Bringing it Home

Home. What is home? Is it being back in the states? Is it my family in Flagstaff? Is it gliding on a pair of skis? We like to say that this ski team is our home (or one of them), no matter where we are in the world traveling for races we have people who are following the same passion and support us no matter what. Looking back on our travels to Slovakia, Italy, or up mountains, those times when we are away from home and then return, those are the times where our ski family cohesion becomes stronger. Adventure. We seek it and we thrive off of it and travel across the globe to find it and yet this “home team” urges us to seek adventure each day in our friendships, in our academics, in our leadership.  My high school coach once told me that you never grow unless you push yourself outside of your bubble. Trips like WUG have immeasurable value for developing character. We are placed in situations where we are forced to cope with a new culture, over faced in races, trying to communicate with people from many different backgrounds and placed in situations with flavors and scenes and beds that aren’t “like things are at home”. We learn to thrive.

The Mountains overlooking Strbske Pleso

     I was sitting in class for the first day, fighting the heavy eyelids and jet lag, attempting to absorb a whole week of lecture material that I had missed. Heading back to class seems like a sleep world compared to the vibrancies of our ski adventures and I couldn't wait to wake up again back in my room in Slovakia. We often joke about how we are students by day and skiers by night because sometimes it feels like we live from race weekend to race weekend with a blur in between. Nobody in our classes knows our secret lives.  Now comes the real challenge of letting the things we have seen and adventures not fade away but to become a part of our everyday mundane life. It’s easy to separate and snap back to how things were before but harder to let it change who we are becoming. How can we bring the climate change and culture that we learned about and became passionate about back to Laramie Wyoming? Megan, sitting next to me in class, asked me how the trip was and then I had the honor of reading her reflection paper and got a little emotional. Even though she affectionately christened us a “sea of hippies”, she wrote about how the team had affected her and her views on the environment and how we were studying climate change in Slovakia. This is what this team is for; to bring it back into our conversations every day, to inspire people to ask questions and seek out what they love. Even if our classmates may not know where we go on the weekends, we can inspire them because we have been so deeply influenced by our experiences. Whether at the World University Games or in a backcountry canyon, we can’t help but let it impact our constantly shifting worldview. Now that we are home comes the hard part of synthesizing, analyzing and interpreting. Not just the data, photos and samples we collected but the memories and thoughts we collected too and finally integrating what we learned overseas to evoke change and keep the fire burning. This is what we do it for and when the true value of skiing and teams and study abroad shows through.

The Torch burning over the duration of the whole games.