It was a rare opportunity. The chance to explore the best outdoor towns in the United States, looking for the perfect place for an avid xc ski racer to live. I made it my goal for the entire off-season: to find XC Town USA. This is my journey.
Last spring, my life was in transition.
I had spent the past six years devoting my life to cross country ski racing. I had been living in Park City, Utah, training full time, as well as working a full-time job. When the 2002 season wrapped up, I was feeling burnt out. My results had been stagnant for three years and the frustration over lack of improvement was keeping me from enjoying skiing. Deep down, I knew that I still had a love of ski racing and I was not ready to give up the sport, but I knew I needed a change if I was going to regain the spark I had enjoyed years before.
At the same time I was having all these feeling, I also got laid off from my job as a software engineer. My job was essentially the only thing keeping me in the Park City. My girlfriend and I had talked about moving somewhere new, but I was reluctant to leave a well-paying job. But once I was cut loose by my former company, we both quickly decided that a change in scenery might be exactly what we needed.
But before we could decided where we were going, we had to figure out why we were leaving Park City. After all, Park City had just hosted the Olympics, it is home to the US Ski and Snowboard Association, and it is a beautiful place for racing and training. It has an amazing array of dryland running mountain biking trails. It is within 6 hours of Moab, Sun Valley, Jackson Hole, and many other outdoor towns. Was I crazy? Why would I want to leave? Well, first of all Park City is at 7000 feet. The high altitude was one of the reasons I moved to Park City in the first place – after growing up in New Hampshire I needed to get more comfortable racing at high altitude. Initially it worked well. But over the past couple years, as I have struggled more with my training and my race results, I think the altitude was taking its toll. Some people can probably train 20 hours a week and work 40 hours a week while living constantly at 7000 feet and still recover effectively, but I don't think I am one of those people.
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