How to Do Twice the Schoolwork in Half the Time
Ski racing is a very time intensive sport. The long hours in the gym, the late nights tuning skis, the drive to the mountain every day—all the time required to fully prepare for just one training session is incredible. Particularly in winter, it limits how much time you have for other endeavors. Throw in the other obligations of a student-athlete, such as those at Stratton Mountain School, and it’s a wonder how it all gets done. Team warm-up before breakfast, on-snow training until lunch, class until 5 p.m., and somehow all homework, tuning, workouts, and video sessions need to be completed before bed. Not to mention, you may need to work on your soon due college application or study for the SAT exam to try and compete with the top students in the country.
When you need twice as much time as you have to get everything done, your options are limited. Usually, you just figure out how to work faster because it must get done. Life as a ski racing student-athlete quickly becomes a crash course in time management. With homework, for example, you may not have time to rewrite a new draft of your essay if your first one is terrible, so you figure out how to get it right the first time. Improving your efficiency in school could mean more clearly outlining your thoughts before you start writing, or maybe it’s finding the most effective memorization strategy. While I may not be able to remember the name of a person I’ve met five times, at some point I realized I could recite song lyrics remarkably well. Memorizing the quadratic formula to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel” was the only way I could make it stick for my Algebra 1 quiz—and the only reason I remember it today. As it turns out, having no time can be exactly what forces us to create more time for ourselves.
Why You Should Talk to People on Chairlifts
My ski career has given me the chance to meet hundreds of high-level coaches and athletes from across the world, all with different styles and philosophies on ski racing. Whether I find myself on the lift with the head coach of the Swiss Ski Team or a young athlete from my alma mater, I often find myself talking ski racing with them. Not surprisingly, I almost always find I have something interesting to learn from them. Engaging with diverse ways of thinking about ski racing has certainly helped strengthen my own understanding of the sport. However, I’ve found that it’s not just fellow ski racers who have something to teach you on the chairlift.
Several years ago, I was on a chairlift in Sugarloaf, heading up to collect my skis after the second run of a NorAm slalom race. My slalom had been hot and cold all year, condition-dependent. I had struggled to find a setup with my boots and skis that gave me the feeling I was looking for across all surfaces. On the lift with me was an old-school Sugarloafer, outfitted with a weathered Carhartt jacket and skis that may have been older than me. In a deep Maine accent, he started telling me about how he had watched the race. We got to talking about equipment, and to my disbelief, he made a suggestion about tuning that actually made a lot of sense. To this day, I have no idea how a guy on skis from the ’90s could come up with such a nuanced opinion on race tuning. Nonetheless, his suggestion helped me come up with an idea for a slight adjustment for the race the next day. I implemented it and finished one of my best slalom races of the season.
That chairlift ride helped me realize even the most unsuspecting people can have something to teach you. This lesson has been proven to me over and over since. Whether it’s a foreigner giving you their perspective on global politics or a local showing you a trick for getting your truck out of the snow when it’s stuck, just about everybody has something to teach you. It’s our job to figure out what that is!
How to Be a Car Mechanic in a Pinch
We knew something was wrong long before the check engine light came on. As we tried to make it up the hill to our apartment, which we normally flew up, our rental van barely had the power to go half the speed limit. That afternoon, we brought the vehicle to the dealership, where they informed us that a “Marder” (the German word for marten) had chewed through several hoses in our engine that delivered air to the turbocharger and intake manifold. The problem was that it would be at least a week before they could fix it. We had a race series in Switzerland that we needed to drive to the next day, and we were in Austria. It was Saturday, and trying to find a mechanic open on Sunday in Austria that could repair our car the same day is nearly impossible. We were in a pickle.
Without many other options, we set to work. None of us had any mechanical experience beyond a few oil changes, so we flipped through the vehicle manual, called friends who were mechanics, and did research online. Poking around under the hood, we figured out which hoses were damaged and needed to be replaced. We sputtered over to an auto parts store just before they closed and were able to purchase some new, generic hosing of the same diameter. With only a little bit of jerry-rigging and duct tape, we were able to get the damaged hoses replaced or patched, and to our astonishment, our van was fixed!
While we certainly got lucky in being able to make the repair ourselves, I couldn’t help but notice how we drew on many of the same problem solving processes I use in skiing. The key always seems to lie in understanding the most upstream issue rather than the symptoms. It was obvious that our van had no power, but it wasn’t until we understood the configuration and sizing of the damaged hoses that we could move forward with a solution. The constant problem-solving strategies you develop from trying to become faster every day sure seem to have a lot of applications beyond the sport. If you’re lucky, they just might help you fix your car in a pinch.