One of the top U.S. skiers not on the national team, Alaska native James Southam has been moving up the results for many years. Last season at Soldier Hollow (UT) he finally captured his first national championship.
Right now James is training in West Yellowstone, MT along with a majority of the rest of the elite racers in the country. We talked earlier in the week about his training, goals, path through college and more:
How did this summer’s training go?
– It went really well. I was healthy all summer and I was able to pretty much do everything I wanted to, and made some pretty big changes to the training program. It seems to be working. I’ve been feeling in better shape now than I was last year.
– Yup, still there.
Are you having to work at all or are you able to get by financially just through sponsors?
– No, I definitely have to work. I work at skinny raven sports, a local running store, and then I’m the race director for the local road bike club. So between those things and training it keeps pretty busy.
Have you done a lot of biking as training?
– Not this year. Last year I did a lot, and mostly because of injuries. This is actually the first year where I’ve been able to do everything—like run, rollerski—without hurting. Well I shouldn’t say that…it’s the first time I’ve been able to do what I wanted any day. Last year I tweaked my shoulder out so I spent 2 weeks biking and skating with no poles. I couldn’t run because my Achilles was bothering me. So this year everything’s finally healthy.
Cool. So, you’ve been out of college for a lot of years huh?
– No I was IN college a lot of years! (laughs) I started with a year at Reno, a year off, a year at Western, then I finished at APU [Alaska Pacific University]. I graduated in 2004 out of APU.
With what kind of degree?
– Business. I was accounting but then I realized if I wanted to do an accounting degree I’d have to be there another year and a half. I said I’ll just…stop now! (laughs)
So did you feel like it worked well doing it like that–being at school long-term doing a little at a time?
– I think so. I think I would have liked to have just banged it out. If I could go back I would probably just take a year off after high school, then go to college and get the degree done with. Because I think you can train enough, and if you pick the right school you can get pretty good support training-wise–just having the access to PT’s and things like that that you don’t appreciate until you’re out of college.
So yeah I think I would have tried to just bang it out. As it is, it worked out well for me; I was able to keep plugging away and had the support to keep going for it.
That’s great. It’s cool to see someone your age that’s been making a little progress year by year, finally start to really do well. It seems like a lot of people just aren’t able to feasibly stick with it if they haven’t made the national team.
– Yeah. I always knew… I was always better in training than I was in racing. I’d always have moments in a few races a year that were ok, but generally I knew I was faster than I was showing I was.
– Yeah, like I trained with Lars [Flora] for years and wasn’t that far behind him in training, but come to the race season and…we’d go back and forth a little bit but when he was skiing well he’d beat me by a bit and now we’re kind of evening out, or I just finally was able to put it together during the season.
Do you know why?
– I think it’s just consistency. I mean I thought I was training a lot before and thought I knew what it took, but two falls ago I just decided to punch it for a couple weeks and see what happened–and I could handle it. So I just kept going from there and started to see the results. I think that was kind of the big thing.
Was it just more of everything or more volume or…?
– At the time it was more volume. A little bit more intensity; I wasn’t so afraid of it. But you end up doing more of a lot of different things and pretty soon you’ve got a 20 hour week. The volume is not something I think of anymore; it’s what happens when you do the things you need to do.
