Five Days, Five Riders

It is with a heavy heart that the Steamboat Springs trip is over, but my clients made the absolute most of their time here and I couldn’t be more proud of them. I wanted to finish off the trip with a report of how each of the five riders I worked with actually did, not the plan, but the real result. Some of it went the way I expected. Some of it didn't. That's coaching. Here's the honest rundown.

Alexis

Alexis's whole program was built around one thing: getting her body to trust the motion before her brain had a chance to talk her out of it. It worked. She hit her first jump and landed it clean. She didn't get to a grab by the end of the trip, and that's fine, that was never the priority. What mattered more is that she left feeling confident about her own path forward. That confidence is the actual win here. The grab will come easily once she's back on snow again.

Stephen

Stephen's trip started rougher than planned. On his very first run, he carved a little too far down the left side of the path and couldn't pull himself back, which sent him down an unintended blue run. He made it down safely, but it took a lot out of him, both physically and mentally. We ended up pushing his first real session later in the day so he could rest and reset. Once we got going, the session went the way it was supposed to, and by the second session he was linking turns. Given how the day started, that's a genuinely good outcome. Sometimes the biggest obstacle for a beginner isn't skill, it's recovering from an early scare, and Stephen did that well.

Edward

Edward's case is the one I'm still thinking about. On paper, the training worked. By the last day, he was keeping up with the group without needing extra breaks and without anyone having to wait around for him. That's exactly the outcome we were after. But I'll be honest: five days isn't long enough to know if that's real conditioning improvement or if he was simply gritting his teeth through the last day of the trip. Real endurance gains take a season, not a week, so I'm treating this as a strong start rather than a finished result. He's got the take-home plan to keep building on, and that's where I'll actually find out which one it was.

Alex and Kellen

These two improved more than anyone else on the trip, and I don't think that's a coincidence. Training together meant they were effectively getting double the instruction, since every cue I gave one of them applied to the other, and Day 3's solo session let them build directly off each other without me in the mix at all.

Alex's progress was the more visible of the two. His perception and turn-initiation timing sped up enough that he could finally put his strength to full use, and by the end of the trip he was leading Kellen through the trees as much as, if not more than, Kellen was leading him. That's a real shift from where they started.

That shift ended up benefiting Kellen directly. He started watching Alex's movements and mimicking his body positioning, which gave him more leverage and power exactly where he'd been lacking it. I don't want to overstate this, it's unrealistic to expect a meaningful strength gain in five days, and I'm not claiming that happened. But studying Alex clearly had a positive effect on Kellen's riding, and the training does seem to have given him a small strength boost on top of it.

Five very different riders, five very different weeks. That's usually how it goes. The plan gets you most of the way there, but the actual progress always depends on what happens once you're on the mountain.