Speed skiing, engineering and mindset The road to the Olympics

Speed skiing is an extreme sport where skiers reach speeds of up to 200 kms an hour. Each competitor skis in a straight line, in a tuck position as fast as possible to the finish line with the skier with the fastest time winning.

It was a demonstration sport at the Albertville Winter Olympics in 1992 but has not been part of the Games since then however there is a likelihood of it returning in the 2026 or 2030 Games and Jacob is on a mission to see that happen. 

Like all high level sport speed skiing is about failure, rectification, incremental gains and constant evolution. It’s an extremely tough sport mentally and physically – you know you will have crashes but you have to have a long-term vision and know where you’re tying to go. You have to put goals in place that are incremental – you’re not going to get to your end goal of skiing at 200 kms an hour on your first run but you can set goals to get towards it and look at it with a long term perspective.

It needs a lot of confidence to go that fast. The starts can be extremely difficult because the tracks are very steep – sometimes it can be like looking out the window of a plane! Starting points can be between 400 and 800 metres or 2000 feet tall and even getting to the start can be problematical. Often you have to use ropes or climbing gear to get in position and it’s even more of a challenge with super long skis of 240cms. Once you get in position and set up for the run you then just jump off a platform or push off the side of the track.

At the start you run though your check-list – the position, what you’re going to do on this run, is all your equipment correct. You focus on things systematically because it then makes you feel as if you have a game plan which in turn gives you a lot of confidence when you’re about to start. Then you put on your aerodynamic helmet (which has an inner helmet which stays on in a crash and an outer helmet that breaks off) and you’re ready for the run. The last thing you should be thinking about at that point are the potential consequences, the ‘what if’ or the ‘what will happen if I crash’. 

With the helmet on the field of vision is very small. You can only see a couple of feet in front of you especially when you are at high speed in a tuck but once they say go you’re totally focused. The run is over in 20 seconds so sometimes the hype before the run is more of a rush than the run itself. You focus intensely for 20 seconds or so. You’re travelling at 100mph and can see the undulations in the snow, you can feel the speed and the wind and then its over. Before you know it you’re at the bottom.

Jacob is also a Manufacturing Engineering team lead for Amatrol Inc., a global leader in technical education and training for industry, community colleges, and technical colleges. He finds it a very rewarding job transforming the global workforce and feels there is renewed interest in trade schools and in developing skills for various aspects of industry. He also finds that the engineering principals he uses and has learned can be applied to the speed skiing side of his life. Speed skiing is heavily involved in equipment so having a background in design engineering and manufacturing engineering allows him to provide product input on the different components of equipment and also to design various pieces of equipment set up.

Jacob found his way to speed skiing by chance. He competed in alpine ski racing, particularly slalom and giant slalom, as a junior and had some success but at the same time he was playing tennis in high school. He wound up playing Division 1 tennis for Wright State University and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and competed on ITF and UTR Pro Tennis circuit.

Whilst he was focused on tennis he took a break from skiing competitively. The career span in alpine ski racing is not very long with most racers retiring around 30. By time Jacob came out of college he was 25 years old so it didn't leave a lot of time to complete. He started looking for ways to get involved in competitive skiing again but in a way that would provide a longer opportunity to build, compete and develop. He looked at different disciplines such as cross country and ski jumping but then came across the speed skiing which he thought looked really cool.

Jacob started reaching out to people in the US and in different organisations in Europe and found out more about the sport. The speed skiing community is there to help everybody. You are competing but somehow are on the same team and everyone wants to get more people interested in the sport. People were helping him to understand the equipment needs and how to get into competitions and at that point he realised this was what he wanted to do. The first year he didn't have any sponsors so was using used equipment in the feeder category for World Cup Competitions which is called S2. He did really well and last year was his first year on the World Cup category itself and he hopes to continue from there.

Managing anxiety is important. When he started out Jacob didn't have much anxiety but last year he had a crash at over a 100 mph. He walked away from it with just bruising but it wasn't the physically side that took a long time to get over. Ever since then when he’s training or even just working on equipment he relives the crash or gets anxiety about it. The biggest thing for him to deal with it was to understand why he crashed and then understand how to prevent it. Once he had figured this out then he could finally let go of that experience. He feels that if you can’t put a reason to why you are doing it or what the causes are then that's what creates anxiety – its the unknown.

Many engineers are very rational thinkers who are not prone to massive flights of imagination and Jacob thinks this can sometimes help because you can logically think through problems but sometimes it works against you because you start to overthink problems - you start to ask too many questions when in reality you should simplify the problem but you make more out of it than it is.

Jacob feels that his engineering and skiing careers overlap. There are always challenges and problems in manufacturing, meeting goals, using resources efficiently, increasing production and improving quality. These things go hand in hand with speed skiing, not just from a technical side but from a mental side as well.

You can find out more about Jacob at https://www.jacobperkins.org/ or to find out more about speed skiing visit speedski.com or fis-ski.com

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
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Lean in and learn. Finding the purpose to change.

David Richman is an author, public speaker, philanthropist and endurance athlete whose mission is to form more meaningful human connections through storytelling. He wrote Cycle of Lives, which shares the interconnected stories of people overcoming trauma and delves deeply into their emotional journeys with cancer.

David was on a quest to try to find out from real life experiences what are some of the difficulties people are encountering, how they navigate those conversations and what we can learn from them and bring to our own lives. He found that when many people try to navigate the emotional facets of the journey, they are not well equipped to have hard conversations or have deep authentic connections with people even their closet loved ones.

When David was at a super low point in life in his mid to late 30’s. He was overweight, a smoker, miserable, stressed and in an abusive marriage with an alcoholic wife.  He was also the father of four-year old twins. It was a destructive lifestyle going nowhere when he got the news about his sister ‘s terminal cancer diagnosis. He realised he had chance to change his life and live for the better but his is sister didn’t.

It wasn’t that easy to make changes. It was tough especially as he set out to find answers without little context – you can hear something fifty times but its not until you hear it the fifty-first that you get it. David heard his inside and outside voice as well as other people telling him that he needed to stop trying to find people to fix and to create problems to get out making changes. He knew he had no self-awareness or self care but he was aware of who he was and didn't like it. He saw himself for the first time and then he saw himself in reflection to his sister and their potential journeys. He had choices but she didn’t.

Someone then said something to him that didn’t make the transformation any easier but it did make the realisation that he had a lot of work to do easier. He was at a low point in his life, complaining about being tired, angry and having to watch his sister die. A friend told him that he’d been listening to him complaining for years and that he should look in the mirror and fix himself, that he needed to realise he was the problem not everyone else. It didn't make it easy but it opened his eyes about what he had to do and that he had to do it fast. The fact he needed to do it fast helped. He felt he didn’t have that much time and he wanted to live on purpose, to see himself for who he really was, to free his mind and forgive himself for his bad choices, the wasted time and the problems he had created. He wanted to lean in and learn. 

He didn't know what a sense of purpose was but he wanted to figure it out. He knew he was a good dad and a hard worker but what gave him purpose was to be present, to be in each moment, to spend time, make a choice that you want and are aware of and be open minded so you can live on purpose. You need to free your mind and let it go. This is your day one now so what can I lean in and learn?  David started with athletics – if he started by becoming healthy where would that lead him? What it led David to do was athletics, triathlons, ironman, 100-mile runs and a 5000-mile bike run. It has given him a lot of focus and purpose and helped solve problems that have crossed over into other areas of life.

In his book, Winning in the Middle of the Pack, he discusses how to get more out of ourselves than we ever imagined. Many people spend too much time thinking about winning or leading or being the best. Sometimes its enough to be yourself and be in the middle of the pack and make the best of yourself rather than being the best of the best or the best against anyone else. There are a lot of people who grow up looking for approval, thinking that other people see them in a different way or do they do things to please people because they think that’s who they need to be. When you think of people at the top such as Roger Federer they don't really care about what anybody thinks they care about what they think. They aren’t driven by outward approval they are driven by what they want to achieve. 

If you’re in the middle of the pack nobody is watching or cares because they are more focused on their own stuff. The only thing that matters is that you care and that you’re doing the best that you can do and that you make good choices – the only one who cares is the one you look at in the mirror.  

David is now leading very moving and transformative Expressive Writing Workshops geared towards people affected by all manner of trauma. He combines traditional expressive writing techniques with elements of both narrative and creative writing so that the participants will be well equipped to continue their expressive writing practices well beyond the workshops. Mental health is such an important topic and David brings his passion, skills, and unique approach to help people connect with their emotions in a whole new way and begin a healing journey.

You can find out more about David at https://david-richman.com/

In his book Winning in the Middle of the Pack, David discusses how to get more out of ourselves than ever imagined and in Cycle of Lives, he shares the interconnected stories of people overcoming trauma and delves deeply into their emotional journeys with cancer.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions. 

Decide to be happy

Rob Dubin was an award winning filmmaker who owned his own company and travelled the world working for numerous Fortune 500 companies. At 42, he and his wife changed direction, sold their home and bought a sailboat and spent the next seventeen years sailing around the world, studying human happiness and fulfillment.

In his late 60s he then started speaking on happiness and fulfillment and when the great resignation hit in the US, he realised that people were leaving their jobs not just because they were unsatisfied with their jobs but also with their lives.  He now works with corporations on wellness, happiness and fulfillment so they can keep their employees and develop a different type of corporate culture.

Pre-pandemic in the US there was a notion that if you did all the right things, went to school, got an education, got a job, got married, had a family, got the white picket fence, got reasonable promotions along the way happiness would just happen to you. That's not actually the way happiness works. In the pandemic there was a paradigm shift where millions of people started asking themselves were they happy in life, was their life ending up how they imagined it. Lots of people said no its not and resigned in mass numbers.

The second paradigm shift was when people asked themselves questions about their dissatisfaction at work. The HR department always knew the answer was more money and better benefits. Now that people are asking if they were happy in life, the HR departments are at a loss. If compensation and benefits are the solution, the great resignation would be over by now. When people ask themselves the question why am I not happy and how can I be happy, most people don't now how to make themselves happy. In the old world we knew that more money would make us happy. In the new world no one knows the answer because few people know how to make themselves happy.

When Rob and his wife had finished sailing around the world, a lot of people wanted to hear their stories but Rob wanted to leave people with more. He had been very involved in the sailing world and spent considerable time with very wealthy people, millionaires and billionaires who were aiming who high-end yacht races. A short time later they were sailing to tiny islands in the Caribbean and Pacific and spending time with and barefoot villagers. Some the very wealthy people were happy and some unhappy and it was the same for the villagers so happiness is clearly not your circumstances.

Rob feels happiness is both a state and a skill. We think that when zxy happens we will be happy. This is true in a small sense but this kind of happiness only lasts for a short time – we buy a new car, a new house and are happy but a while later we want a different car or house. We get sucked into this idea because it’s partially true but in fact real happiness is just a decision you make to make to be happy. Once we make that decision Rob thinks we need to practice habits or skills of happiness daily over a period of time until they become habits. Once they become habits and part of what you are, happiness becomes part of who you are. Rob uses LIVE HAPPY as an acronym.

L - Learn optimism

I - Invent your new story

V - Value yourself

E - Exert emotional control

H - Happiness is a decision

A - A daily gratitude

P - Practice mindfulness

P - Practice contribution

Y - Your dreams

Rob feels that the way we know when are happy is that we feel a deep contentment that you know your life is going the way you want it and that it is what we thought it was going to be. Our experience of life is our emotions so that's how we describe our experience of life be it happy, sad or worried, these emotions become our life.

The change in direction in Rob’s came a year after he and his wife were part of a group of people who spent five nights in the wilderness after being lost in a winter blizzard in Colorado. People generally only survive one or two nights so after three nights the search for them was called off and they were given up for dead. The search made the news worldwide and when they were found safe, the first call they received was from the President of the United States who congratulated them on their survival. 

The aftermath however though was that Rob’s wife incurred frostbite which led to the doctors saying they would amputate both her feet and most of her fingers. Rob wondered what life was going to be in the future. He left the hospital distraught and helpless but the next morning he woke up feeling powerful. He went back to the hospital where he and his wife refused to sign the papers for the surgery and focused instead on a full recovery. They decided that was going to the outcome and although his wife was in hospital for 21 days and it took a full year, he did make a full recovery. Rob feels their story of resilience has three phases. The first was when they were out in the storm. The second was when they decided they were going to focus on a complete recovery and focus on a compelling future for the future and the third was the story they told themselves going forward – that we can accomplish what we want so lets sail round the world

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.

You can find out more Rob at Robdubin.com