Jessie Diggins, America’s cross-country skier, is fighting on after a relapse of her eating disorder

It’s July, a time of year when Jessie Diggins, the best American to ever strap on a pair of cross-country skis, is usually deep into her off-season training, the hours of roller skiing and running and strength work she loves almost as much . like tearing through the snow in Norway in the middle of winter.

However, something is wrong. She feels something she has never felt before; she’s just not sure if she wants to do this anymore.

She thinks about the coming season, the four months she will be away from her husband, who is in a constant state of fatigue and enters the “pain cave” at almost every race. In her 32 years on this planet, she has never had to search for motivation, never dreaded a workout, never wanted to do anything other than push her body and mind to the brink of exhaustion.

However, it was more complicated than that.

The eating disorder she battled throughout her teens and early career, a condition all too common in her sport, used to be back. That shouldn’t have happened. She thought she was over it, something that years of therapy had eradicated from her brain. But for weeks she had been fighting it again.

And for the first time a thought occurred to her:

“I don’t have to do any of this.”

“I don’t need to win another race as long as I live,” Diggins, a world champion and three-time Olympic medalist, said earlier this fall, recalling the feeling after her summer setback.

For anyone who has even glimpsed Diggins’ career — most likely that final, lung-busting sprint across the finish line at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics to win America’s first gold medal in cross-country skiing — the idea that her brain had reached the point where she was considering walking away from ski racing is difficult to fathom.

“HERE COMES DIGGINS!”

At the 2018 Olympic Games in PyeongChang, Kikkan Randall and Jessie Diggins won @TeamUSA‘s first-ever Olympic gold medal in cross-country skiing.#BestOfTheDecade pic.twitter.com/Y8ZgqzBLzx

– NBC Sports (@NBCSports) December 28, 2019

Few athletes experience both training and competition as Diggins does. And it has always been that way, through the seasons – and beyond – when she was a nobody, and the seasons when she was an Olympic champion and the best skier in the world.

It’s how Diggins, who is known more as a sprinter than a distance specialist, won her second medal at the Beijing Olympics – silver in the 30 kilometer race – after a bout of food poisoning made it unclear whether she would even make it to the starting line. She blocked out the pain, decided to lead her team another day and fought her way to a third Olympic medal after also winning bronze in the individual sprint earlier in Beijing.

Diggins was not released on bail that day, nor will he be released this summer. She starts a new season, her 14th, this weekend in Ruka, Finland.

But it’s not because she wants to chase another opportunity to be on stage. That’s not why she raced in Beijing that day, after a night of sweating and vomiting. On the bus to the race she read an email from her mother, who knew how sick she was, reminding her that she raced because she loved what she did and loved challenges, and who knows, maybe it could be the best days can be. of her life.

My mother was right (apart from the emergency medical intervention Diggins needed afterwards). But it wasn’t because she medaled again. It was because it felt like a celebration of the community that propelled her into this life.

There was her mother’s email, the conversations with her husband on the other side of the world, as he so often is, who offered her all the support he could. Two teammates climbed into bed with her in the Olympic Village to help her rest. The wax technicians adjusted her skis just right. Her teammates and skiers from other countries, knowing how sick she had been, trekked through the snow to the final climb, urging her on as her body and her brain began to shut down in the final kilometers.

“I felt like the whole world was cheering me on,” she said last month during a 20-mile run in New York’s Central Park, her favorite interview setting.

The support this past summer, perhaps the most difficult of her adult life, was different, but no less impressive. She didn’t know what she was told when she called her coaches and told her she was sick and didn’t know if she would be ready for the start of the season, if at all.

No one, she said, pulled out a calendar or created a timeline for his return. They told her to take care of herself as best she could, ask for anything she needed and not do anything that would endanger her health. It was like they didn’t care if she ever raced again.

That was refreshing for Diggins, especially given all the questions elite athletes have raised in recent years about whether the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee saw them as medal-winning machines or as people. The organization and its national governing bodies, which directly oversee individual sports, have attempted to pay as much attention to athletes’ mental well-being as to their physical health, offering psychological services that do not prioritize sports performance.

“You want to be able to live and compete happily and healthily,” says Alex Cohen, a psychologist with the USOPC who works primarily with winter sports enthusiasts. “They go hand in hand.”

That hasn’t always been so easy for Diggins, who has embraced every ounce of her position as a pioneer and role model, sometimes to her detriment.

She hates turning down requests to appear at schools or ski clubs, or anywhere else there might be a child whose life she could change. When she’s not raising money and awareness about eating disorders, she might be meeting with government officials to lobby them on climate change legislation. On the American ski team, she is not only the star, but also a kind of captain/big sister/den mother for both the women and men.

In retrospect, she said, the pressure she puts on herself to play all these roles to the fullest led to her relapse.

“You can’t be perfect,” she said.

She knew that; even the best skiers lose, or rather, don’t win, most of their races. She just thought she was well past the hurdle that had caused so much trouble years ago, when she jeopardized her health by depriving herself of food and making herself vomit.

Now she had to come to terms with the fact that bulimia was a part of her and probably always would be. That didn’t make her a failure, which she felt the first time. It’s just who she is.

“A little piece of me that my brain has to pay attention to for the rest of my life,” she said.

As she worked through that idea in therapy and her blood work showed she was healthy enough to exercise, her motivation began to return. She hasn’t lost her love for moving her body outdoors or being part of a team, a reason why she thrives in relays.

There was something else. In the aftermath of that gold medal in 2018, her agent asked her what she wanted: a free trip to an exotic island; a nice car?

She thought for a moment and decided that what she really wanted was a World Cup cross-country race in Minnesota, where she grew up, the rare American region where Nordic sports are part of the culture. The World Cup circuit mainly takes place in Northern Europe. Lugging the entire sport to Minnesota could be a tall order, her agent said.

But then FIS, skiing’s world governing body, rescheduled a race in Minnesota — for March 2020. It was one of the first events canceled by the pandemic, but Minnesota got back on the schedule for the season, this time in February.

As a little girl, the only way Diggins could watch a World Cup race was through a VHS tape in her basement. What she would have given to see a local hero racing against the best skiers in the world in her backyard. Additionally, her grandparents haven’t seen her race in person since she was 19.

That’s not what Diggins wanted to miss: an opportunity to express herself and her passion at home in her unique way, as she floated and trekked through the snow and then dropped across the finish line.

“You’re sharing something of your soul with people,” she said of those moments, which in a way are not so different from telling the world about her battle with bulimia, then and now. ‘You are so vulnerable, you let everyone see you at your very weakest. But then there is something powerful about letting people in like that.”

(Top photo of Diggins at the 2023 Nordic World Cup: Daniel Karmann / Photo Alliance via Getty Images)