first races of the season!

Prep season in review

I start my first races of the season tomorrow with two FIS DH’s and two FIS SG’s at Copper Mountain! This is probably the latest I have ever started racing and I truly cannot wait to get started. But before we dive into what the races will look like, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my prep period this year.

We had 3 pre-season camps (4 if you include Mammoth in May). We went to La Parva and Portillo in Chile at the end of August for three weeks, then we went back to Chile to Corallco at the end of September for two weeks, and we came to Copper Mountain mid November for our last three week training camp.

39 days on snow (give or take a few days for weather or food poisoning :0) Which does not feel like that many days!

In the beginning of the summer, I had to decide if I wanted to stick to the World Cup Speed team’s training plan (full speed prep), or go to one camp with the Europa Cup team in Ushuaia like I did last year to get one training camp more tech focused and one more speed focused. This was an incredibly hard decision for me.

At the end of last year, it was quite clear that some speed elements of my skiing were really holding me back and that I needed to focus on those (namely gliding, tuck turns, high speed sections, jumps, etc). But at the same time, my technical skills are my greatest strength so I really didn’t want to lose those by focusing on speed all summer.

Ultimately I did choose to go the full speed route, and so my prep looked a lot different than in past years.

While I was in Chile, I definitely doubted my decision, as I was incredibly slow and simply could not figure out how to get faster. This was extremely frustrating as I felt like I was wasting precious time on snow and not making progress.

Fast forward to Copper though, and I finally see some improvement in my speed skills, which feels amazing! But, I am still a little behind technically compared to where I was last year. This makes sense as I didn’t focus on my technical skills as much as in past years.

I am still unsure if it was the best plan or not. But I do know that at some point, I needed to commit to getting the speed miles in. Speed skills are very unique, in that they truly just take a lot of repetition and laps to get better at them. And because I didn’t grow up skiing downhill and am not naturally good at it, I was going to need to put the time in at some point to really make the next step as a speed skier. Looking back at the past couple months, I am confident that I’ve made progress on that front, which is great!

I’m hoping that I can continue to build on my technical skills throughout the season, and honestly it feels nice to see a path towards getting even faster throughout the season.

Another continual theme throughout the prep period was thinking that ski racing is a lot harder than I remember!

In one of my Chile blogs, I wrote about how it took me a couple days to find the intensity needed at ski camp. There is a big contrast coming from summer, where the dryland workouts are hard, but it’s more the mentality of “go in and get the work done.” With training on snow though, every single second matters because we get so little time skiing. So this requires a much higher level of focus for me. At every prep camp this year, I was surprised by just how exhausted I was from the mental, physical and emotional strain of trying to get faster at skiing.

I have no idea why this took me by surprise, as it’s like this every year, but I think it’s a testament to just how much the singular focus on skiing builds during the season. And this is truly one of my favorite parts of skiing. I love the intensity and commitment. And I love the feeling of working so hard at something.

I truly could not be more excited for the season to start! Tomorrow and Sunday will be just a warm up, but on Monday we head to Beaver Creek for our first World Cup of the season.

I couldn’t possibly want this more if I tried, so here we go!

the world famous Copper Mountain Speed venue where all the best athletes come to train speed in November :) drone perspective

team photo with all the other Clif athletes - Gary and Kit (past owners of Clif Bar) are so amazingly generous to support all of our ski racing dreams!

lots of early early and cold mornings here at Copper mountain. Can’t say the 5am alarm clock gets any easier

but the morning sunrises are always worth it!

me at the start of downhill training!

start photos waiting for our turn to train - Me, Breezy, Keely, Allison, and Lindsey - It’s been so cool to have Lindsey training with us. She is super open to helping us all which is awesome.

very rare powder day with some of my teammates on different teams (AJ, Jack and Jared)

chairlift view of the downhill at 7 am :)

start gate focus on point!

because the start of the season is so late this year, we were all able to fly home for a short break over Thanksgiving :)

and I got to go to my first annual family thanksgiving hunt !

and I just signed a new non alcoholic beer sponsor! definitley check them out - they are delicious !

and now we’re back in beautiful Colorado !

Thanks for following along! As always please feel free to reach out with any questions or comments of things you’d like to see :)