Over the next six months, the country and many parts of the world will be focused on the Winter Olympics in Whistler. I'm excited to say that the Paralympics is getting its fair share of attention as well.

Once the Olympics are over, the Paralympians will move in for 10 days of competition. Even though this is the highest stage in our sport, many of you are not as familiar with some of the athletes who will take part. I think the first thing I'll do is provide the stories of the people you will see competing next March.

There are three classes in Paralympic alpine skiing - visually impaired, sitting and standing.

Yes, I wrote visually impaired, and yes that is the politically correct way for saying blind. What does that mean? Well, it means that they can't get a driver's licence. It also means they see less than 10 per cent of what you and I see. What it doesn't say is that they can crack 120 km/h on the Whistler downhill.

I have two teammates who are visually impaired and if you met them for the first time you likely wouldn't notice for a while, not until they tried to read a menu in 10-point font! I usually travel will a small football and play catch with my teammate Chris Williamson. We've played catch in many airports around the world while waiting for our planes to take off, some times with security guards holding machine guns watching us. We are skiers after all, so we're a little nuts.

Chris catches the ball most of the time, but as he only sees about six per cent, it's quite a process. He only sees out of one eye and has no depth perception. The ball is often on its way and nearly to him, and then he snatches it out of the air at the last minute (when he can actually see it). It's amazing.

The second class of athlete that you might have the privilege to see race in the Paralympics is the sitting class. Most of the people in the sitting class are paraplegics, but some are double amputees and some have other disabilities in both legs that won't allow them to stand.

How well can a guy who can't move his legs really ski? Well, if you want to win the downhill in Whistler, you'll have to be faster than my teammate Josh Dueck, who averaged 87 km/h (and cracked 110km/h) for one minute and 30 seconds, to win last year's test event.

As for me I'm a standing skier. I lost my right leg to cancer at the age of five and began skiing shortly after my chemotherapy treatment was complete. I fell in love with the sport instantly and have never looked back.

I compete against anybody who is standing, so arm or leg amputees, people with cerebral palsy, and some who are double, triple and quadruple amputees but have prosthetics that they ski with. We all ski in the same class and they calculate our race times based on a factor system. Basically it's a system a lot like a golf handicap system, where each disability is given a handicap (pardon the pun) based on the level of function.

Average speeds in my class are somewhere close to 100 km/h with tops speeds reaching about 130 km/h. I finished seventh in that Whistler downhill race last March, three seconds behind the winning time.

I just got back from my first on-snow training camp with the team in Valle Nevado, Chile. I spent more than two weeks living 3,000 metres above sea level getting ready for the long season that lies ahead.

The next five weeks will be spent at home in the gym and on my bike doing the final fine-tuning going into the season. This year will take me through Sass Fee, Switzerland, Panorama, B.C., Winter Park and Copper Mountain, Colo., Kofel and Abtenau, Austria, Sestriere, Italy and Aspen, Colo., before we even reach the first downhill training run in Whistler on March 10, 2010.

There's a long way to go, but things are looking great.