Caroline has been a busy busy girl as of late, and to start off with she was gifted with a feature in Women’s Health Magazine, the article will be in the September issue of Womens Health.

She has also done up a really cool story on the ups and downs she faces while juggling two different sports, which you can read now over at her personal website carolinebuchanan.com

• By Allan H

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I'm currently flying back from Chicago from the Stomping Ground contest. It was a busy week that's for sure. The weather in Chicago was all over the place, sunny one minute, pouring rain the next, and if it wasn't sunny or raining it was windy.

The course lay out was fun, there was about 9 jumps in a row and 2 lines. One started off with a sweet 'S' berm and the other started off with some little jumps to a step down. There were a couple of transfer lines and a hip over a taxi cab mixed in with a long and low. It was a fun course to ride, but not exactly what I'm use to riding. I like big jumps with lots of time in the air, these jumps were all relatively small so it was hard for me to adapt. The scheduale got pushed around quite a bit due to the weather so the qualifying was done on Saturday morning instead of Friday arvo. Instead of getting a couple of runs, the guys qualifying got one run done before it rained so that was the score they ended with.

Unfortunately Jaie Toohey crashed a superman seat grab by missing his hand and took it really hard. As he is fresh of his 6 month re-hab from his knee surgery he was still wearing his knee brace which caused his leg to get stuck at a weird angle and his knee brace dug into his thigh and fractured his femur. Hope he is feeling better soon.

Dane searls and I were doing trains all through practice until we went to do a transfer then a flip on the next jump which was kinda like a right hip. Searlsy wasn't use to the small jumps also and he crashed right behind me by under rotating the backie, we all know how tuff he is but his bike smashed into his shoulder blade while his shoulder was already popped out and that put him out of the contest.

He is going to get x-rays to see if there is a fracture there or not when he gets back to Australia. After raining out the prelims, no one knew what to do or how the contest was going to be run, it was all up in the air until we got word that we have a 2 hour window and were gonna run it. So we all rushed down to the event and started gettin in some practice. The format had changed and no one knew if we were doing one run, then a jam with all 31 riders, or if it was going go be 2 runs, 1 counts, then a jam for 10 riders or what! I was asking everyone but no one seemed to know. All I knew is that there was gonna be a jam and we had to do 2 runs. I pulled my first run exactly how I wanted to. Everything came out dialled and clean so I was heaps stoked on it. Going in for my second run I went for the same run as my first but wanted to step up the last trick on the last jump. Well that run went a bit squirly. But I pulled it off. I was under rotating the flip turndown, clipped my back wheel on the take off on the 720 and hung up on the 360 tailwhip a little bit but still managed to pull it off. I was stoked. I guess they finally decided after our 2 runs that they were going to do a jam with the top ten riders, but the best run we had in qualifying was going to be our final score. So pretty much the jam session didn't mean anything except a show for the crowd and a best trick comp.

I guess i was in 9th place with my first run score in qualifying. I was pretty stoked on that effort considering I have a blown out knee and have limited tricks. So before the jam started, Hucker got 3rd, chris Doyle got 2nd and Brandon dosch won. During the jam I didn't do too much at all. I just flowed the course and did transfer lines. The comp was already over so I didn't feel the need to throw down and risk hurting my knee any more than it is. The rain shut down the jam after about 15 mins.

Overall I had a good time and stoked that I didn't have any hard diggers. That pretty much wraps up the Stomping Ground comp. Next stop, back to Chicago for the Dew Tour! Can't wait to get off this plane and sit on the couch at home and get some chill time in.. Cheers, Cam

• By Allan H

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