Lessons from a One-Sport Athlete

(A picture from Whistler Cup in 2008 half of the J4 team, yours truly on top and below from right to left: Julia Mueller Ristine, Mikaela Shiffrin, Colin Martens, Hana Saydek, and Linnea Basinger. One of these athletes has quit, two are on the U.S. Ski Team, and four race in college.) 

 

A lot of people talk about specialization these days. There is a debate about whether athletes should focus on one sport or diversify and do multiple sports (especially in high school). I decided to write a blog on the subject because I was and am a one-sport woman. I want to say that what is going below is not going to be an argument for the one-sport track but rather a discussion about multi or single sport life and the pros and cons of both and why I chose one but why you or your children might choose otherwise.

I began skiing at age 3. My father has always been into skiing and my mom got into it as we went along but my parents really always wanted me to be a ski racer. I was always pushed toward ski racing and so it is unsurprising that I became a ski racer. But I tried other sports.  I played soccer when I was little, a little summer rec league. My dad coached our team and I never liked it. I wasn’t good at it (I might have stuck with it longer if our team had won more but my team always sucked). I didn’t like the team sport concept (it frustrated me) and soccer simply didn’t excite me. I think I did three or four summers of it until my parents let me quit. I played hockey for a year or two but in addition to the problems of soccer there were only one or two girls on the team. Because my family liked skiing we didn’t have a lot of extra cash for things like horse back riding (I still have never ridden a horse) and tennis so I didn’t have a chance to do those.

When I was about ten or eleven I told my mom that I would like to try swimming. I was pretty good at it and soon began doing it competitively. The sport was cheap, individual (except for relays but our relay team rocked!), and I was pretty good at it. I was swimming five days a week for an hour and half a day and I enjoyed it. Then I got good at ski racing. I went to Whistler Cup my first year J4 and after that swimming was never the same. I was barely medaling in states in swimming and I was winning Junior Olympics in skiing. The choice seemed simple at the time.

So by the time I entered high school I only ski raced. I never picked up another high school sport and personally I don’t regret that decision. I wouldn’t have wanted to force myself through another sport I hated. But I did some sport hobbies. I got into running my freshman year and did that – and continue to do it -- on and off. Sophomore year I got into gymnastics and took some classes (even though I had never done it at a younger age and was about eight inches taller than anyone else in the building). I got into slacklining. I played horrible tennis with my host father junior year.

Skiing is what I love -- it always has been. I did my hobby sports without the pressure of competition and that definitely helped keep me from comparing them to ski racing. It also gave me a break from the stresses of trying to be the best. Some would say that I did do more than one sport in high school but I disagree. To me they were hobbies, like knitting or reading. I did them only second to everything else I had going on. I didn’t spend a lot of time on them, not nearly the same amount that a school sport would demand.

The problem with the route I took is that there are certain athletic disadvantages I have, chief among them that I have incredibly bad coordination. One advantage I had was that I was able to attend more weight lifting sessions and I am stronger for it. Many girls who tried to play another sport (mostly soccer) couldn’t get enough strength sessions in before the season. There were also some sports that I would have liked to play when I was young that I simply couldn’t because my family didn’t have the funds. Yes, I never got to play tennis but in the end they paid for a lot of ski camps and for that I am grateful.

I have recently been reading Anders Ericson’s study on deliberate practice. You may know it as one of the building blocks for Malcolm Gladwell’s 10000 hour rule (there are some great blogs coming). He noted a study that I found interesting stating “Greater height is an obvious advantage in basketball, high jumping, and most sports emphasizing strength. Shorter height is an advantage in gymnastics. Differences in height were found to discriminate well among male athletes of different events at the Olympic games in Montreal, although the average height of all athletes did not differ from that of a control group of students.” This implies to me that there is a sport for everyone out there -- you just have to find it.

Most of these articles and studies reach conclusions based on what the best did.  They don’t look at the general population compared to the best. So most of the people recruited to Ohio State football played two sports. My question is: Out of every kid in Ohio who played another sport and football as opposed to just football, who got recruited to Ohio State?

In conclusion I think that from my standpoint this debate doesn’t make sense. If you want your kids to be great at some sport (especially on a professional level) you should know that there isn’t some magical algorithm to being the best. Yes, you need to be athletic and you need to put a lot of time in, but you also need passion. Don’t make your kids play basketball in high school just so Ohio State will recruit them. Don’t tell them to quit swimming for soccer when they are ten because they are better at soccer at that point. When your kids are little, do as many sports as you can afford and have time for and let them figure out what excites them. Then provide them with the opportunities to continue those sports as long as those sports enchant them.

More food for thought and articles that inspired this post:

http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/probability-competing-beyond-high-school

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/04/sports/olympics/olympic-athletes-may-win-gold-but-a-pot-of-it-rarely-follows.html?_r=0

http://highschoolsportsstuff.areavoices.com/2015/01/20/one-sport-athletes/

https://stevenashyb.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/the-race-to-nowhere-in-youth-sports/

Brains or Balls?

(These are pics from my recent race in Santa Caterina, Italy, where the men's World Cup was held in December)

Ski racing has got some contradictions. Just to name a couple: cold weather without warm clothing, and going downhill side to side. As the women head to Cortina and St. Moritz (where I will be racing this week!

) and the men head off to Wengen and Kitzbuel I thought I would talk about brains and balls, and why you need them both for this sport. This is one of the reasons that ski racing is so hard. We rocket down a mountain as fast as we can but we also need to use our heads so that we don’t kill ourselves doing so and -- perhaps more importantly -- can win.

Interestingly, in my opinion, younger kids seem to have more of one or the other of these characteristics. They are either more go get ‘ems or they are great thinkers. You can develop both but some who are too much one way never make it as they get older. I know some girls who were incredibly good but fizzled out because they couldn’t put the gas pedal down and push it, or couldn’t put on the brakes when things got hairy. The former normally became slalom skiers if they can deal with moving quickly albeit at a slower speed, and the latter normally had some gnarly crashes (not that everyone in this sport doesn’t have those, theirs were just a little too predictable) and quality time in physical therapy rooms before bowing out of the sport.

Ski racing is beautiful but as you will see if you do a google search of ski racing crashes it will b*tch slap you if you don’t use your head. The movie The Thin Line talks about this a lot, and if you have not seen it I highly recommend it for the ski racing fan, especially this time of year. The unfortunate thing is, and Bode will attest to this, it is in the thin line between destruction and safety that winning occurs. As a speed skier I will say that intelligence is my brake and audacity is my gas pedal and they fight over the clutch and steering wheel.

Brains:

In downhill we travel at speeds up to 120 km/h and after some quick math that means we travel about 33 meters per second at that speed. Last second decisions -- heck talk about last hundredth of a second decisions. Add in bad light and varying snow and it’s a bit of a wonder we make it down at all. In inspection ski racers do a lot of analysis, trying to figure out just how something is going to ski. One thing the veterans have over the newbies is that they may have run a course countless times (factor in doing two training runs and a race per year at each venue and it starts to feel like home). They know just how much they can let fly and just how high the line needs to be because they tried it last year and it worked or it didn’t. The goal in ski racing is that you figure out exactly where you want to be in inspection and are capable of executing that line perfectly; then you adjust with course reports and the way you feel while skiing down. Adjusting during a race run is the most advanced stage of ski racing intelligence. It takes a lot of experience to identify what is going on (remember you’re moving 33m/s) and have time to adjust and also be able to pull that adjustment off in that same perfect way you would pull off your inspected line. 

Balls:

If you are more of a weekend skier then you probably gawk at the way ski racers haul their bodies out of start gates. Even I am a little mesmerized when the boys tuck on Kitzbuel. I think this is one of the most confusing parts about ski racing. You have to turn your brain on and off. Ski racers have to act on what their circuitry tells them, when, say, it’s telling you there are bumps ahead and you have to adjust your line a body width, but then we have to ignore the pleading of our self preservation circuitry telling us “throw it sideways! This is steeeep.” Differentiating the two is so challenging it can take an entire career to develop. Trusting yourself is incredibly tough and trusting yourself and going as hard as you can, while not going too hard is something only the greats have in spades.

So when you are watching the upcoming January classic races, with their big air, high speeds, and demanding corners watch as athletes press on the gas and brake. Watch as racers balance what is smart and what is fast. The physical side is important but the mental side wins the race.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

 (me having fun at Bogus Basin as a little person.)

It seems to be coming up a lot recently. How to make ski racing more fun. Let me first establish that I have a lot of fun at what I do. I enjoy ski racing and I find that the sport, at its best, gives me a blissful joy that cannot be matched doing anything else. However, ski racing is not always fun and fun is not why I do it. We as a society teach our kids that life is not always fun. I haven’t heard people trying to solve the problem of high school dropouts by trying to make school more fun. We don’t try to make the workplace more fun. But athletics, well if you’re not having fun at all times then suddenly there are big problems.

It seems interesting to me that we put athletics up on this pedestal, a seeming utopia where there only exists fun and joy, and we participate under this cloud where we don’t even realize we are working. I can’t speak for everyone else but I know I am working when I am working and most of the time it is not fun. When I am doing circuits until I literally can’t see straight in the summer I am not having fun. When I am packed like a sardine in the back of an airplane surrounded by people I am not having fun. When it’s twenty below and I am in full strip at the top of a course where the wind is blowing sideways and now we have a course hold because you can’t see down there but my clothes are at the bottom I am not having fun.

Last year I went to Europe. I spent approximately 57600 seconds flying to Europe and back. I added up all of my times from my races last year in Europe and the total number of seconds came to… wait for it… 520.66 seconds (about 8 and a half minutes). The ratio: 110/1. I spend 110 seconds cramping in the back of an airplane for every one second on a racecourse. And that doesn’t count time spent in the van on two lane roads winding through the back woods of central Europe. At a race in Spital I spent approximately four hours at the start waiting for a fog hold that never ended. They counted the race but I was listed as a DNS1. This means that I spent 14400 seconds waiting for a fog hold for 0 seconds of racing. I think you can do that ratio.

I am not saying that ski racing is never fun but as far as sports go it has many aspects that make it an unlikely candidate for “most fun sport in the world.” I mean you are talking about a sport where you literally throw yourself down a mountain in who-knows-what-weather in spandex and boots that don’t fit. People used to ask me “are those suits warm?” No, they are not warm -- do they look warm? Furthermore we have endless amounts of equipment and we have to tune it for one to two hours a day. If I had a dollar for every time someone said “why can’t we just be swimmers” in the tuning room I could pay for my ski career.

Everyone talks about all of the life lessons people get out of ski racing but people still think about fun when they think of keeping kids in the sport. I am not sure we can make it this sport fun enough for all the kids out there who are only looking for fun to continue to do it. I believe that we should focus on the principles kids learn: hard work, responsibility, time management, self-respect, and focus. Kids learn to buckle down for what is important, they learn to live with other people, they learn to push their limits. I believe that if we help focus on these things kids will stay in the sport not because it is fun but because it helps shape their identity and they believe that ski racing is critical to who they are.