Hi everyone,

Graham here, checking in with a little springtime blog post from a not-so-snowy Bozeman. With many of my teammates racing overseas in either the U23 World Championships, on the World Cup, or at the Paralympic Games in Italy, I thought that I would talk about something every athlete at some point in their career deals with: a bad season and what you can do to try and minimize the negative spiral that comes with it.

Should you just quit? No seriouly, should you just pack it up and be done for the year? I mean, the season is going south in a hand basket, results aren’t there, and worst of all, all that hard work that you put in this summer and fall has amounted to jack all. Why are you doing this? What’s the point of even trying? The shape isn’t there, and no matter how hard you push yourself in the race, you only get slower and slower. But why is this happening? You trained so hard, and you know what you're capable of, but it isn’t showing, and you’re watching the season that you dreamed would be a success, is now falling flat on its face! The question is, why indeed? These are all questions that every athlete asks themselves at some point in a season that just isn’t going their way, and it’s a slippery slope and an easy one to spiral down if youre not careful.

Sadly, if you have read this far and are expecting me to give you the silver bullet or the magic or miraculous training plan that will turn your season around and make everything great, I don’t have it. But what I will be talking about is something you can do to stop you from spiraling down the negative slide.

Trust the process.

That’s it, as the old saying goes, Rome wasn’t built overnight, and neither are the best athletes in the world. Trust the process. What I have done this season is try to find other smaller aspects of my training, and with skiing, that remind me of why I enjoy that sport that I’m doing, and knowing that focusing on these things will make me a better skier in the long run. Trust the process. Those small aspects have come from daily training, for example, getting to the parking lot and seeing many of my teammates who always seem to bring a smile to my face, or just knowing that I get to spend hours of my day outside skiing (even on a low snow year) in the forest. Trust the process. With the few races that I have done this year, I have taken the liberty of trying some new racing strategies as well as tactics to see if there might be something to be gained. Trust the process. Additionally, I have realized that there is a calming bliss in going into a race and having zero expectations as to how the outcome of the race is gonna go. Finally, know that just because the season this year isn’t going the way that you want it to is not an indicator of how the season will go next year. What you do know is that if you trust the process and keep following your path, that season you’ve been working hard for will come.

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I trust the process.

See you in the next one.

Graham

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