Hallo from St. Anton, Austria!
I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas and New Years :)
I was able to go home for 10 days which was pretty incredible mid-season. My family spent a lot of time shoveling, playing games, working out in our garage and reading by the fire during the Buffalo snow storm which was honestly wonderful. I also got to go back to the old stomping grounds and had so much fun skiing with all the Holimont racers. I am continually impressed with the race program there and the amazing community Holimont brings together. It really is super unique and special.
I left Buffalo feeling rested, strong, and ready to take on the rest of the season!
I headed up to Vermont for some training and Nor-Am races on the 29th, but unfortunately, as soon as I got to Vermont it started raining. So I did a lot more lifting and dry-land training and spent some quality time with friends and family in New England. (Big shoutout to the Campbells, Ted and Lauren Suriani, and the Trudeau’s for the kind hospitality in NE).
The GS races in Stratton were cancelled because of the weather, but the two SG’s in Burke had awesome conditions. I won the first and DNF’d the second after a pretty terrible pre-race edge tune up by me :( But it was still nice to finally get to race! I then quickly waxed my skis, packed my bags, and loaded my rental car to head down to Boston to catch my 8 pm flight to Munich on Sunday! It was quite a hectic evening, but I made it and was picked up and reunited with Stef and Thomas yesterday. Today we were able to free-ski St. Anton! It is all of our first time here so it’s really nice to be able to check out the hill and figure out where everything is the day before the training run so I’m not getting lost or taking the wrong lift while were competing.
Austria was lacking some snow as well last week, but it snowed 50 cm’s two days ago so now it is quite soft! The track looks super fun and challenging though, with tons of big technical turns and blind gates. I’ve been watching a lot of video from past World Cups here to try and learn the course as much as possible before the first training run tomorrow. We’ll (hopefully) get two training runs and then race DH on Saturday. I am still not sure if I can race the SG on Sunday yet or not, but for now focusing all my energy on the DH!
While I was home, I also launched a project I have been working on called Outside Edge: a ski racing mentorship platform to facilitate meaningful relationships between current World Cup Athletes and the next generation of rippers.
Because I didn’t come from a ski racing family, I always felt a little bit out of the loop growing up when it came to knowing what was best for my ski racing journey. Thankfully, my family helped me reach out to many people for advice and guidance along the way, which proved invaluable. I am really excited to create Outside Edge as a way for other young athletes to have access to high level ski racers as mentors, so that they can gain valuable advice and guidance on their own journey, no matter where they’re from, who they know, or what team they come from!
Feel free to check it out and share with anyone you think might be interested.
https://www.outsideedge.org/
Here are some photos from the past two weeks: