Strong Skier Profile

My story
People come to me all the time for advice on how to get

• A stronger back
• A better posture
• Better working shoulders
• Control of knee pain etc.
• Return to some level of activity after an injury

That's my field now. I've been through most of these pain patterns myself – and I've have learnt what seems to work best both by trying myself and by studying.

You see, I was a skier at Olympic level.I have been to 6 world championships in moguls skiing and I have been carrying the yellow world cup leader bib.Moguls skiing is a physically demanding sport.Your balance is constantly challenged and sometimes you have bad crashes.To get to world class level, being from a country with no mountains and starting fairly late in life, I had to push it.

I was strong and I really wanted this so I would ignore the pains and aches that inevitably occurred along the way.Until one day.

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I am in Mont Tremblant at the first world cup after the Christmas break.I had just won my first world cup before Christmas and I had conquered the yellow bib.With one month to go to the 1998 Olympics I am now one of the favorites to win the Olympic gold medal.That would make me the first Danish athlete in history to have ever taken a medal at the Winter Olympic Games.I am really excited and ready to give it everything.My back is not feeling great, but I feel like I have more important things to concentrate on.

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Well, that was an expensive mistake of inexperience!

Going to Christmas break leading the world cup, I for sure didn't want to just sunbathe in the glory of my accomplishments.My coach and I had decided to work even harder – I wanted this medal and so did he.So I trained even harder.That recipe had seemed to work till then.I hurt my back in training a little.Like bullies not sensing the danger. we just kept pushing it...

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This is a freezing cold January day in Mont Tremblant. The moguls are icy and hard like concrete and I cannot stay warm.  I sure had received all the warnings, yet I don't see it coming.All of a sudden my body tells me in the most explicit manner:I have had enough!

It has been trying to tell me for a while but I haven't listened.So now it tells me in a way that I cannot possibly ignore any longer:My back gets stuck and I simply cannot move!

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Now, it's perfectly legitimate if you think – well how smart are you?  Everyone knows that the body needs rest and that you have to listen to the alarms and act on the red flags!

Yes, I know too – and I even knew then.But I guess I just didn't understand the connection between events.I didn't understand that I was in a high risk group for this injury.Not because of the sport itself, but because of my mechanics.  With the repetitive movements and little traumas here and there that were never properly assessed, muscular imbalances had developed in many significant places.

If I had known what I know today about biomechanics and movement patterns I could have anticipated and made the changes ahead of time. 

I would made a different kind of conditioning, so that it would have never become an issue because I could have rebalanced myself with the proper training as I did later.I can't say that I would have won the gold medal, but I would have avoided a herniated disc for sure.

I did get ready to stand up and ski on pain killers for the Olympics – but my reflexes were rusty after one month of complete inactivity besides training in the pool and I placed 13^th due to a mistake at the very bottom.

Over the summer the bulging disc herniated when I sneezed!And there I was, immobilized again for a while.I was prescribed ten visits to a local physio.Like that was going to help me attack icy moguls again…!

(Skiing was not as appreciated as a sport as "after skiing" was at the time in Denmark.)

I struggled with back pain for a full year after this, making it impossible to get a good flow in the training.I managed to get 9^th place at world championships – helped by the warm weather and very soft snow, but I couldn't reach the top level from before the injury.

During the season I decided with my coach, that enough was enough.I had to find some people who could help me with this, who understood the demands of the sport.I also decided that I needed to know and understand for myself why my back didn't get better.

I didn't have a team doctor since I was a one-person team. So I consulted with some of the doctors from the other teams at World Championships.The Canadian Team doctor , Dr Galea, told me that if I came to Toronto, he would fix me. -Isn't that exactly what anybody in pain wants to hear!

Going there almost cost me my funding even though I paid for everything myself in Canada.(Political stuff.Some people didn’t appreciate me chosing my own solution.)  Moguls skiing is amateur sports, so funding means a lot.But I knew it was the right thing to do if I wanted to get back to the top of the world cup.

In Canada I was introduced to some very competent people and to words like biomechanics, muscle recruitment patterns, muscular imbalances and to treatments like Active Release Techniques®.

This was when I started understanding how you can actually influence a lot more than just the absolute strength of a given muscle.How you can teach your body to be pretty much the weapon or vehicle that you want it to be (-unless of course you have something more serious, like an incurable degenerative disease.)

I came back with good, balanced mechanics to season start and finished 2^nd at the first world cup.

At the second world cup I tore my ACL in a crash…

Back to the clinics, hospitals, rehab, treatments etc.Now I had to regain good mechanics of the knee and make sure I didn't mess up at the lumbar level again in the mean time.I did all my rehab training 4-5 hours a day.10 months later, as I was just getting ready to hit the moguls again, I had to go back on the table and have most my meniscus removed.The surgeon had tried to repair my meniscal tear, but it didn't work. This meant that I was no longer on time for season start.The prequalifying season for the 2002 Olympics.The knee got most of the attention and I slowly slipped into my bad compensation habits, that had caused me the back injury.At World Championships in Whistler 2001 I was in immense back pain again.I cried on the lift between training runs.From pain and from fear.Was this going to be the end of my skiing career?

My coach and I didn't want to repeat the ignorance of the past.We bet our last chances of prequalifying, by ending the season right after worlds, so that I could refocus on getting the mechanics right again rather than just focusing on the next competition.The bet was that with a healthy body, I would qualify for the Olympics at the first world cups of the Olympic season.  That bet did cost me my funding.But again, I knew it was the right thing to do.

This time I went to Vermont to train with Bill Knowles.I had heard he was a good trainer and that he understood moguls skiing.At the same time I tried to instruct my boyfriend (now husband) to the best of my knowledge in a few moves of a specific type of treatment that I had tried:Active Release Techniques®. It is by far the most efficient type of manual therapy I know of.He clearly had talent for it and it really helped me a lot.He later got his certifications and he works with all kinds of athletes today using this technique.

The training and the treatments were a great cocktail and we managed to get me ready for season start.I qualified in the first two world cups, and I was back in the game and fully funded again with top ten results.

Together we had broken the viscious circle and I was pain free.But I had lost terrain during these injury years.I finished 15 at the 2002 Olympics.

After the Olympics I had to go back to basics and change some fundamental things in my skiing.Both the moguls courses and the skis had changed and the technique needed to follow.As for the jumps, the rules were changing and I had to learn new tricks.I had gone from one of the better jumpers to one of the worst during the 4 years of injuries.

Fortunately I had already tried being at the bottom of the field, so I knew the humility it was going to take to climb up the ladder.It took me two years to get to a level where I could ski and jump at level with the top 10 of the field.This time I felt certain it would be the right time.In 2004 I had taken a year off from the world cup to just train and concentrate on the changes I still needed to make (and finish the last bit of university...).

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I am in Tignes, France training for the first world cup of the season 2005. I feel ready.Really ready.I know, I am on the right path to my third Olympics in 2006 and right on schedule.This time I'm good and strong with a healthy body.

The feeling gets broken about one hour into training.I land with one foot on an ice chunk, the size of a football.It starts rolling under my right foot and I can't get off of it.It pulls my leg all the way out to the side until I hear the infamous "pop" of an ACL tear.In one instant the whole season is gone.Before it even started.

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That's when you start getting fatalistic – at least for a little while.Guess it just isn't meant to be.But my husband (who was now also my coach) and I ended up deciding to give it one last chance.I did the surgery and the rehab to the best of my knowledge and experience (of which I have quite a bit by now).

Things go well and I improve a lot.By the time I get back on snow, my knee is strong and stable and I can ski.But it just won't accept the many hours of training that you need to be able to ski at world cup level.That was the end of that adventure.  A great one that I don’t regret one bit. 

Today, I'm doing really well thanks to proper rehab and training.I can do almost anything at the level I want to (check out my skiing video from April 2008) at least in moderate portion sizes.  I keep taking care of my body because that's the only way I can continue the lifestyle I like.To me that's the essence of training.Training is how we help destiny decide what we are capable of doing physically.

I think it's fascinating how much we can influence our bodies through training, and that's why I work with this today.I love helping dedicated people get tuned for the sport or lifestyle they want to excel at and see the results and satisfaction it brings.