Ski racers, get up to speed for this season

Snowmaking is underway at Loveland Ski Area. Dustin Schaefer

Hopefully, you’ve spent your summer getting ready for this upcoming winter of racing. If so, you should be stronger, more technically sound, and more mentally prepared than ever before. You’re now entering the final stage of preparations for the upcoming race season with this last period of conditioning followed by getting back on snow and tuning up for your first races.

It’s hard to believe that I’ll be skiing in about two weeks at Loveland (weather permitting) in Colorado. I’m sure that, with the leaves changing and the nights getting cooler, ski season is front and center on your radar screen.

As I have done every fall, I wanted to begin this new season of writing by giving you a refresher course on some key issues that I have written about in past seasons. As all of my ideas built on the previous ones, you can’t just leave those from last season in the past. Rather, you have to make sure that these tools are still in your toolbox before you can add to it with the psychological information and strategies I will share with you in the coming months.

1.  Prime Ski Racing should be your goal: Skiing at a consistently high level under the most demanding conditions.

2.  You need to have the right attitude about competition and success and failure before you can begin to achieve your goals.

3.  Just like with the physical side of ski racing, you can use Prime Profiling to better understand your strengths and weaknesses.

4.  Motivation is the foundation of all of your efforts to achieve your ski racing goals.

5.  Confidence is the single most important mental factor in ski racing.

6.  There are five keys to Prime Confidence.

7.  There are five things that I hate to see racers do in training.

8.  You need to know the five themes to live by on race day in order to ski your fastest.

9.  Learn to master frustration.

10.  Five tips for race day success.

For a little inspiration, these two articles about Bode and Julia and Lindsey should help.

And if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can read all 97 posts on my ski racing blog.

So, now that you’re up to speed on some of the key topics I’ve written about in past years, let’s look ahead and see what we can do to get you even more mentally prepared to be successful this winter. More posts coming throughout the season!

Jim Taylor, Ph.D., competed internationally while skiing for Burke Mountain Academy, Middlebury College, and the University of Colorado. Over the last 25 years, he has worked with the U.S. and Japanese Ski Teams, many World Cup and Olympic racers, and several of the leading junior race programs in the U.S. and Canada. Jim is the author of Prime Ski Racing: Triumph of the Racer’s Mind, he publishes bi-monthly newsletters on sport, business, and parenting, and also blogs for huffingtonpost.com and psychologytoday.com. To learn more or to contact Jim, visit his website.