2018, I was scheduled to go to back-to-back FIS World Cups with the US Boardercross Team. The first leg of the trip was at a mountain town in eastern Turkey called Erzurum. I had never been to Turkey so I was excited to go!

I met up with most of the team in Munich and stayed the night. I shared a room with an athlete I’ve known since 2012. Because it was an Olympic year, I wanted to make sure I didn’t keep him up knowing I was going to be up most of the night watching football. Unfortunately, this was quite a difficult task.

For most of my life, I was a Minnesota Vikings fan. So much so, that in 2017 my wife and I became season ticket holders! The 2017 season was a good season for the Vikings. They won the NFC North division title. And they were scheduled to host the Super Bowl in their new stadium (with the hopes of playing in it as well)! As season ticket holders, we had tickets to the playoffs. Unfortunately though, I had already committed to this trip.

I streamed the game from my hotel room. It was 4am in Germany. The Vikings were playing the Saints and we were behind with only a few minutes left in the game. That’s when the video stream froze! I was gutted, resigned to another early post-season exit. Such was life as a Vikings fan. A few minutes later, I received a few text messages from home with exclamations of disbelief. Suddenly, the video stream unfroze. I watched in nervous anticipation. Then I saw what happened. Stephon Diggs made an unbelievable catch down the sideline and ran it in for a touchdown as time ran out! My roommate was sleeping so I was trying not to freak out too loudly.

The next morning my roommate turned over and congratulated me. It turned out I wasn’t as quiet as I thought I was! Ironically he was a devout Packer fan. So as a Vikings fan, it was a bitter sweet moment. In the history books, that play went on to be known as the Minneapolis Miracle! 

A few hours later we departed for eastern Turkey, with a layover in Istanbul. Somewhere along the way, I logged onto Facebook and noticed one of my cousins was flying to the Philippines via Istanbul as well. I thought it would be crazy that we would end up at the same airport at the same time half-way around the world. So I messaged him. And sure enough he was on his way to Istanbul! We met up at the airport, caught up for a few hours, took a photo, and went our separate ways. What a small world!

(With my cuz)

When traveling to these events, I usually check in a lot of luggage. On this trip, I had a snowboard bag, a personal luggage, the massage table, the medical kit, and the AT kit. So I had 5 large bags in total. The other staff had even more! Of all things, this always seemed to be one of more stressful experiences as a traveling sports physio with the US Snowboard team.

Initially I was not impressed with the mountain. It was tiny and crowded with mostly beginner skiers and snowboarders. At the top, the crowd thinned out. Luckily, this is where the course was, well above the tree line, away from the crowds.

For the most part, the event went off without a hitch. All except one day when I got stuck on the ski lift because of gnarly winds. Once I finally got off the lift, it was white-out conditions. So I hunkered down next to the lift until it cleared off. I then headed down to the start gates, unstrapped my snowboard, and secured it in the snow next to my AT kit. As I walked away towards the athletes, a huge gust of wind picked up my snowboard, as well as a few other’s gear, down the mountain. Luckily, they got caught in the A netting on the way down. Crisis averted as no one got hurt! Whew.

We didn’t win any individual podiums in Turkey, but the men placed third in the team event. In the end, I am glad to have experienced life on a random Turkish mountain. It was not an event I want to go back to in the future though. Logistically it was more stressful than anything due to many reasons I won’t mention in this post. At least I could check off Turkey from my list of countries visited.

Off to the next stop on the tour, Bulgaria!