AST Athlete Journal: Katie Smith

Hello everyone! I’m Katie Smith and this will be my second season on the Alberta Ski Team. I grew up racing with Calgary Alpine through U16 and then moved to Lake Louise for FIS. I’m really excited to begin another season with the Alberta Ski Team!

Prior to our first pre-season camp I spent my summer working in Canmore for both the Canmore and Area Mountain Bike Association (CAMBA) as well as at the Canmore Brewing Company. It was my third summer on the trail crew with CAMBA working in Canmore maintaining bike trails. The outdoor work of digging trails complemented my summer training while giving back to the community. I spent my summer doing lots of biking and hiking with a few notable hikes allowing me to be able to ski all 12 months of the year. Other summer highlights included finishing second in the Canmore Enduro and a family trip to Nova Scotia where I was able to see puffins for the first time!

At the start of summer I was still dealing with some low back pain which meant that I had to adapt and modify many of my strength workouts. With the help of our strength trainer Nate at CSI I left for Saas Fee feeling healthy and strong for our camp.

As I am writing, we are at the airport in Munich, Germany. We have just finished a four week camp in Saas Fee, Switzerland and Wittenburg, Germany. We spent the first 3 weeks in Saas Fee staying at hotel Jagerhof with Stefan and Everlyn. The first seven days of the camp were spent doing lots of tech freeskiing and going back to basics before hopping into courses. It was really nice to pick up my skiing where I left it off at our spring camp at Sunshine. We spent lots of time doing drills in and out of the course with high volume days, the most being 25 runs! During a rest day, we went mountain scootering in Saas Grund, which was one of the team’s favorite activities! After the rest day, we were fortunate to finish the camp with a solid ten-day block. Training for ten consecutive days was very challenging, but we managed our energy well and stayed productive right through to the end. We were really fortunate with the weather while in Saas Fee, only losing one day due to poor weather. It was sad to say goodbye to Saas Fee and leave the hospitality of Stefan and Everlyn. They were incredibly welcoming and treated us like family. It was really nice to have home cooked meals every day and get to experience Swiss specialties like raclette and fondue.

Our journey from Saas Fee to Wittenberg began with a 5 hour bus ride to Zurich, where we reconnected with Phil and Kyle who had picked up vans to drive the team and all our gear for another 9 hours to the indoor training facility in Wittenburg, Germany. It was my first time skiing at the Wittenberg indoor facility but I had previously skied at a similar indoor facility last year in Belgium, so I knew what to expect from training indoors. We were all fairly excited to have a chairlift in Wittenburg to give the feet a break after all the t-bars in Saas Fee.

One of my main goals for the indoor session was to stay positive mentally. Our coaches are adamant that your mental focus can be your biggest weakness or strongest skill. I definitely noticed that during sessions where I didn’t have a positive mind set I became less confident in my skiing, this quickly became frustrating and caused my skiing to get worse. This is especially important when training indoors on ice as you must be confident on ice. This downward cycle ruined one session for me because I wasn’t able to recover mentally. In later sessions, though, when I felt confident and was skiing well, the opposite happened, my skiing kept improving as the session went on. Recognizing this cycle was one of my biggest takeaways, and it will be a main focus for me this year and in my upcoming camps in Sweden.

Right now, I’m looking forward to getting home and to begin another block in the gym before our next camp. Until then, for the next month or so, you can find me working on the bike trails in Canmore or at Canmore Brewing Co, or in the gym!

I hope everyone is as excited for ski season as our team is! Thank you to our sponsors, the GMC dealers of Alberta, Mountain fire foods, Genstar Alberta, Karbon Sports and Gear up Mountain Sports for helping to make our seasons possible!

-Katie