THE START
BEYOND THE COMFORT ZONE WHETHER YOU ARE AN OLYMPIAN OR A MIDDLEAGED ICE SWIMMER, GETTING OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE HAS ITS REWARDS.
Contestants test the water at the Lake Memphremagog Winter Swimming Festival. Courtesy Kingdom Games
O
ne of the things I love the most about the Winter Olympics is watching some of the sports most of us never participate in. Sure, we go sledding. But have we ever luged? Yes, we skate. But how about curling? Crosscountry skiing is something that’s almost a given in this state. But doing that, and stopping to shoot at a target at the same time? How many of us have done that? While some of the athletes and Olympians we feature in our annual round-up of 10 Athletes of the Year were practically born into their sports (we’re looking at you, Ryan Cochran-Siegle), what is impressive is how many picked up their sports relatively late in life. Take Deedra Irwin, a runner who started Nordic skiing to stay in shape and pickeup biathlon in 2017. She is now headed to the Olympics as a biathlete. Or Megan Nick, a gymnast, who went to a free U.S. Ski Team aerials scouting camp as part of a high school senior project. She is now a World Cup-winning aerialist. We have a remarkable breadth of opportunities in the region to pursue just about any outdoor sport at the highest level. Ski jumpers can learn on small hills like those in the Upper Valley area, or head to Lake Placid, N.Y. —where you can also learn to luge or bobsled. The Vermont National Guard’s biathlon training site at Camp Ethan Allen in Jericho, offers training and a chance to learn biathlon for civilians as well as those enrolled in the Guard. Six of the eight members of the U.S. Olympic Biathlon Team have been training in Vermont or are from here. Stratton Mountain School has no fewer than four grads competing in the 2022 Winter Games: slopestyle/big air skier Mac Forehand; cross-country ski racers Jessie Diggins and Julia Kern; and snowboardcross veteran Lindsay Jacobellis. Burke Mountain Academy grads Mikaela Shiffrin and Nina O’Brien
will be ski racing in China, as will University of Vermont’s former NCAA champion, Paula Moltzan. Green Mountain Valley School has also turned out its share of World Cup and Olympic contenders. What makes any of these athletes different from us, or the people we were growing up? The difference is these top-level athletes consistently push themselves beyond their comfort zones, something that humans are not conditioned to do these days. “Humans evolved to be able to handle stress and that physical stress just isn’t present in our lives today,” says ultra-marathoner Rob Williams who teaches the Wim Hof Method of breathwork and cold-water therapy. He makes an ice bath part of his weekly practice. That may be why cold-water swimming and ice baths are growing in popularity, as we write about in the “The Rising Tide of Ice Swimming.” Many of the people who are practicing this emerging “sport” are not hard-bodied young athletes but folks in middle age who are eager to push themselves into something new. “A lot of us are deterred from trying things because we think we can’t,” says Charlotte Brynn, 55, who has swum an ice mile in Lake Champlain. “The thing that struck me is this is actually achievable.” And if you do decide to ice swim with any of the groups we profile in this issue, you may also have a whole lot of fun. After rereading the stories in this issue, I came away inspired to do one thing this year. Call it a resolution or not, but I am going to find a new way to push myself out of the comfort zone. —Lisa Lynn, Editor
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