We’re back in Val Gardena this week, the same place that last year I was able to score my first World Cup downhill points. However, it was simultaneously the place where I tomahawked across the finish line to score said points after catching an edge on the landing of the final jump. I was fortunate to not have any serious injuries other than a shoulder that would bug me for the next few months, but it was the same kind of crash that took me out for two full seasons with my knee in 2021.

Whenever I go to school visits or to talk with clubs, there are always questions about how we are able to manage the fear that comes as an inherent part of our job. This week serves as a good reminder of that, because it took more intentionality that usual to push through when we arrived back here for the first run. During that initial training run, you’re doing your best to push the memory to the back of your mind, but it’s always somewhere lurking, knowing that the last time you raced this mountain you ended up upside down and almost broken by the bottom of the course. And so the entire first day there’s an extra sense of tension in your whole body, while at the same time being rationally aware that you’re totally prepared to keep yourself safe and that once the first run is out of the way, it likely won’t be an issue anymore.

That’s generally the experience on days like these, but as for how to actually manage that fear and nervousness, there’s some different things that seem to work well for me. I think firstly everyone racing WC downhill is pretty open about acknowledging their fears, and this creates somewhat of an understanding community where you don’t feel like you’re the only one nervous about doing something. On the other hand, just about everyone has a healthy amount of nerves on the first training run of every track. So knowing that you’re not alone in this feeling is hugely comforting. People always ask if we just don’t get nervous, but in reality, we’re just used to the process of managing it more frequently (and hopefully more effectively) than most.

There’s two concrete steps that I rely on to make this happen. One is my breathing. I don’t typically notice this until I’m close to standing in that start gate, but at places like Kitzbuehel or Bormio, your heart rate seems to be about 140 when you’re standing still up top. To combat this, I need to be intentional with my breathing, slowing down the exhales and trying to release as much tension as I can from my body. This tension is what’s going to hold me back from being able to perform when I need to, both keeping me safe and making me fast. The other thing I intentionally focus on is to trust the work that I and my team have put in to get me ready for this moment. I think back and know that my coaches have given me the best possible training, that my technician has given me the best possible skis, and that I’ve worked as hard as I possibly could to be ready for anything once I’m on track. By remembering how much has gone into being ready to give your all on course, you’re able to trust that this work will give you speed and keep you safe.

Past that though, whatever happens happens and that’s the thrill of the sport. Just one more aspect of what makes skiing such a challenge and an adventure. Hopefully my thoughts here can help satisfy some curiosity for all the people that are wondering this same question when watching downhill races, and maybe give some useful tips to try for any younger racers out there going through the same thing every now and then. Remember, if it were easy, it would be boring. So why not seek out challenges like this.

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.

I’ve gotten a couple questions on our dryland routines in the summer, so I’ll give a bit of an overview here. The rationale behind this 4 month break from skiing was to give the team a longer strength training block in the summer so that everyone is recovered and in a stronger place than last year. The June-July workout blocks are mostly directed at building maximum strength and power, so lots of heavy lifting. This means a lot of big compound lifts like front/back squats and deadlifts, generally with 5-6 sets of 3-5 reps. This is interspersed with 2 types of bike workouts: some longer 2-3 hour easy rides (heart rate 130-150) to build basic endurance, and some interval sessions such as 30 sec on / 30 sec off to get our bodies used to clearing the lactice acid that builds up from this intensity. Then, once we get later into the summer and fall, we start focusing more on strength endurance, which means lots of circuits aimed at keeping a high heart rate and muscle fautigue for 2-3 minutes. Ideally as similar of demands as possible to a tough downhill race.

But enough gym talk, on to Ushuaia. We ended up doing mostly a GS and SG camp, with a couple days of slalom in there as well. Because if you’re a professional skier, you should be a good skier on any type of skis, not only the discipline that you compete in. Our first day training slalom, I realized that for some guys it had been about 3 years since their last slalom training sessions. This is crazy to me just because I’m still young and I’ll go home and train/race slalom in the spring after our World Cup season, just for fun. But I get it; after you’ve been doing this for long enough, it’s more valuable at the end of a long season to take a break and seperate from skiing a bit than it is to go grind some tech training.

We fly all the way down to the tip of South America for this camp because it’s probably the most consistent summer training in the world. It’s so far south that it’s constantly fairly cold and dark, allowing the snow to freeze well, but it’s also right on the coast, so the snow has a lot of moisture in it. This moisture combined with the cold temps makes for a World Cup-like icy surface almost every day. Lucky for us. And we took advantage of it, skiing every day except 2 for this entire three week camp. I always thought that once you’re on the World Cup team it’s only low volume, high intensity training, but boy was I wrong. We’re out there rain or shine, getting as much work in as possible so that we know we’re able to handle the long weeks that come in the midst of race season. I should’ve known; it’s the same lesson that everyone learns when they come into the US Team for the first time. Some people think they’ve made it once they get that jacket, but in reality that’s only where the real work begins. As soon as you think you’ve made it and you don’t need to outwork people anymore, that’s when you fall off.

But everyone is working really well together right now, and pushing in the same direction, which makes these long camps so much easier. With momentum building and a group of guys that are as fast and experienced as the guys I’m lucky enough to be on a team with, it’s a pleasure to show up and work every day. And that’s exactly what we’ll do, whether it’s here in the gym for the next couple weeks or in Chile next month at our next on-snow camp. Keep building.

Aplogies for the total drop-off in posts here; I re-enrolled in college this spring and things got hectic pretty quickly. I’m studying out in New Hampshire, like several of my teammates, at Dartmouth College. We’re fortunate because they run on a quarter system, so we can attend the spring term of school (10 weeks from late March until early June) with very minimal interference to our training programs. Basically, when everyone else goes home or goes to the beach to recover after a long season, we go straight to hit the books. I was in Sun Valley at US Nationals on a Saturday, caught a red-eye that night to Boston-Logan, and started school the very next day.

And showing up as a 25 year old freshman is a wild experience. I would show up to office hours to try and remember how to do math, except the kids would all start asking me questions, assuming I’m the professor or TA. Little do they know, last time I did basic calculus was close to 10 years ago. Right about the same time that they were getting ready to learn multiplication at age 8 or 9. So I started the term a bit behind and had to play catch-up, but all par for the course when you’re trying to do biomedical engineering and have a full-time career in sport outside of that. The end goal is to try and combine these engineering principles with some machine learning / artifical intelligence tools so that after my ski career I can help build something really impactful for people’s lives. Just the way so many people have helped me through my life and career so far; I would like to extend that to others in the future and use my education to do it. Although who knows if anyone is gonna hire a 35-year-old graduate, so we’ll see.

Through school we essentially have the first few weeks totally off from training to phsycially and mentally recover after the long season. It’s nice to try and feel like a normal college kid at least for a little bit, and to just relax and seperate yourself a bit from all the obligations that come with this job. Then it’s back to the gym, as always. I was able to work out at least once per day when I was at school and then came right back out to Park City, where I’ve been based for the last 6 summers to train with my teammates. So by now we’re solidly in our third month of working out and we’re feeling more than ready to get back on snow.

This is the longest non-injury break I’ve ever had from skiing, and I’m honestly not sure how I feel about it. It feels great to have some sort of a life outside of skiing during these few months, and it’s wild how good your body feels after being allowed a respite from the impact of skiing for a bit. But it also feels like you’re missing a core piece of your purpose. When so many aspects of your life are structured around skiing, after a few weeks without it, it feels almost foreign and a bit like you’re living someone else’s life and missing out on your own. Rationally you see the need for it (both physically and mentally), and you can really enjoy spending time with friends and family that you just don’t have time for during the season. But it’s hard to do away with the feeling that you’re missing out on some sort of progress when everyone else in the world is training and you’re sitting at home.

Anyway, I’ll try to be more regular with these as we get underway with our regular training program again, and thanks for tagging along! Next post will come at ya from South America.

I couldn’t be more glad to have experienced the Norway World Cups like the guys had all said. I always heard that the Americans enjoy the track there, and since it usually has cold winter snow similar to what we often see in the US, our guys also frequently perform well there. And this year was no different, with 6 guys inside the top 20 on the DH race day. I can’t remember the last time this happened for our team, but I was so proud to be a part of it. Seeing the guys you train with every day have such good results makes it easy to have faith in yourself, since you suddenly have a good reference point at the head of the race. “If we are the same speed in training, and they’re fast in the race today, why shouldn’t I be as well?”

I got a handful of messages after these races asking, “what changed?” And fair enough, it was a shitty last month. Wild to come off of getting last in every race to immediately having two career bests. If you read my last post you can probably figure this out, but I realized how important it is for my skiing to have energy and be able to bring intensity to a race run. All January I was skiing fine technically and tactically, but just wasn’t able to put any energy into the ski. And turns out, most of skiing fast at this level is having the confidence to commit to the turns that other guys won’t, and to have the power in your body to pull it off. This one key lets you actively search for speed instead of just riding passively along the line that you have planned. It lets you tuck for that extra second coming down a pitch when the lights go out. And that extra second is where the difference is made I think. So moving forward I need to be more conscious of my energy levels and make sure I’m ready to bring as much intensity as possible to race days.

A perfect example of this is watching River ski in Palisades last weekend. I know he always loves skiing at home, and is able to use the energy from the crowd in his own skiing. This lets him think about it like putting on a performance for the crowd, and when it’s about something bigger than yourself, I think it becomes easier to focus and commit to your fastest skiing. Watching how much passion he put into that second run was one of the more inspiring performances I’ve seen in a minute, and makes me want to have that same feeling in the finish someday. Always grateful to have teammates to inspire me in every aspect of this sport, and push me to be better.

But now I find myself in a weird situation. I have lower than 15 points in both SG and DH, which means I can’t score FIS points in Europa Cups or Norams, but I also didn’t ski fast enough to make World Cup finals. So then I find myself in this position of having my season essentially be over on February 18th, aside from US Nationals at the end of March. But the next step ended up being a fairly easy call for me in the end. As long as there’s good conditions here, it’s time to go to work and prepare for next season already, even though its early. So we went to eastern Italy for some Europa Cup SG races in the rain and bumps to get some more training in race conditions. Being there purely to practice executing on race day is a unique feeling, taking some of the pressure off but also making it challenging to take as much risk as you normally would.

And then it’s straight over to Reiteralm, Austria to train some GS. I feel that when I ski a full season of speed I get a bit lazy with some of my fundamental techniques, since often you can get away with things like leaning in on those big, long DH turns. But you watch guys like Marco and Cyprian ski, and even if you can make it down without great technique, the guys who are winning are doing it through powerful GS-style skiing, nothing lazy. So I’m here doing double sessions every day, trying to get my technique in a place before we stop skiing where I can come back fresh after summer break and start with a solid foundation. I love this part of the job, where you have to buckle down and grind. The process of trying to be great at something is rewarding in and of itself, so these long days here training bring a certain kind of satisfaction. Anyway, enjoying the process here, and trying to trust it along the way.

I hope these posts can eventually reach some kids like I was one day, curious about what life actually looks like on the World Cup but no idea how to find out. Time will tell I guess; just gotta ski faster so more people can see this. Or maybe they’ll just go out and find out for themselves by just doing it. Only one way to find out..