One Bite at a Time?

By Luke Jager

Hailing from Anchorage, Alaska, Luke Jager is a 2022 Olympian and was recently named to the U.S. Ski Team's B Team for the 2024/2025 season after showcasing impressive performances at the World Cup and Junior World Championships, contributing to several relay podium finishes. Jager competes for the University of Utah, where he has helped the team secure multiple NCAA titles​. Outside of skiing, he has a passion for dirt biking and photography. He is pursuing a degree in environmental and sustainability studies, reflecting his commitment to protecting the natural landscapes that inspire his athletic pursuits.

We are all trying to get better at something. We all want to be better at our work, hobbies, relationships, and everything in between. The issue is that nobody is keeping score in most of these areas. We can't really quantify our performance as a partner, parent, or friend. This is a lot of the reason that the arena of sports is so appealing to so many of us. If you put in hours of work a week trying to keep the house clean, you hopefully get some meaningful subjective feedback that your family appreciates your effort. Still, it is not immediately or measurably tangible. If you put in hours a week waking up early to train for a 5k, however, you get feedback on the fruits of those efforts the second you cross the finish line and look up at the clock. Sports make our efforts concrete and measurable, which is a lot of the reason they can be so immediately gratifying.

While this objective feedback is certainly a welcome oasis in the otherwise extremely nuanced and gray desert of life, we should approach it with great caution. By gripping too tightly to results and objective feedback, we jeopardize losing the best gifts that sport offers, likely hurting our performance.

When skiing down a scary downhill, we are often told to "look up at where you want to go, as opposed to down at our feet. It's good advice, but to make it more specific, we want to look at where we want to IMMEDIATELY go. Sure, we want to get to the bottom, but if the bottom is straight beneath us with a series of sharp, sweeping turns in between, we need to think about the immediate task of each turn in front of us, not the finish that comes after. If we point our gaze where we want to be in the far future (bottom of the hill) and not the near future (sharp turn coming up fast), then the odds are good; we are going ass-over-tea-kettle.

This very clumsy and obviously forced metaphor describes the point I wish I had learned when I was a junior skier—focused on getting onto podiums, making teams, and where I would finish compared to others. I was trying to skip all the turns and point straight for the bottom of the hill. This focus is a recipe for a lot of frustration and a pretty narrow mindset, and it's a hard way to get better.

Performance is a very personal thing because the way any one of us connects to a task is going to be different. To have a good ski race, you need to make it around the course quickly. To ski the course quickly, you need to ski the first hill well; to ski the first hill well, you need to ski the transition into the hill well; to do that well, you need a good start to carry speed into the hill. Every component of a strong performance is contingent on the one that came immediately before it. In order to remain present and focused on connecting each of these pieces, our attention needs to be on the task immediately in front of us, not the finish line waiting on the other side of those tasks.

Particularly in a sport like skiing, which has such a large technical component, we can't afford to spend our precious attention on things like comparison or how we measure up while we are out there racing. We want to focus on actually skiing well instead of focusing on wondering, "Am I skiing well?'. This concept helps us immediately complete the task of skiing as technically well and with the highest effort we can, and it also gives us clarity of experience that allows us to analyze our performance and figure out how to improve. If we look back on a race and think, "I skied so much slower than everyone else up that hill and got passed by so many people there," it gives us a lot less to work with than "I rushed my transition from double pole to striding going into the hill and felt that I never got my hips under me which caused me to slip a lot and use too much energy." We only get that clear and unemotional analysis by focusing on DOING rather than how we are doing.

Results can still be our goal, and having tangible goals like results can even be a really good thing. We just can't let our result goals exist at the expense of the process that precedes them. This idea is why so many coaches love making athletes create separate result goals and process goals. These days, I try to break up courses into a lot of small chunks and tell myself, "Just ski as well as you can to that tree," and then once I'm at the tree, I'm skiing as well as I can to the trail sign just ahead, and so on until the finish. Any way we can manipulate our attention to center on the immediate task at hand instead of how it fits into the broader challenge ahead of us will help us perform better and also help us experience being truly present. Many of our most fulfilling and fun moments in life are when we become totally immersed in a task and lose our 'self' and our concerns about how we measure up in the task.

The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, the best way to ski a downhill is one turn at a time, and the best way to do a ski race is one stride at a time. Next time you are racing or just out for a ski in the woods, pay attention to your attention and see if it could be pointed in directions that could make you ski faster and, more importantly, just make you feel better.

*Photo courtesy of Luke Jager