first contest of the year

The contest season has started down here in colorado with the US grand prix at copper mtn. It's been an interesting week for me.
I showed up a week ago to get a few days in the pipe prior to the contest. On my first day at the pipe i realized i was riding a broken board. In my last minute packing i didn't really notice which boards i packed and grabbed the wrong one! thankfully i had 2 more boards with me. I usually like having 2 identical boards for contests (in case one gets broken) and now i was left with only one of my favorite boards and a prototype which i hadn't ridden yet. Turns out the prototype didn't last long under my feet and didn't make it to the contest. Having only one board is a major stress to me when it's contest time. My boards usually take quite a while for me to break but you never know. Thankfully i got another one sent down so I should be sweet for the rest of my trip.
I had a few good practice days where the pipe was good and a few where it wasn't so hot. However, one of those days Copper received 13inches of snow so i didn't ride pipe that day. Copper has a pretty good base for this time of year so we were able to ride the trees and some of the alpine bowls. It's always nice to get a good powder day while on a 'pipe' trip. and it's puking right now so hopefully tomorrow will be another good one.
Onto the qualifiers, which were yesterday. I've never really felt 'on' this time of year at coppers pipe so I generally use it as a warm up for the rest of the season. I'd planned 2 slightly different runs for the contest. The first one was supposed to be backside air, frontside 720 indy tuck knee, cab 900 melon, switch backside 720 mute to backside 720 japan. However, i tried to adjust my line after the first 720, ended up scrubbing some speed and it just messed up my line. I ended up falling on the switch backside spin. For my second run, the plan was to drop in with a mctwist (instead of the backside air) into the same rest of the run and finish it off with a switch frontside alley oop for my straight air. Which as an entire run, at this time of year was, somewhat ambitious as it's a pretty tech run and i wasn't sure there'd be room left in the pipe for the switch alley oop. And i hadn't landed (or even tried) that run yet in practice. but i really enjoy doing new runs spur of the moment so i was psyched for the run. I ended up landing the run but it was too sketchy to go through into finals.
The video below is a compilation of both runs put together, just to give an idea of what i was going for.
We've got a few days of riding either copper or breckenridge then it's the dew tour next week at breck. and we're hearing the breck pipe is epic. I can't wait to get up there and check it out.
jl