BUILDING A COMPETITION RUN

The Technique

1. Start by understanding what the sheet rewards, because it is not the same thing your phone rewards. Judges are marking difficulty, execution, variety, amplitude and use of the course, and they are marking the run as a whole rather than a list of moments. A repeated trick stops earning what it earned the first time. A trick you land dirty scores under a simpler trick you land clean. This is why the best rider at the ramp does not always win: a run of six clean, varied, well spaced tricks beats a run of nine attempts with three saves and a swim. Write your run against the sheet, not against what looks good on a phone screen.
2. Build an honest inventory before you build anything else. Make three lists. Bankers are tricks you land almost every time you try them in training, on a normal day, tired. Contenders are tricks you land often but not reliably, or only when the water is good. Lottery tricks are the ones you have landed a handful of times and cannot call. Your run is built from bankers with contenders placed where a miss does not cost you the rest of the run. The most common mistake in run building is counting your best ever session as your baseline. Count your average Tuesday.
3. Order the run for your body, not for drama. Open with a banker thrown at full commitment: it settles your breathing, it tells the judges what standard to expect, and it buys you a clean start you can build on. Put your hardest trick early to middle while your forearms and grip are fresh and your timing is sharp. Do not save the hardest thing for last. By the closing stretch your hands are cooked, your legs are heavy and your judgement is worse than you think it is. Save a strong, reliable, high amplitude trick for the close instead, something you can throw on empty.
4. Use the whole course. Riders who work one corner of the box get marked down for it, and they also get judged on a narrower set of angles. Move between zones, use both sides, change your approach direction, and orientate your tricks so the judges see the axis of rotation rather than the back of your ski. Present to the tower. A backflip seen side on reads as a backflip; the same flip thrown straight away from the judges reads as a splash. Plan roughly where on the water each trick happens, and plan the ride between them so you arrive at the next spot already set up.
5. Manage the clock as a rhythm rather than a countdown. Most freestyle formats give you a run of about two minutes, and the riding between tricks is not dead time. It is setup, it is positioning, and it is where the judges read your control of the machine. Learn the real cost of each of your tricks in seconds, including approach and recovery, then build a run that finishes a beat early rather than one that needs everything to go perfectly. That margin is what lets a single bobble cost you one trick instead of costing you your closer.
6. Build intensity through the run instead of dumping it in the first thirty seconds. A run that opens at maximum and then flattens reads as a rider running out of ideas. A run that steps up, adds amplitude, adds variety and finishes at its highest point reads as control. Judges are human and the last part of the run sits closest to the pen when the score goes down. Escalate deliberately: bigger air, tighter linking, less water between tricks, and a close that leaves no question about whether you had more in reserve.
7. Rehearse the recovery, not just the run. If you blow the third trick, you need a trained answer that is not a repeat of the same trick. Build a substitution tree before the event: if trick three fails, trick three becomes this instead, and you move on inside a couple of seconds. Practise starting a run from the middle. Practise throwing your closer straight after a swim so you know what your hands feel like. The riders who look calm after a miss are not calm; they are rehearsed.
8. Plan for the conditions rather than hoping for them. Wind chop direction changes which way you want to be facing when you throw rotation, because chop on the nose loads the hull differently from chop on the tail. Depth decides whether submerged tricks are safe. Current moves your landing zone between the time you leave the water and the time you come back to it. Sun angle decides whether you can see. Turn up early, ride the actual competition water, and carry an A run for good water and a B run for bad water so you are choosing between two rehearsed plans rather than improvising under a clock.

Common Mistakes

Building the run from your highlight reel instead of your training average. Fix: score your own sessions for a month and only put tricks in the run that you landed in that log on ordinary days.

• Treating the transitions as filler and riding them flat. Fix: choreograph the water between tricks so you arrive set up, and ride it with the same intent as the tricks themselves.
• Repeating your best trick because it feels safe. Fix: replace the second attempt with anything that adds a new axis or a new direction, even if it is simpler.
• Riding the same corner of the box because that is where you warmed up. Fix: mark three zones on the water in practice and require yourself to use all three in every rehearsal run.

The Drill

Run three full length rehearsal runs in one session, on a timer, filmed from the bank at the judges' angle. Standard: each run finishes inside the clock with a few seconds spare, contains no repeated trick, uses all three marked zones, and includes at least one forced miss where you skip to your substitute trick without stopping. Review the footage the same day and mark your own run against difficulty, execution, variety and use of course.

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