Quick announcement that I am holding two dryland fitness sessions this weekend in Ellicottville NY! Any and all skiers and ski racing enthusiasts are welcome to join for morning workouts, Q&A sessions, and equipment testing. Attaching the event info here, please feel free to share with anyone you think might be interested!
Chile Training Camp Reflection
During our final dinner in Corralco, I asked my teammates, Breezy and Alice: if they could go back to the beginning of our training camp and redo it, would they? I was initially surprised when they both replied quickly saying no. They both felt like they did everything they wanted to do and put their best effort forward every day.
Contrarily, I found myself wrestling with a degree of dissatisfaction regarding my performance and execution as the camp came to its conclusion. It’s not that I didn’t put maximum effort into every day (this is something I take pride in doing every day during training). It was more that I was left wishing we had more days, more runs, more turns, to figure out how to make the changes in my skiing that I wanted to make.
I am constantly belaboring how I can get faster as quickly as possible. When I talk to other athletes or coaches about this, the answer is usually: it just takes more time, more runs, more experience to really make changes. Deep down I know this is party true, and I know there is no magic secret to approaching a training day that will automatically help me change my skiing or figure out the skill I’m working on. But I still can’t help but think that there must be some approaches that are better than others. I think part of what makes skiing such a challenging sport is that there are so many constantly changing variables and it’s not just about how hard you work, but also how smart you work. I am QUITE sure that I could go out on the hill with no focus and ski terribly and not get better - I would probably even get worse! So if that is possible, than there must be another extreme at the other end of the spectrum that approaches optimization of the limited time on the hill we get. I’m sure this sweet spot looks different for everyone. But it still must exist in some capacity, and so I spend a lot of time thinking about how I could and should be optimizing for it.
I found myself reflecting on this on our first flight home from Chile (from Temuco to Santiago yesterday) when I read a particularly relevant quote from my favorite newsletter.
“When you’re in the middle of the work, set your expectations high. It’s unlikely your performance will exceed the standard you set for yourself. High expectations encourage you to keep reaching and fulfill your potential.
Once the work is done, release yourself from your expectations. The fastest way to ruin a good outcome is to tell yourself that it’s not good enough. Your expectations dictate your happiness more than your results.
Expectations can be helpful as a motivator and unhelpful as a measuring stick. Now that the work is done you can rest easy knowing you tried your best. You’ve already won.”
Obviously, I cannot go back and start over from the beginning of camp, and I don’t think I would even if I could. There is no guarantee that I would be able to figure out the changes, and there is always the risk that I wouldn’t make some of the positive progress that I was able to accomplish this camp. And there’s always the added risk of crashing and getting injured – a decidedly suboptimal outcome!
So instead of using the high standards I hold myself to as an unattainable measuring stick in retrospect, I am deciding to use them only as motivation moving forward by reflecting on what I think I might have done differently and why and what I can do to change those things in the future.
How can the work I’m doing today and tomorrow and at future camps accumulate and layer on top of what I did yesterday? How can I compound my efforts? Here are my three main takeaways from camp:
Be intentional with what I’m trying to accomplish each and every run. I already do this pretty well (definitely every day and most runs), but I want to get even more diligent at it. **Nota bene that some runs the goal or intention is not to think at all and just go!**
Keep better records of what equipment I’m testing and how it feels. I am testing a couple different things with my boots and equipment set up and haven’t been keeping good notes that I can look back on, but this will help me stay more organized and systematic with my testing.
Communicate better with coaches. This was my first time working with the WC speed coaches and I could have done a better job communicating what works well for me on the hill. Admittedly, at the beginning of this camp, I felt a little bit like I was imposing on them since I’m not technically a part of their team, but realized later on that they are there to help me just as much as any other of the US coaches, and if you never ask for help, or open yourself up to others helping you, it’s unlikely they will.
Reflecting more on the past three weeks, I realize that I actually did have a tremendously productive camp. I’ve learned from past seasons and races that you can be both proud of the effort and still be left wanting more at the same time. My motto last season was to have attention on my intentions which I still think about every day. But I am adding a new motto for this season: happy and hungry. I will definitely use this partly insatiable feeling of wanting more as motivation for the next three weeks in the gym and into the final prep days!
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