Watch Jessie Diggins 'make friends with pain' after historic cross-country ski gold medal
What sets Jessie Diggins, 31, apart is her ability to withstand suffering, the veteran Alaska cross-country ski coach John Estle mentioned in a conversation the other day.
I didn’t really understand what he was getting at until I saw the video below of Diggins as she won the 10-kilometer cross-country ski race at the World Championships in Slovenia Tuesday. She is the first American to win a world title in the sport.
Watching her from a distance on television, she seems to move along smoothly in a choreographed dance, requiring something less than extreme effort. But appearances are deceptive, as you will hear. She is not exhausted at the end of the race. She is writhing in pain.
For detailed coverage of the races, FasterSkier.com is the place to go.
Anchorage reporter Nat Herz, who specializes in covering Alaska politics and skiing, is in Slovenia for the races, the only reporter from North America actually there for the event.
Writing in the New Yorker Wednesday, Bill McKibben mentioned Diggins and her pain threshold and the work of Herz and Devon Kershaw.
“There’s little coverage of cross-country skiing in the U.S. media, but there is a delightful podcast, hosted by Devon Kershaw, a Canadian former standout who is now in medical school in Norway, with Nathaniel Herz, a journalist based in Alaska. A few weeks ago, they spent some time wondering aloud whether Diggins really might suffer harder than other skiers: there was some sentiment that perhaps her trademark finishes, in which she collapses across the line, are a bit corny, though since half the field does the same in any given race it seems unlikely that she’s putting on a show,” McKibben wrote.
“Indeed, it’s not really that Diggins works harder than others; everyone in this sport works at levels that the average human body can’t even approach, in part because it’s almost the only sport that uses all the muscles fully at the same time.”
“But Diggins does seem to have mastered the art of staying present in the pain. Tuesday’s race—an individual start competition, in which skiers go out on their own, at thirty-second interval—was a textbook example,” wrote McKibben.
He said Diggins is “as great an endurance athlete as America has produced perhaps since Joan Benoit Samuelson took home the gold medal in the first women’s Olympic marathon, in 1984.”
On the Kershaw podcast after her victory, Diggins told Herz, “In a race you just make friends with pain. You don’t pretend that you don’t feel it. You go great, this is what I’m supposed to feel. This is a sign that I’m doing my job.”
Among the other Alaskans at the World Championships is David Norris, who grew up in Fairbanks and is one of the top distance skiers in the nation.
Norris, who now lives and is a ski coach in Colorado, had a good reason for being a late arrival to Slovenia this week. He is scheduled to race in the 50-kilometer race that ends the World Championships this weekend.
On Saturday he won the 50-kilometer American Birkebeiner in Wisconsin.
“There have been World Championship skiers who have won the Birkie, and Birkie winners who have competed at World Championships, but never have the two categories been traversed in the same season, or same calendar week. For David Norris, it’s a unique accomplishment that captures the essence of a unique chapter in his skiing journey,” wrote Ben Theyer for FasterSkier.com.
Norris is facing considerable personal expense in making this trip, about $4,000.
He hasn’t set up a fundraising account, but anyone who wants to can send a check made out to David Norris to his parents, and they will put the funds in his account. The address is: David Norris, 1277 Airline Drive, North Pole, AK 99705.
“David has always represented Fairbanks and Alaska well, and always puts in a
good word for Fairbanks,” said Estle.