THE MOST POWERFUL FITNESS TOOL?

GETTING ON A HEALTHY SLEEP SCHEDULE COULD MARK THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A GOOD ATHLETE AND A GREAT ONE.

BY EMMA COTTON

There is a growing trend among today’s top athletes—the ones you look at and ask, where did she come from? How does he keep landing on the podium? At the end of the season, they’re still going when everyone else is burnt out. Turns out, these athletes get more of one thing than the average person, and it’s pretty simple: Sleep.

Sure, there are plenty of other factors. Mikaela Shiffrin is known to train longer hours and push herself harder than most other ski racers. But she also is known for napping. Mat Fraser, three-time CrossFit Games champion, has a rigorous training regimen, a balanced diet and preand post-workout rituals and actually focuses on sleep. LeBron James, known for getting 10 to 12 hours of sleep every night, goes to Versaclimber, spin and pilates classes in the off-season.

But when you get down to it, the most successful athletes are the ones that commit themselves to a healthy, well-rounded lifestyle. They literally eat, breathe—and sleep—their sport.

“Sleep is the number one recovery technique for body and mind,” says Mike Day, Shiffrin’s coach. Shiffrin has told the media: “I try to go to bed somewhere between 8:30 and 9 at night. Sleep is huge for me. It’s my best, main and favorite form of recovery...I need eight and a half to nine hours of sleep to feel my best.”

After placing second twice in the CrossFit Games, Fraser was ready to do anything to win gold. The main thing he changed? “The regular sleep schedule—not staying up until 2 a.m. watching Netflix,” he told Vermont Sports. Leading up to the 2016 Games, Fraser went to bed and woke up at the same time every day, whether he was training or on vacation. And the results paid off: Fraser won the Games by 200 points—the largest margin in history.

In 2017, he won by 216 points, beating his own record.

So can sleep really make the difference between a good athlete and an all-time champ?

“I certainly think it makes a difference in separating the great from the really good,” says Matt Gammons, a sports medicine specialist at Rutland Regional Medical Center and a consulting physician at Green Mountain Valley School in Waitsfield.

“The margin at elite levels is such a fine thing. And if you look at sleep through adolescence, sleep is an opportunity for players who have potential to fulfill that potential. Take Mikaela. Sleep can make the difference between first place and second place in a GS race for her." And for the kids Gammons sees at GMVS, not getting enough sleep could derail the opportunity they have to be the next Mikaela.

Recently, scientists have realized exactly how powerful sleep can be for our health—powerful enough that, in early October, 2017, researchers Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on circadian rhythms, which regulate sleep. Their discoveries explain, on a molecular level, how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it’s synchronized with Earth's revolutions. More than ever, it is clear that our bodily functions are naturally aligned with the patterns of day and night—and fighting these could create consequences for our health.

But for athletes—those of us who use our bodies rigorously on a daily basis—getting sleep is extra-important, and it isn’t always easy. There are a lot of unanswered questions about sleep, but scientists are beginning to nail down answers about the amount and quality of sleep that an athlete needs to perform at his or her best.

WHAT IS SLEEP?

Sleep is what you do at the end of the day, when you close your eyes and dream. But in reality, scientists are still fuzzy about sleep’s exact purpose—why and how we do it, and what exactly it does for our bodies.

The conclusions they have drawn include the following: Sleep reenergizes our bodies on a cellular level. An influx of cerebrospinal fluid washes into the brain during sleep, clearing away harmful waste proteins like a dishwasher—which explains why scientists recently linked chronic sleep deprivation to Alzheimer’s and dementia (both have been connected to a building up of plaque in the brain). Sleep supports emotional drive and promotes motivation, the ability to learn and remember, and even controls appetite and libido.

Sleep starts, ironically, when certain regions of the brain become active. With a natural dose of melatonin, the hypothalamus and the parafacial zone in the brain prompt slow-wave sleep (SWS) and when the cells in those regions turn on, our consciousness shuts off.

After that, we enter rapid-eyemovement (REM) sleep. The first cycle usually occurs 70 to 90 minutes after we fall asleep, and the average sleeper experiences between three and five REM cycles per night. An entire cycle lasts between 90 and 110 minutes. During those cycles, our bodies regulate hormones that control our hunger (ghrelin), blood-glucose level (insulin) and the development of muscles and tissues (growth hormones).

So it might not be surprising that athletes—people who physically exert themselves, rely on precise movements and learn new skills on a daily basis— need to pay particularly close attention to their sleep habits.

Sleep provides several things that are important to athleticism, according to Michael Seteia, active emeritus professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. “It's essential to providing a positive emotional state and high motivation,” he says.

Think about your training: it’s much more likely that we’ll be motivated to do that last rep, take that last run or push ourselves just a little bit harder, if we’ve had a full night’s sleep.

“Then there’s the somatic aspect,” Seteia says, “which is metabolism and glycogen synthesis and storage, and being able to efficiently fuel muscle cells that are required in intense athletic competition. In the past, we didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the role of sleep in metabolism. Now, of course, we understand that sleep plays a very critical role in metabolism, and with insufficiencies, metabolic function is less efficient than it should be or could be. That, in turn, will have an obvious effect on athletic performance, especially for endurance athletes.”

The last thing sleep does for us, he says, is improve cognition; it helps us with procedural learning, and it sharpens our hand-eye coordination and muscle memory.

In 2014, Cheri D. Mah, a researcher at Stanford, experimented with the idea that sleep improves cognition. Her subjects were Stanford's men’s basketball team. Eleven players wore wristbands that tracked their sleeping patterns. She found that, on average, the athletes slept 6.5 hours per night. For two weeks, they kept a regular sleep schedule while Mah monitored their performance on a 282foot sprint, free-throw drills and threepoint shooting. Then, the athletes were told to do everything they could to increase their sleep. The team average moved from 6.5 to nearly 8.5 hours of sleep per night.

The players’ performance improved significantly. Free-throw shooting improved by 11.4 percent, three-point shooting shot up by 13.7 percent, and their 282-foot sprints were 0.7 seconds faster, on average. That’s the kind of improvement that might come with performance-enhancing drugs or decades of training.

The Ideal Sleep Schedule

If sleep can make that much of a difference, it may be even more important than athletes originally thought. So what kind of sleep schedule should an athlete have? The short answer: it varies. The amount of sleep an individual needs depends on age, amount of physical activity, stress level, diet, personal preference—the list goes on.

While it’s impossible to propose a sleep schedule that works for everyone, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine suggests that adults get a minimum of seven hours per night, and as many as nine hours. Adolescents, who rely on the growth hormone to regulate puberty, along with the growth of muscles and tissues, need more—about nine hours per night.

Though athletes exert themselves more than the average sleeper, there is no evidence to suggest that athletes need more sleep than anyone else. Some people may naturally sleep longer, and some studies indicate that athletes are more likely to achieve a better, deeper quality of sleep, but LeBron James’ 12 nightly hours aren’t necessarily the key to athletic success.

“It’d be tempting to say, ‘Gee, if everybody gets 10 to 12 hours of sleep, they’re going to be like LeBron James, and obviously that’s not true,” Seteia says. “The fact is that LeBron James could be, intrinsically, a longer sleeper, and not everybody would be even capable of getting 10 to 12 hours.”

The key to a successful sleep schedule is the same for athletes as for anyone else: making it regular.

“An ideal sleep schedule is one that’s consistent,” says Gammons. “So if you go to bed around the same time and get up around the same time, these things, over time, tend to build better sleep patterns and make you more tolerant to interruptions in terms of being able to get yourself to sleep.”

IT’S EASY, RIGHT?

While sleeping might sound like the simple part of the eat-train-sleeprepeat cycle—less complicated than developing a balanced diet, and surely less strenuous than running drills—it’s surprisingly difficult to get enough of it.

For elite athletes, schedules shift both seasonally and daily, and getting a good, steady amount of sleep might be considered the hardest component of the sports lifestyle to achieve. Again, take Shiffrin: in the summer, she travels to New Zealand and Chile. In the fall, she’s off to Europe, and then the World Cup touring begins. Between jet lag and her training schedule, she has to work to make sleep a priority. The rest of us have it easier, though we still have to balance sleep with work, social lives, family time and some amount of training.

But that doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. “Consistency is important if it’s possible,” Gammons says, "but if you can’t have an exact pattern, you can have consistency in your rituals and planning in terms of how you sleep— turning off stimulation a half hour to 45 minutes before you want to go to sleep, not taking caffeine late in the day, those kinds of common-sense things."

A few habits will increase your chances of getting deep, restful sleep. If possible, avoid exercising in the hours before you fall asleep. Before bed, do something relaxing—take a bath, put on some calming music—forget your stressors, if you can. And by all means, avoid what Seteia calls the kiss of death: “If people are really having trouble sleeping, they shouldn’t remain in bed awake for extended periods,” he says. “It starts to potentially result in

How To Be Good In Bed

• CONSISTENCY, CONSISTENCY, CONSISTENCY

If there’s one thing that most scientists and doctors agree on, it’s that your sleep schedule should be consistent. Keeping an irregular sleep schedule will knock you off your natural circadian rhythms and make it more difficult to fall asleep and wake up. A 2015 study by The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism studied 447 adults and found that those who kept a regular sleep schedule were likely to have better cholesterol levels, smaller waist circumference, lower body mass index and less insulin resistance. “There’s no question about the fact that, if you’re trying to sleep at odds with your circadian rhythm, things are going to be seriously disrupted, and that, in turn, is going to impair performance,” says Michael Seteia, active emeritus professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.

• PUT IN YOUR HOURS

While there’s no magic number that determines how much sleep you need, most adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep per night. (This number represents between three and five full cycles of REM sleep, each lasting about 90 minutes with non-REM sleep in between). Athletes should experiment to find the number of hours that feels right. When possible, get to bed at a decent hour, then, without setting an alarm, time how long you sleep. Do this several times, and you’ll start to understand your patterns. With work, family and social lives, training and other demands, it's difficult to make sleep a priority, but the rewards are high. Matt Gammons, sports medicine specialist at Rutland Re- increasing insomnia, because you begin to associate the bed with wakefulness and frustration.”

For those who travel regularly, or who can’t seem to nail down a regular schedule, Gammons says it’s possible to make up for what he calls “acute sleep debt,” which accumulates over time, but it’s much easier to make up for a short-term lack of sleep.

“If you’re traveling for a couple of days,” he says, “it’s relatively easy to get back on track with a few nights of good sleep. What seems to be harder is the athlete who’s chronically sleep deprived. Just taking a nap isn’t going to make up for that. It really requires a lifestyle change that over a couple of weeks, will start to reset the system.”

But for adults who exercise regularly, avoiding chronic sleep deprivation and keeping to a consistently generous sleep schedule could be the key to a powerfully healthy lifestyle.

“Getting on a regular sleep schedule is nice from an athletic standpoint, but just from a life standpoint, sleep patterning is probably the second-most important thing we can do,” Gammons said. “You’d be surprised at how much exercise and sleeping well can moderate other things. If you were going to do three things for your health, exercising moderately most days of the week, not smoking, and getting good sleep—those are probably the most powerful things we have.” gional Medical Center, says many doctors agree that sleep is one of the most powerful tools we have to stay healthy, and short-changing it can affect nearly every one of your major body systems.

• POWER NAPS—DO THEY WORK?

The short answer: yes. “Naps built into a regular schedule can be very beneficial, but you shouldn’t use them to make up for chronic sleep deprivation,” Gammons says. This could explain why companies like Ben & Jerry’s, Zappos, Uber and Google all host napping spaces in their headquarters. Naps can make up for the loss of alertness and motor ability that results from a sleepless night. A study published in the Journal of Sleep Research in 2009 found that even well-rested adults can improve reaction time, logical reasoning and symbol recognition with a nap. Even sleeping briefly—say, a 20-minute power nap—helps reinforce learning. And if you have the time, a 90-minute nap (during which you may experience a full REM cycle) can give you the same learning and cognition benefits as a full eight-hour sleep cycle.

• WIND DOWN

Athletes who travel from one time zone to the next are bound to experience a shift from their natural circadian rhythms, but there are still ways to get a restful night’s sleep. To start, practice a relaxing pre-bedtime ritual, conducted away from bright lights and noise. Separate yourself from triggers that cause excitement, anxiety and stress. If it’s possible to control, set the temperature in your room to between 60 and 67 degrees. Consider eyeshades, earplugs, white noise machines, humidifiers and fans. For these rituals to be most effective, begin practicing them before the travel begins, and keep them consistent.

HAILING FROM EVERY CORNER OF VERMONT, THESE 10 ATHLETES PUT THE WORLD ON NOTICE THIS YEAR.

Over the last 12 months, Vermont athletes hailing from Kirby to Killington, Richford to Landgrove, have taken center stage at events around the world. Of the 25 medals the U.S earned at the Olympics, four were won by Vermont-based athletes. Jessie Diggins earned two, Megan Nick and Ryan Cochran-Siegle both won one. Add in Lindsay Jacobellis (who grew up in Vermont but no longer calls it home) and that would make five. But Olympians were not the only ones who put one impressive performances. Here are the 10 athletes we are honoring for what they achieved over the past year and what lies ahead for them.

RYAN COCHRAN-SIEGLE, BURLINGTON

Say “Ryan Cochran-Siegle” and there may be just one race that comes to mind: the Vermonter’s silver medal-winning run in Super G at the Olympics in Beijing in February 2022.

That win — the only Olympic medal the U.S. Alpine Team secured — launched Cochran-Siegle into the international spotlight, earning him endorsements, media attention, hometown parades and front-row invitations to events such as the U.S. Open in tennis. It also ensured the Cochran family another generation of Olympic medalists (Ryan’s mother Barbara Ann Cochran, won Olympic gold in slalom 50 years earlier).

Athletes Of The Year

But what that one win might have eclipsed was Cochran-Siegle’s long, steady rise in the ranks of ski racing. In 2022, Ryan Cochran-Siegle, now 30, made it into the top 10 in World Cup races seven times. Most recently, that included finishing fifth at the Bormio, Italy downhill on December 28, 2022, the same location where, in 2020, he’d won the Super G. That race marked a high in what has been a roller coaster of a career, with the lows marked by injuries.

In the 2020/21 season it seemed as if Cochran-Siegle was poised to finally fulfill the promise he seemed destined for. But once again, an injury – a wrenching crash in Kitzbuhel, Austria in January 2021 that left him with a broken neck — sidelined him for the season. It was, he said at the time, the closest he had come to a career-ending injury. Instead, he rehabbed and worked on dialing in gear from his new sponsor, Head.

Even with an Olympic silver medal, R.C.S. is not complacent. “I still have my best skiing ahead of me. As a speed skier, the more I ski these tracks, the more comfortable I can get. If I can learn a little bit more each year, that will just help me in the future,” he said.

KAYLEIGH DAVENPORT, SUDBURY

For its 2023 annual meeting on January 31, the Vermont Horse Council lined up a stellar speaker: Sudbury native Kayleigh Davenport. Davenport isn’t an Olympian, or even an equestrian who has walls covered in blue ribbons. But what she accomplished in 2022 set her apart as both a rider and an athlete.

In August, Davenport finished the Mongol Derby, a 1,000-km (621.37 miles) grueling trek through northern Mongolia designed to mimic the horse messenger system established by Genghis Khan. To even be invited is an honor and requires an extensive resume. Thousands apply each year from around globe, striving for a chance to compete on a route established 800 years ago in 1224.

The race course changes every year and is kept secret until the last minute. It can take riders through mountain passes, open valleys, river crossings, wetlands, floodplains, arid dunes,

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Athletes Of The Year

rolling hills, and of course, the famed Mongolian steppe. Riders pick their horses at each leg from herds of semiwild horses Mongol tribes care for.

Riders must carry all their materials and supplies (although meals are provided at checkpoints) and may not weigh in at more than 187 lbs., including their backpack (with camping supplies) and a saddlebag that could hold just 11 lbs. “When you’re out in the field, it’s just kind of you and your horse,” said Davenport.

Some restrictions are made to keep the race close to what the initial Mongolian riders had to contend with, but much of it is done with horse safety in mind. “If you’re on a horse and you don’t really have a say in how fast you’re going to be going, you can’t be barreling through a field and fall in a marmot hole, which happened a lot,” she said.

It’s grueling for the rider too. Of the 47 who started only 33 finished. Davenport, riding with another American, tied for 14th. Davenport worked with a fitness coach to prepare. While she is not sure she’d do it again, the experience was life-changing for her. “I loved it. It was amazing,” she continued. “I keep seeing people saying, “Oh, you made it back in one piece,” and I respond: I am wholer than I have ever been.”

PASCAL DEPPISCH, DANVILLE

While 24 Vermonters competed in the winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022, six headed to Orlando, Fla. for the Special Olympics. Held once every four years, the event drew more than 5,500 athletes from around the world.

Matthew Benn, 28, from Beebe Plain, Vt. won a silver medal in the Level 4 9-hole individual golf competition.

Julie Bruner, 26, from Hyde Park won silver in the 25-yard freestyle swim. And Pascal Deppisch, an 18-year-old runner from Danville, took home a gold in the 1500-meter race with a time of 4:33:94. To put that in perspective, that’s just about 34 seconds off Elle Purrier-St. Pierre’s record-setting Olympic Trials time for that distance. Deppisch also took two more medals: bronzes in the 3,000 meter and in the 5,000 meter. For anyone who followed his high school progress, it might not have been a surprise. Deppisch was fifth at the D4 Vermont State Track and Field Championship, running the 3,000 meter event in a time of 10:20.88. Deppisch has been running with his school team since he was 13. As a profile on RunVermont noted: “When Pascal first joined the team, his 5K time was just shy of 30 minutes. By the end of his second season in 2019, Pascal improved his time to 22 minutes. When the pandemic hit, Pascal decided he’d take the time to become an elite runner. He set his eyes on completing a 100K race that he registered for in the summer of 2020. It was, unfortunately, cancelled due to Covid-19. Determined to meet his goal, Pascal continued training, competing in multiple virtual 5Ks throughout the spring and summer of 2020. His incredible commitment resulted in qualification for a virtual Nationals 5K race, where he finished in 5th place with a time of 15:57. On Saturday, July 18, 2020, Pascal completed his own 100K route.”

JESSE DIGGINS, STRATTON

On December 18, 2022, in Davos, Switzerland Jesse Diggins skied her way into the history books. Coming into the finish of the 20 km freestyle World Cup race, her contact lenses froze in her eyes. She’d been so fixated on the race she had forgotten to blink and she nearly crashed. She stayed upright and sped on to her 14th World Cup win, putting her ahead of her former teammate Kikkan Randall as the winningest U.S. cross-country ski racer in history.

It was Diggins’ third World Cup podium in the month of December 2022, alone. The win set her in second place overall in World Cup points rankings. In 2020/21, Diggins won the overall World Cup – the first American to do so. In 2021/22 she placed second. In 2022, Diggins also took home two more Olympic medals —all while recovering from food poisoning. She earned an Olympic silver in the 30 km freestyle mass start and a bronze in the freestyle sprint final. She added these to the gold she earned with Kikkan Randall at the team sprint in PyeongChang in 2018.

To cap off 2022, in May she married her long-time sweetheart, Wade Polawaski, a former hockey player who now works in finance in Boston

“The thing I am best at is suffering,” Jessie Diggins has said over and over. During the summers she spends training near her home at Stratton, she finds ways to push herself into that pain cave, doing things she calls

“Big Stupid” adventures. In July, she covered 34 miles while running and hiking the Pemigewasset loop in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. It took her just 9 hours, 37 minutes.

This March, for the first time, the longest World Cup event—the women’s 30 km mass start race in Oslo —is being extended to 50 km, to match the men’s

MAC FOREHAND, WINHALL

If there’s one thing that changed Mac Forehand’s life early on it was this: most winter weekends his parents drove from their home in Southport, Ct. to ski at Stratton. Pretty soon, the family moved to Vermont. Enrolled at Stratton Mountain School and honing his skills at Mount Snow’s Carinthia Parks, Forehand was on his way to becoming one of the top freekski competitors in the world, In 2019, at age 17, he amassed enough points to win the overall World Cup crystal globe for slopestyle freeskiing. Then came a series of injuries and Covid-19 shut things down.

distance. “To be totally frank, I think it’s total crap that women never got to race this iconic distance,” Diggins told NBC Sports in December. “I’ve raced 50 km multiple times and I was fine. I didn’t need an ambulance at the finish line like they used to think they needed for women at the end of ski races. So, turns out we’re OK.”

Forehand competed in Beijing, earning 11th in big air and 20th in slopestyle. But over the course of the year, he was consistent enough to finish third overall in the World Cup slopestyle standings, with a silver medal at Silvaplana, Italy and several 4th places throughout the season. Now 21 and spending most of his time training in Park City, Forehand is gearing up to get back on the podium for 2023. Sponsored by Red Bull, Faction been a crowd-pleaser at events such as

Athletes Of The Year

the made-for-video The Nines. He won silver in big air at the X-Games and earned Best Trick at the World Cup in Copper Mountain, Colo. in December 2022. He still makes appearances at Mount Snow and Stratton and he still calls Vermont home.

BEN OGDEN, LANDGROVE

In 2018, Ben Ogden was part of the first U.S. cross country ski relay team to ever medal at the World Junior Championships. He was just 18 at the time. In four years, Ogden has leaped to the top of the U.S. Ski Team. He finished 12th at the Beijing Olympics in the freestyle sprint race – the best showing ever by an American male. A graduate student in mechanical engineering at University of Vermont, he also won the 2022 NCAAs. And as of early January, he was 13th in the grueling Tour de Ski, the highest ranking ever for an American male. It’s been quite a year for the 22-year-old who grew up in the tiny town of Landgrove, Vt. (population: 154) skiing at the Wild Wings XC center with his sisters, Katherine (also on the U.S. Ski Team) and Charlotte with their father John as an early coach.

MEGAN NICK, SHELBURNE

On February 14 2022, as the TV cameras rolled at the Beijing Olympic complex, Megan Nick launched a back full, double-full to become the first American to win an individual Olympic medal in aerials since 1998—a bronze. Not bad for a gymnast from Shelburne, Vt. who became interested in aerial skiing after choosing to attend a free aerial skiing camp in Lake Placid as her high school “Graduation Challenge” project. Nick, now 26, won two World Cup events in 2021 and then, after Beijing, took the top spot at the U.S. Nationals in March, 2022. Later that spring, she was the commencement speaker at her high school, Champlain Valley Union. Nick was a perfect choice to inspire a new generation— and not just as an athlete. She earned her degree in economics from the University of Utah and is pursuing a masters degree in environmental policy and management —all while competing at the World Cup.

ELLE PURRIER-ST. PIERRE, RICHFORD

Last fall, it was hard to miss her: there was New Balance athlete Elle Purrier St. Pierre on a billboard in New York City’s Times Square, looking larger than life in more ways than one.

Ever since 2020 when she broke Mary Decker’s 37-year record for the indoor American mile, Elle PurrierSt. Pierre has been a name to watch in international running. In 2021, she set the national two-mile indoor record and had fastest qualifying time ever for the 1500 meters in the Olympic Trials. She made it to the finals, finishing 10th in that distance at the Tokyo Games.

After the Olympics, Purrier-St. Pierre took a short rest, settling back into life as a Vermont dairy farmer with her husband Jamie St. Pierre in Franklin County. The Richford native was back at it in 2022. At New York’s Millrose Games she again won the Wanamaker Mile, running a 4:19:30—a few seconds over her record-setting 4:16:85 of 2020.

On Feb. 27, at the World Athletic Indoor Games in Belgrade, Serbia, Purrier-St. Pierre showed her signature strong kick in the last lap of the 3,000-meter race to earn her first international medal, a silver, behind Ethiopian Lemlen Hailu.

But in July 2022 at the World Outdoor Athletic Championships, St. Pierre didn’t even make it to the finals, placing 11th in the 1,500 semi-finals. As reporters from around the world grilled her post-race, she smiled enigmatically saying “I’m not really feeling myself these days.” In September, she announced that she and her husband are expecting a baby this March.

In the past, pregnancy has limited some runners’ sponsorship opportunities. Not for Purrier-St. Pierre. With a bump visibly showing she did a photo shoot for the New Balance “Run Your Way” ad campaign.

“This message really speaks to me,” she wrote on Instagram. “I never felt like I was your stereotypical runner, and it took me years in the sport before I really felt like I was part of the community… I’ve always relied on the baseline strength I built growing up on the farm to translate over on the track. Not your typical story. Through all the comments (‘It’s funny seeing you line up next to all those long-legged girls;’ ‘Your kinda buff for a runner’) I’ve just kept running.” She then added: “I’ll admit seeing this picture of me and my little baby bump up there on the screen in the middle of Times Square and numerous other places is a bit emotional. This small-town farm girl with a baby in her belly up on the big screen for everyone to see…. I’m just one runner among millions of others who are all doing it their own unique way. None of us being more or less of a runner than the other. Thank you @NewBalance for this amazing message.”

HANNAH SOAR, KILLINGTON

If you skied Killington last spring, you might have caught Hannah Soar doing what she loves best: bashing the big spring bumps, blonde ponytail flying behind her, keeping rhythm to a Grateful Dead beat that often plays in head. A four-time medalist at World Cup mogul events, Soar first qualified for the U.S. Moguls team as a junior in high school. In the first half of 2022, Soar didn’t score a World Cup podium but had a string of 7th-place finishes, including in Beijing. The 2022/23 season started out with a concussion which sidelined Soar from the first World Cup races but also let her head home to Killington to recover and rest up over the holidays.

MORIAH WILSON, KIRBY

In just first months of 2022, Moriah Wilson emerged as what Velo News called “the winningest woman in the American off-road scene.” In saying so, the national bike racing authority

Athletes Of The Year

was lumping together gravel riding, mountain biking and cyclocross and putting the unknown Vermonter at the top of the heap. And with good reason; Wilson, a former Burke Mountain Academy ski racer and Dartmouth College grad was turning heads in all three disciplines. In October 2021, she was not only the top woman, but passed many of the world’s top elite male racers to finish 12th overall at the 103-mile Big Sugar gravel race in Bentonville, Arkansas. In March 2022, she averaged 19.2 mph for five hours to finish the grueling Mid South gravel race in Oklahoma in second place. Then came the 80 km cross-country mountain bike race, the Fuego, at California’s Sea

Otter Classic. That was the first in the new Life Time Grand Prix series which promised a $25,000 overall purse. At Sea Otter, Wilson found herself leading a pack of elite mountain bike racers, including Vermonter and former Olympian Lea Davison, who finished fourth. Haley Smith, who went on to win the Life Time Grand Prix, was sixth. Wilson was just getting started. She had just announced plans to leave her job working for Specialized and pursue racing full-time. She’d been in talks with Davison about training together. She’d lined up sponsors such as TheFeed, Skratch Labs and the Meteor Café. And she was talking with her family about moving back to Vermont and perhaps opening a cycling-focused coffee shop near Kingdom Trails. All that came to an end on May 11 when Wilson was shot in Texas what was, allegedly a fit of jealousy, by Kaitlin Armstrong, after Wilson returned from a swim with Armstrong’s partner, bike racer Colin Strickland. This May 13, the Vermont cycling community will honor Wilson’s memory with a 25 or 50-mile ride. The proceeds will support Kingdom Kids, a local organization that provides children with opportunities to enjoy outdoor recreation and funds scholarships for children to ski (downhill and cross country), snowboard and mountain bike.