JO Relay

To be a successful American cross-country skier is not easy. Typically, we are indoctrinated from a young age that skiing itself is not worth consideration; characterizations of the sport range from boring and slow to simply running on skis. If for some reason you do enter the sport, there is the problem of the range of knowledge that exists in coaches. There are many who have never ski raced, but being aficionados of the sport consider themselves qualified to coach a small high school team. Those who have raced may be no better, having been educated under the same system. And then of course athletes from this end of the spectrum are competing against skiers who have learned and are training under ex-patriot Scandinavians or eastern Europeans, who can be a decade ahead of their competition in terms of technique, equipment and training technology. Against this, even skiers with considerable talent can face frustration from repeatedly being trounced by these apparent child prodigies. It’s easy to quit, writing off your failures to you just not being very good.

I have a story for skiers who are in this situation. It’s set in Houghton, Michigan, on the ski trails of Michigan Technical University. The story goes like this: I had been cut from my college ski team in the fall. I had to train on my own until January. I barely qualified for Junior Olympics – I was the second alternate, or number seventeen on a team of fifteen. And on the day of the relay – the final day of racing – my first leg tagged me and I was in nineteenth place in the field of forty-seven J1 and OJ boys.

So why was I so confident?

We can dig deeper into my history and find further reasons for not having confidence. I came from the very same American high school system that I outlined above. Until I was seventeen I had never placed higher than 100^th in any state-wide competition. The year before this one I had come not even close to qualifying for JOs. I had started skiing late, I had not known a thing about training, and I had never met with any of the major success that all of my teammates had. But still I took out onto that course and I believed that my team could win this race.

I skied my 5k leg in 12:13.0. It was the fastest second leg of any J1 or OJ boy by 1.2 seconds. After having started in nineteenth place, I tagged our anchor leg in eighth place, twenty-three seconds out of the lead. As the New England skiers who had skied the second leg made their way out of the tag zone none of them felt they should congratulate me, for I had still been behind the majority of them. My mother didn’t even see me tag off, because she had seen my position when I was tagged, and decided that it would be better to get pictures of me skiing out on the course than having to watch all of the other teams come through the tag zone ahead of me. Only a few attentive and interested spectators had noticed my performance. But I was already ecstatic. By the time our anchor leg finished the race in second place, I was already two miles off of the ground. I think in many ways that I still haven’t come back down.

So please bear with me as I append a moral to this haphazard rendition of one of the best days of my life. I think what I am trying to say can be summarized like this: just because you have no reason to believe that you can do something huge, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t. This may just sound like self-help psychobabble, but in a sport like Nordic Skiing there are actual practical applications to such a philosophy. First, if you are motivated by an unshakable belief that you can achieve, that can carry you through many, many long dull training sessions. Second, in a sport in which you must compel your body to go hard for twenty-five minutes, or forty minutes, or an hour or more, the belief that you are strong and fast will carry you a long way.

There is no point at which it is too late to start skiing. There are few obstacles that someone who is dedicated cannot overcome, and none of those are present at the junior level. Just be patient, be attentive, and your opportunity will come.

-Sam Evans-Brown