A season-ending knee injury has done nothing to dampen Kelsey Serwa’s enthusiasm for ski cross racing.
If anything, the setback has made the 22-year-old from Kelowna even more committed to making a successful comeback.
“I don’t have any second thoughts about it at all,” Serwa said this week from Whistler. “This (injury) has actually made me more eager and more determined to get back to it. It’s what I love doing.”
Three weeks after undergoing surgery to repair her damaged left knee, the 2011 world and X games champion is upbeat about the early stages of her road to recovery.
Serwa suffered a tear to her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) after crashing at a World Cup race Jan. 11 in Alpe d’Huez, France.
There was also damage to her meniscus which, along with the ACL, was repaired during a surgical procedure Jan. 30 in Squamish.
Serwa is undergoing physio treatment on the knee in both Whistler and Kelowna, and makes daily visits to the gym for conditioning.
If all goes as planned, Serwa could be as good as new by August and back on the snow.
“I got back in the gym last week, I’m working on my upper body and core stability,” said Serwa who won the first two races of the World Cup season in Italy. “When I go to physio, I’m repairing my broken leg, trying to get to get those muscles firing again.
“It’s kind of a feel-it-out process at this point,” she added. “I can’t do any jumping or rotation for another four months, but I can keep working towards that. By summer I should be able to work out at the level I was before.”
In a perfect world, Serwa would be ready to compete in an FIS World Cup race in September in South America.
“Right now it depends on whether that race is an Olympic qualifier or not,” she said. “If it is, there will maybe be a bit more pressure for me to get ready for it. If not, there’s still two years to qualify for the Olympics (2014 in Sochi, Russia). I can also look at using it as a warm-up.”
While injuries are never welcomed, Serwa said the timing of her mishap could have much been worse.
She says with no Olympics or world championships in 2012, a little downtime might not be all bad.
“It’s not totally unheard of for athletes to take a year off to prepare for bigger things to come,” she said. “I certainly wouldn’t plan it this way, but you take the positive aspects of an injury and work with it. We do a lot of our working out in the summers, so that could work out well for me, and I should be back to where I want to be.”
A competitive skier from a young age, Serwa isn’t accustomed to being off the snow during the winter months. Still, her days are anything but idle.
“It doesn’t really seem like I have much time on my hands, two hours of physio every day, two hours a day ot workouts, catching up on e-mails…there are lot of things I need to do. It hasn’t been too bad in that way.
“There are more easy days than hard ones.”
In addition to her rehab, Serwa will occupy some of her time this spring and summer taking a course at Okanagan College.
