Mitchell Gunn, with permission

What do you need to do to be totally prepared to ski your fastest on race day? If you ask the top-ten men and women on the World Cup, you will probably get 20 different answers. But, having asked this question of many world-class ski racers, I have found five themes that underlie their responses.

#1: Control Or Not To Control

The life of a ski racer can be stressful. There are many things that you can worry about and that can make you distracted, stressed, frustrated, and just plain annoyed, all of which will hurt your skiing. Unfortunately, many racers worry about the wrong things. The big problem is that many racers get stressed out about things over which they have absolutely no control. In your ski racing life, there are some things you should think about and others you shouldn’t. Things that you should pay attention to are those things over which you have control including your physical condition, effort, attitude, thoughts, emotions, behavior, equipment, and preparation. All of these are within your control, so by thinking about them, you can ensure that they are all working for you rather than against you.

At the same time, things in your ski racing life that you have no control over, yet you still may worry about include competitors, coaches, officials, parents, start number, weather, terrain, and snow conditions. If you think about these, you’re creating stress, wasting energy, and preventing yourself from focusing on aspects of your skiing that will actually help you ski fast.

The next time you find that you are under stress, ask yourself one question: “Is the thing that I am worried about under my control?” If it’s not, let it go and focus on things you can control. If it is within your control, instead of worrying about, do something about it!

#2: Trust Your Ability On Race Day

A disagreement I have gotten into with coaches over the years involves whether it is good for racers to think about technique right before and during a race. They argue that if they don’t think about technique they won’t ski well. But it’s my belief that if you have to think about technique on race day, you haven’t fully ingrained it and one of two things will happen. Either you will not be able to use the technique in a race and, by focusing on it instead of just skiing fast, you won’t ski well. Or you will be so focused on the technique that you may, in fact, ski technically well, but you won’t go fast because you weren’t focused on going fast. Yes, for some racers, particularly young ones, a specific technique may allow them to ski fast. But good technique and speed aren’t always connected. And on race day, they don’t give style points for good technique. All that matters is going as fast as you can!

There is a time and a place to think about technique. That time is during training. It is here that you analyze your skiing and focus on a particular part of your skiing in order to develop it. With repetition in training, the new technique becomes automatic and it will then help you to ski faster in races.

But when race day arrives, you shouldn’t question, doubt, analyze, or focus on technique. If you do not have a technique down by the time you get to the starting gate, you probably won’t be able to use it effectively in the race. Whatever capabilities you bring to the start, trust yourself, and go as fast as you can with what you have on that day.

#3: Expect The Unexpected

A major source of stress for ski racers is the unexpected things that can come up on race day. The natural reaction to unexpected events is to, well, freak out. You worry, lose confidence, become anxious, and get distracted. In that mental and physical state, you have little chance of skiing your best.

During the course of a race weekend, all kinds of things can wrong. On the way to races, airlines can lose skis. At the races, goggles can become fogged and buckles can break. If you’re not prepared, you’re going to stress out and probably ski poorly.

There are two ways to deal with the unexpected. First, expect the unexpected. This can be accomplished easily. Take a sheet of paper and on the left side of the page, make a list of all the things that can go wrong at a race. Think travel, weather, gear, and race day schedule, for starters. Then, on the right side, list solutions to these events. For example, you break your skis, you should know someone beforehand who has an extra pair of skis that is similar to your own and who is willing to lend them. Or, if you have fogged goggles, you can carry some napkins or have an extra pair in a bag at the start. Using this strategy, you prevent yourself from freaking out by preventing the unexpected event from being, well, unexpected.

Of course, you can’t anticipate everything (s#*& happens!), so the key then becomes how you react to that unexpected thing (e.g., the lift stops and you might miss your start). You have two choices here. Either experience the aforementioned freak out, which I’m sure you would agree doesn’t do you any good. Or stay positive and calm, look for a solution to the unexpected event, and stay focused on your goal for the day which is to ski your fastest. I can assure you that you will feel and ski a whole better if you can keep your cool. And it’s been my experience that, with 20/20 hindsight, that thing that caused you such stress wasn’t really worth the reaction.

#4: Start Area Preparation

The most critical period before your race run is the time you spend in the start area. What you do there will often dictate the success of your run. There are three things that must be done to ensure that you ski your best. First, you must prepare your equipment: bindings, edges, bases, boots, armor. The last thing you want to worry about before your run is your equipment, so you want to get it ready first.

Second, you must get physically ready and at your ideal level of intensity. This involves stretching, doing warm-up exercises, and revving your engine until it’s race ready.

Finally, you must get mentally prepared. This phase involves putting on your “race face,” that is, narrowing your focus onto the race, using mental imagery to rehearse key parts of the course, thinking positively, and focusing on skiing your fastest. This preparation will lead to a level of readiness in which, as you enter the starting gate, you are totally prepared to ski your best and you only have one thing on your mind: skiing as FAST as you can!

#5: Commit Yourself To Your Race Runs

There’s only one way to find success on race day and that’s to being totally focused and completely committed to ‘bringing it.’ When you’re on course, there is just no room for being tentative and cautious. If you let up or back off during a run, you’re either going to make a mistake or ski slow. One of the most important things you must do when you get into the starting gate is to be totally committed to skiing as aggressively and fast as you can.

To ski fast, you have to be 100% committed to skiing the very best you can. Unfortunately, as you develop as a racer, you will often come upon courses, terrain, or conditions that you will see more as a threat than a challenge. You may be uncertain about going all out. You may worry about making a mistake or DNFing. This uncertainty will doubt and anxiety. In this fearful state of mind, there’s no way you’re going to throw one down.

So before your race run (in fact, training runs too), make sure that you are focused on skiing as aggressively as possible. Make sure you are totally committed to doing it all the way. If you aren’t totally committed, get refocused and fully determined, then GO FOR IT! By being committed, you will ski better and faster, make fewer mistakes, and have a whole lot more fun.

Bonus Tip #6: Avoid One Emotion and One Question

You only have one shot at life (there are no do-overs). Have you ever played it safe in a race, saw how slow you were, and kicked yourself for not having gone for it more? It’s a terrible feeling! You look back up the hill and wish you hadn’t skied so timidly. Just finishing doesn’t feel very good.

After every race run, you want to look back up the hill and, whether you made a mistake or finished or not, be able to say that you were going for it and you left it all out on the hill. If you DNF, there’s the frustration of having not finished, but the satisfaction that you were going really fast. If you do finish, you will be fast.

There is one emotion you never want to feel and one question you never want to ask in your ski racing (or life). The emotion you don’t want to feel is regret. What’s regret? Wishing you had done something different. The one question you don’t want to ask is “I wonder what could have been?” After your race run, race, season, career, and life, the statement you want to be able to make, whether you fully achieved your ski racing goals or not, is “I gave it everything I had.” And the emotion you want to experience is pride in knowing that you couldn’t have done anything more.