It’s been a while since my last update, so I figured it was time to fill you all in on what off-season life has looked like since wrapping up the Olympic season back in April.
I actually started things off by staying close to skiing, just in a different capacity than usual. In early May I got to guest coach at a Whistler Mountain Ski Club spring training camp, working with the U16 athletes from my home club. Passing on a bit of knowledge to the next generation is something I really value, and it was a great reminder of where it all started for me.
From there, I went the opposite direction — far from the snow. My girlfriend Courtney and I spent a few days in El Salvador, surfing and wandering around the small coastal towns. We rented a scooter to explore, and met a traveling Austrian couple who were keen to go charter fishing on a tiny panga boat with us. The surf was honestly a bit gnarly for my skill level, and I quickly learned that lying with little to do is its own kind of challenge after a winter of go-go-go. Turns out I’m not great at doing nothing, but I’m working on it.
Shortly before the season ended, my brother had also announced he was retiring from ski racing. After so many years on the team together, that news hit differently than I expected. It had me doing a lot of thinking about my own future in the sport, especially coming off an Olympic year — the kind of year that naturally makes you ask yourself if you’re still all in. After sitting with it for a while, the answer was a clear yes. I’m still chasing a World Cup podium, and I’m not done yet.
That sense of commitment carried into another part of my month: a quick trip to Toronto to attend the Alpine Canada board meeting as the men’s alpine athlete rep. With the Olympic quadrennial wrapping up and a CEO change on the horizon at our national sport organization, it felt like an especially valuable moment to bring the athletes’ voice into the room and share our vision for what we’d like to see from future leadership. It’s a role I take real pride in, and I’m grateful to have a board that actually wants that direct feedback from athletes.
Between the brother news and the board meeting, May was quite busy — and then it threw one more curveball my way. Some knee pain I’d been managing through the second half of the winter turned out to be a torn meniscus. We opted to have the damaged piece surgically removed, so at the end of the month I headed to Banff for a quick procedure. It went well — I was up and moving right away with no pain — but it did mean pushing my strength program back a few weeks.
June became a rhythm of rehab at the gym and, in my downtime, working on a project that had nothing to do with skiing at all: building a sauna in my parents’ backyard, on the site of our old childhood playhouse. The project definitely ate into some of my recovery time, but I’ve always loved building things, and it turned into exactly the kind of off-season distraction I needed — something to pour energy into that wasn’t rehab or racing.
Toward the end of June, I also put together a team for the first-ever North Shore Move To Cure ALS event at Ambleside Park. My Helmet4Hope fundraising is almost entirely virtual, so this was a rare chance to actually stand shoulder to shoulder with other people whose lives, and whose families’ lives, have been touched by ALS. Patient ambassador Pete Cross opened the event with a short speech that set an incredibly moving tone for the whole day. I’m grateful to everyone who donated to the team, and especially to those who showed up and walked with me.
By early July, the sauna was nearly finished and my knee was responding well to higher intensity work. The whole men’s team gathered in Whistler for a camp — gym sessions, mountain biking, pilates, and a little fly fishing mixed in. My knee got a bit grumpy the first time I reintroduced hopping and jumping, but it settled back down quickly, which was a good sign heading into our first on-snow camp.
That camp is where I am right now — El Colorado, just outside Santiago, Chile. We’re four days into training, working through free-skiing drills and easy GS gates to get the feeling back. So far the knee is feeling good. We’ll be moving between a few venues over the month, with recovery stops in Santiago between blocks to manage the altitude, and I’m looking forward to progressing into speed training as the month goes on.
I’ll keep you posted on how the rest of camp unfolds. Thanks, as always, for following along and for being part of this journey with me.
