Adam- What I’ve Learned Being a Pro Skier
Hey! Adam Witkowski here, I was supposed to write a blog about my recent trip over to Norway but there seems to have been a few blogs in a row about that so I thought I would switch it up a bit. I’ll still have a little recap at the end but I thought it would be more useful for both myself and you readers to talk a little about what I have learned in my previous years as a pro skier and how that is shaping my time here with Team Birkie for this upcoming season.
For those who don’t know, I grew up in Victor, NY, a smaller suburb of Rochester, and attended Stratton Mountain School for high school. Growing up out East was nice but when it came to making college decisions I knew that it wasn’t the right place for me to stay. I spent a year out in Sun Valley as part of the PG program before coming to the Midwest for four years at Michigan Tech! Those years were instrumental for not only shaping me as a person but also finding lifelong friends with similar passions and reigniting my love for skiing, racing and training. After graduating in 2023, I headed back out east to be closer to family and train with a top level pro team and athletes. It was a very tough two years though and this spring I knew that a change was needed to get back on a positive trajectory. It wasn’t a hard decision to decide to come back to the Midwest and join up with many of my former college teammates here on Team Birkie!
My three biggest takeaways from my first stint as a pro skier:
1: Believe in yourself
This one seems a little obvious. I don’t mean this as in when you get to a start line to believe in yourself (you should also be doing this), but I more mean in the sense of believing in what you are doing everyday. As a pro athlete, or any level of athlete, your training and preparation for competition should be something that you believe will make you a better athlete. It can be very easy to blindly follow a plan made by somebody else and for many athletes that works perfectly fine for them, but in my experience I have found that believing in your training can be a big advantage come race day. Having the confidence in your preparation makes it easier to have confidence in yourself once you cross the start wand.
This has been a big advantage I have had with Team Birkie this year. Jake and the other coaches are always there to shoot ideas off of and adjust training so that it helps to benefit my goals for the season. The biggest example being my three week training camp in Norway instead of training with the team out at altitude in Steamboat. As more of a sprinter type, the altitude effect for me usually means a decrease in speed for a period of time. In this year where speed is quite important, we decided that only one altitude camp was needed to hit our endurance goals while keeping the speed in our training.
2: Don’t be afraid to take up space
This one can be very tough for me. I am more of an introvert. I don’t like to speak up unless I 100% know what I am going to say will be taken well. Also, on my previous team, to put it nicely, I was a small fish. I’m not saying that you need to be loud and obnoxious all the time but knowing when it is your time to have the attention on you is a great skill to have. From having meetings with coaches, solo technique time, videoing during intervals and so many more instances it is OK to ask for these things regularly. In fact, your coaches probably WANT you to be doing this regularly. Again, not my strength, but I have been making an effort about this recently and my solo technique sessions at the Pioneer treadmill have led to some positive feelings both technically and with the direction of where training is headed.
3: There's no reason not to go all in
Skiing, like many things in life, is a really hard thing to master. It takes time, dedication and a lot of persistence. Being a professional skier requires years of dedication and acknowledging the fact that you are most likely delaying the start of your “normal” life. So if this is what you are choosing to do, there’s no reason to not do everything you possibly can to succeed at being a skier. That means developing good habits everyday like sleeping well, eating well and taking care of your body. The best athletes in the world have developed these habits to fully optimize their training and performance. If our goal is to get to that level, we need to as well. If you are willing to put in the effort for 90% of the job but not go the extra mile for the last 10%, then being a professional athlete might not be the right choice for you. Looking back on the past few seasons, I can see where I have not fully optimized the situation I was in. A big goal of mine this year is to fill in those gaps and fully commit to my skiing.
OK, thanks for following along with my little spiel to myself really for things to focus on the rest of the year. Now to the more beautiful part of this blog, Norway! Why Norway you ask? Well the answer is quite easy actually. Male skiers on this team seem to have a thing for Scandinavian women and well can you blame us?? The nice part is that it is also the home of cross country skiing and the training might be the best in the world.
My three week trip started off on a recovery week which was perfect because I joined my girlfriend's family at their cabin on the Oslo Fjord and we had a week of 30+ degree (celsius) weather and sun!
My three week trip started off on a recovery week which was perfect because I joined my girlfriend's family at their cabin on the Oslo Fjord and we had a week of 30+ degree (celcius) weather and sun!
There are also some sweet backroads to rollerski on with very little traffic and sweet views of Norwegian farm fields. It might just be my favorite place to rollerski in the world, especially for a 3+ hour classic OD (my favorite workout).
My second week of camp Norge started off with being in the support car for a bike trip through the Telemark region of Norway. The area that we were in is sometimes referred to as the Yosemite of Norway. There were 3,000+ft mountains of bare rock that plunged down into these small skinny lakes. I would say that it looked like a mixture of Yosemite and British Columbia. One highlight of the trip was our run along one of these lakes. We took a boat 13 miles down a lake and then climbed up 3,000ft to the ridge above and ran back to the car. At some points we were so close to the lake that it seemed like it would have been possible to throw a rock and hit the water even though we were thousands of feet above it.
After a quick stop in Oslo to paint my girlfriend's new apartment, we headed up to the “mountains” to spend time at her other cabin to finish out the week. It’s located about 2 hours northwest of the city up on a large plateau with tons of running and mountain biking around the area. We brought the great weather with us and had all of our days up there at 75 and sunny which was just perfect!
There was lots of running through the semi bog-like terrain and I took advantage of the largest hill I will be able to ski for the year. The valley below is at 500ft above sea level and the cabin sits around 3,000ft. The road up has perfect pavement and averages around 4% grade for a little over 9 miles. I used this to work on my biggest weakness in skiing, uphill skating! The workout I did was 5x12 min of L3 where the L3 was broken up into 45-15 segments. So there was 45 seconds of L3 and then 15 seconds of L1. This was to keep the body from bogging down and overloading and to have high quality movements for the entirety of the interval session. I highly recommend this kind of workout if you are struggling to keep your L3 in a controlled level regardless of the terrain.
The weather turned from warm and sunny to Norway’s usual 60F and rain for my last week in Norway. One morning I found myself all alone at the Holmenkollen ski stadium doing classic intervals in the pouring rain. It was a quiet start to the week but I got to start exploring the new part of the city around where my girlfriend just bought her new apartment! I’m not usually one who gets scared of anything on rollerskis but roller skiing through the city of Oslo can be quite terrifying. Big hills, lots of cars/busses, trains, slippery pavement and not knowing what comes around the next corner are a recipe for potential disaster.
To end my trip, we traveled up to Rondane National Park with some friends and did a weekend cabin trip in Mysusaeter. Almost everything here is above tree line and it made for some of the prettiest landscape I have ever seen. The mountains start just far enough away from the parking lot that running to the base and back would make it a long day, so they set up a bike taxi in the parking lot! There were around 80 bikes that you could ride in the 4 miles to the base of the mountains. Where you dropped the bikes off was at a cabin that served waffles, cinnamon rolls and just about anything else you could ever want as a tired hiker.
By the end of my trip I was starting to miss the Midwest a bit but it is hard to leave such a nice place. It has been nice though to come back and train with all of my teammates.
