My friend Drake asked me a little while ago to write something about how I got to this point, and so, not that I’ve ‘made it’ by any means yet, I figured I’d oblige and see if the way I went about it helps anyone else in their approach. I’m going to focus on my younger years skiing, since I find it all gets somewhat similar once you are on a national-team level or even close to that when you’re older in FIS. Everyone is following a somewhat similar program because FIS races and Nor-ams are pretty standard and everyone suddenly has to play by the same rules and start to commit a lot of time to ski racing if they want to make it to the next level.

But before that, as a kid I grew up skiing in Copper Mountain. The same place I’m now sponsored by, and the same place my dad coaches kids right now on the weekends. I just skied weekends for a long time, and NASTAR as well actually. The NASTAR events were somewhat of a family vacation because my parents were also new into this whole ski racing world, so it was something we could all do together and enjoy for a weekend or two. I would even go race in some of my parent’s beer league races every now and then, as well as some normal youth races. Really just any excuse to get out and have a chance to go ski, but nothing overly serious for a long time.

Eventually we moved over to Loveland when I was about 12 years old since it was a bit closer to Denver where we lived and went to school. I met some of my best friends growing up there, and found a true love for skiing. If it snowed we would bail on training and go ski powder, and take every chance we got to ski from bell-to-bell and get into as much trouble as possible. For me ski racing was just a fun excuse to be in the mountains with my friends, and looking back, all the freeskiing I did growing up was equally as important in my development as an athlete and a skier. But even all the way until I was about 16 years old, I was really only skiing part-time. I went to public school in Denver through my second year of high school, and would play lacrosse in the springs and football in the falls, so time actually spent skiing was extremely limited. At an age where many of my peers had moved to ski academies in different states and were already training all summer at Mt. Hood and the like, I just wanted a normal experience and the chance to be a kid without centering everything in my life around this one pursuit. There were too many other things in life to enjoy, and my parents wanted to leave every option open so that at the end of the day, it would be my choice what I wanted to pursue.

I would still ski every Friday afternoon and weekend, and probably one more night session per week since Loveland worked with Echo Mountain close to Denver so we could drive up after school finished and train from like 6-8 pm or something. There were years and years of doing homework in the car, apologizing to teachers for having to leave class early and making up assignments another day, and long drives to facilitate all of this. But I was also able to have so many experiences that my friends in ski academies never got the chance to. Figuring out how to do do normal school with this lifestyle also taught me that if you try to be a nice person and work as hard as you can, people will generally be understanding and try to make it work alongside you.

All of this made it so that when I chose to go to Vail and commit to skiing full-time at age 16, luckily with my parents believing in my dream every step of the way, I was sure it was my own passion and not something that I just did because everyone else was or someone else told me to. I came in with sort of a late start, and wasn’t as fast as many of my new peers when I arrived there, but I knew that I would work as hard as was possible to take advantage of this opportunity. I think a lot of people don’t see what their families have to sacrifice for them to be able to chase these dreams, but I tried to not take it for granted and do everything I could to validate their belief in me.

Anyway, my point with all of this is that I don’t think anyone should have to feel the pressure to throw everything away and go all-in on skiing when they’re so young, just because everyone else seems to be doing it. It should be the most fun part of any day, not something you have to do. And there’s so much else of life beyond just skiing. That said, when you do finally decide to commit to it, if you decide to commit to it, and only if it’s your own decision, you have to go all-in. There’s a time and a place for everything, and this is the time to try and outwork everyone else in the world because the work ethic you ingrain now is what’s gonna make the difference in 5 or ten years down the road when the races start to count for real. So trust your own path and do what feels right, and when you decide it’s time to commit, put all your cards on the table and take the risk to see where it gets you. There’s not a lot of people in the world that would commit so fully to any one thing, and not many pursuits worth fully committing to, but it’s a special thing to take that leap when you don’t know what’s on the other side. Even if you don’t make it, because at the end of the day even the best skiers don’t meet their goals 90% of the time, there’s so much to gain from that journey of jumping off the deep end.