Jessie Diggins goes into her final cross-country skiing races with ideas for her next chapter
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What will Jessie Diggins' life look like after she races for the last time this weekend?
"Part of what I love is that I don't know exactly what it's going to look like," she said in a recent webinar with the Emily Program, an eating disorder treatment organization that Diggins' credited with saving her life as a teenager. "I love that it feels like an adventure, but filled with so much possibility. I get to decide what it looks like. I get to write the next chapter of this book."
Diggins, the greatest cross-country skier in U.S. history with four Olympic medals, is retiring after this season.
Specifically, after the Stifel World Cup Finals in Lake Placid, New York, from Friday through Sunday, a rare weekend of racing on home snow. She is on the verge of being crowned the World Cup overall season champion for a fourth time.
Diggins already has some specific ideas for her sporting retirement, like cooking meals with herbs from her own garden.
Maybe most of all, to live in her house with husband Wade for a full calendar year. Experience all four seasons in the Boston area.
"I'm retiring because not that it's no longer my dream job, but just the way I have to live to do this isn't the way I want to be anymore," she said.
For the last 15 years, she spent up to eight months a year traveling, including full winters in Europe for World Cup seasons. She recently broke the record for most individual World Cup cross-country skiing race starts (more than 350 dating to 2011).
"I had one of our volunteer team doctors calculate the pounds of cheese that I've gotten over my career," she said, a nod to unique post-race prizes on the circuit, "but I think I need to calculate the hours spent in the pain cave over the course of my career."
In the long term, Diggins will take what brings her so much joy from ski racing — inspiring people with her mix of glitter and grit — into sharing her story through public speaking.
"Have them walk out of there really feeling something," she said. "I no longer want to do that by pushing my body so hard."
She already poured her heart out in her 2020 book, "Brave Enough," and also with "Threshold," a new documentary on her fight with an eating disorder that's available on Peacock.
Diggins has said goodbye in stages to the sport she started as a 13-year-old walk-on to the Stillwater High School team outside Minneapolis.
The farewell tour began last spring with "a little cry" when she flew out of Bend, Oregon, after that annual preseason camp for the last time.
"I have been processing along the way," she said, "but I suspect it's probably going to hit like a dump truck on Sunday."
