Hailey Swirbul and the Experiment of Returning

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When Hailey Swirbul logged onto a Zoom call from Italy last Monday, she was already living inside uncertainty.

“I’m in Livigno right now,” she said. “Yeah — the higher one.”

The U.S. team held two pre-Olympic altitude camps, and Livigno was the higher-altitude option. With thinner air, it’s a place where nothing happens quickly, where adaptation takes patience, and where clarity is rarely immediate. When we spoke, it still wasn’t public which races she might ski, or even whether she would start any at all. She was there because she had qualified back onto the U.S. Olympic Cross-Country Ski Team — but nothing beyond that had been decided.

She didn’t talk about it like a comeback. She didn’t talk about it like redemption, either. Mostly, she sounded attentive — to her body, to her thinking, to the risk of letting the story get ahead of her.

“I’ve thought about this whole thing more as an experiment,” she said. “Like… can I do this? And can I do it in a way that actually feels good?”

The Olympics mattered. She didn’t pretend they didn’t. But they weren’t the point.

“What can I do?” she kept asking.

Before Skiing Was the Point

Swirbul’s relationship with endurance sport started long before skiing felt central, or even intentional.

“I grew up in just a really active family,” she said. “My parents valued getting outside and doing that with our family.”

Neither parent was an elite athlete. That wasn’t the model. The emphasis was simpler: movement, time outdoors, effort shared rather than measured.

“They just love being outside and moving our bodies,” she said. “And they taught that to my brother and me growing up.”

The first sport that really mattered to her wasn’t skiing.

“The main thing we loved to do as a family when we were young was mountain bike races,” she said. “We would travel around Colorado or the West and camp as a family and do these bike races.”

Mountain biking wasn’t cross-training. It was the center.

“That was kind of the first main sport that my brother and I both really loved,” she said.

Nordic skiing entered her life almost accidentally. Her older brother decided to try it as winter conditioning for mountain biking.

“So as the younger sister,” she said, “I was just going to follow whatever he did.”

Her first experience skate skiing was blunt.

“I had never skate skied before,” she said. “And I just got destroyed. I was so far behind everyone.”

What stayed with her wasn’t embarrassment. It was the challenge.

“I remember feeling this sense of, like, I need to figure this out,” she said.

Progress came quickly, and with it a new kind of motivation.

“I remember feeling like, whoa,” she said. “It’s pretty fun to do well at it — whatever well means.”

What drew her in wasn’t winning so much as the learning curve.

“Skiing is such a hard sport to master,” she said. “I don’t think anyone really can. It’s always evolving.”

By middle school, she was actively seeking out more difficulty.

“I wanted to race more,” she said. “I would go on jogs in the fall after soccer practice because I was like, I need to get more training.”

She started racing up in age groups — not because anyone pushed her, but because she wanted to be there.

“I raced up as a U16 when I was still 13,” she said. “And I qualified for Junior Nationals that year.”

Being part of something bigger mattered.

“Getting to go and be part of this bigger thing,” she said, “that was incredibly motivating to me.”

Racing Up — Until There Was Nowhere Left to Go

Much of Swirbul’s early career followed that same pattern.

“My young career — and honestly much of my career — was defined by racing up,” she said.

It worked. Racing older athletes fed her curiosity and reinforced the idea that discomfort was something to move toward, not away from.

But as she progressed through the development pipeline and into the World Cup system, the feedback loop changed.

“There’s this moment where it flips,” she said. “And suddenly you’re supposed to be top 30.”

Early World Cups felt expansive. Points mattered. Starts felt earned.

“Getting points felt exciting,” she said.

Over time, expectations hardened. Results that once signaled progress became baseline.

“It stops being exciting,” she said.

What made it difficult wasn’t failure in the dramatic sense. It was repetition.

“It’s really hard to go over there and be 45th every weekend,” she said. “And still believe in yourself.”

She kept coming back to that number — not as a complaint, but as a psychological reality.

“When that happens over and over,” she said, “it starts to mean something about you.”

The pressure didn’t explode. It narrowed.

“I felt really rigid,” she said. “And I didn’t like that.”

By the end, the issue wasn’t the results.

“There wasn’t anything wrong, exactly,” she said. “That was kind of the hard part.”

She wasn’t falling apart. She just wasn’t herself anymore.

Leaving Without Drama

Swirbul didn’t retire in crisis. She retired calmly.

“I don’t regret retiring,” she said. “At all.”

She enrolled in an engineering program. She stepped away from the race calendar. For the first time in years, skiing wasn’t the organizing principle of her life.

That winter, she worked as a ski patrol member in Colorado.

“At Aspen Highlands, we have this hike-to terrain up at 12,000 feet,” she said. “It’s like an 800-vertical-foot hike.”

For weeks at a time, that meant repeating the same climb again and again.

“You’re hiking up and down that bowl for six hours a day,” she said. “And honestly, I loved it.”

She was careful to separate that year from any training narrative.

“That wasn’t training,” she said. “It was just work.”

What mattered was usefulness. Responsibility. Being competent at something that didn’t care who she was or what she’d done before.

“There’s something really grounding about that,” she said.

Her body worked constantly, but without scrutiny.

“I just loved hiking,” she said. “That was my whole day.”

When Time Shows Up

The idea of returning didn’t appear during that patrol season in any obvious way. It arrived later, through moments that didn’t seem connected at first.

One came from a book about time—the idea that a human life spans roughly 4,000 weeks.

“It wasn’t panic,” she said. “It was more like honesty.”

Another came from a comment made by someone she respected — casual enough that it might have been ignored.

“I kind of just sat with it,” she said. “And I couldn’t shake it.”

What lingered wasn’t urgency. It was clarity.

“If I’m ever going to do this again,” she said, “it’s now.”

Not because she felt behind. Because waiting indefinitely no longer felt natural.

The Risk of Trying Again

Coming back wasn’t simple. It carried risk.

“I didn’t want to come back if I was just going to be the same athlete,” she said.

She worried about slipping back into rigidity. About obligation replacing curiosity again.

“I’m way more aware now of how easily I can slip back into that mindset,” she said.

She also worried about the other possibility.

“What if I come back,” she said, “and I’m just not good enough anymore?”

She didn’t rush past that thought.

“That’s part of the experiment,” she said. “Like… maybe it doesn’t work.”

Starting Where She Actually Was

When Swirbul decided to race again, she didn’t shortcut the process. She entered domestic races. She lined up without protection.

“I was literally starting from the back in mass starts,” she said. “And I was like, okay. This is fine.”

Fine didn’t mean easy. It meant honest.

“I actually loved that,” she said. “It took so much pressure off.”

Domestic racing gave her feedback she could read again. Progress looked like progress. Bad days stayed contained.

Later, she reached for a phrase that stuck with her — the idea of a “safe nest.”

“A place where you can go out into the world and get beat down a little bit,” she said, “but you always have somewhere you can come back to and rebuild your confidence.”

For her, that place was domestic racing.

Europe, Revisited

She never forgot what the other side felt like.

“There’s this moment where it flips,” she said again of World Cups. “And suddenly you’re supposed to be top 30.”

She talked about Europe without bitterness, but with clarity.

“It’s really hard to go over there and be 45th every weekend,” she said. “And still believe in yourself.”

This time, she wasn’t trying to prove she could survive that environment again.

She wanted to know whether she could return without losing herself to it.

Not Being Only One Thing

Throughout her return, Swirbul kept coaching at Alaska Pacific University.

“I was doing three sessions a day sometimes,” she said. “Elite team, masters, devos.”

The workload was heavy. She didn’t romanticize it. But she didn’t want to let it go.

“Being around kids who are just excited to ski,” she said, “it reminds you why you started.”

She was conscious of what she modeled — not just in training, but in attitude.

“I didn’t want to be only an athlete again,” she said.

Where the Experiment Stands

Qualifying for the Olympic team didn’t resolve the experiment. It simply moved it forward.

“It doesn’t make the decision right,” she said. “It’s just what happened.”

She didn’t frame it as validation.

“I don’t regret retiring,” she said. “At all.”

While in Livigno, she waited — not gripping, not withdrawing.

The Olympics were close enough to matter. Far enough away to remain uncertain.

Now the races have started, and Swirbul is presumably days away from a race start at the Winter Olympic Games. So the hypothesis has been written and the lab experiment designed.

“What can I do?” she asked.

Not forever. Not for anyone else. But the time to run the test has arrived.

 

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