Megan Labbate: The Love of Skiing with Friends
- Megan Labbate
- Mar 15
- 5 min read
AMBASSADÖRK Megan shares how stepping away from competitive club teams and finding her crew in high-school restored her love of cross-country skiing.
With that, let's get to it.
ambassadörks
Megan: The Love of Skiing with Friends
My relationship with skiing has ebbed and flowed over time. My earliest memory of being on snow involves being bribed by my mom with bite-size Snickers bars to keep skiing. Fast forward a few years to racing in the Bill Koch Youth Ski League. I have fond memories of these races, having found joy in meeting skiers from other teams and enjoying post-race cookie celebrations. While I was only marginally successful in these races, the fun of skiing outweighed my performance. I was content with being with my friends, spending time on snow, and idolizing the older kids who made skiing look effortless.
As I transitioned from youth skiing into more serious training as a junior skier, my relationship with skiing took a turn. Rather than feeling like my teammates were my friends, now they were competitors. Training was more regimented, and I lacked the motivation to push myself in practices and races. I wasn’t winning races nor was I within striking distance of the podium. I fell deeper and deeper into despair, believing that I wasn’t a good skier.
I had fallen out of love with skiing.
Noticing the drastic shift in my feelings toward skiing, my parents searched for options that would reignite my passion for the sport. After banding together with other families interested in a lower stakes environment for skiing and racing, my local high school decided to form a team.
I left my club team hoping it would be the change I needed, and it was.
Skiing at the high school level brought back my enjoyment of the sport. My coaches prioritized fun during workouts. Relay races masked intervals. Racing at top speeds down hills only to scamper back up them hid hill training. Challenging each other to double pole competitions became killer ab workouts.
But what helped improve my outlook the most was being on the high school team with my best friends. One friend had also left our club team and we convinced another friend to switch from alpine to nordic skiing. While we competed against each other at races, I didn’t feel the way I had on the club team about my teammates being my competitors. Any one of us could have a good day and beat the other two, but there was never any jealousy or animosity toward each other. We skied every practice, warm up, and cool down together. We shared stories, told each other secrets, and laughed along the way.
After high school, I struggled to find that same sense of community in college. While my college had a club team, we lacked a coach and funding. During the week, we mostly worked out on our own, and on the weekends, we travelled to nearby races by begging friends to borrow their cars for the day. I struggled to feel close to my teammates as our lives were so separate from each other. Those feelings of despair and isolation crept back in and I found myself racing less and less.
These negative feelings about skiing continued into my early career. I dreamt of finding a community of skiers, but with little knowledge of ski areas in my new home and feeling overwhelmed by my job, I struggled to make time for skiing. As much as I tried to introduce new friends to this wonderfully obscure sport, they often felt like their experiences were best as a one-time adventure. When I returned home for the holidays and could reconnect with my high school teammates, my love for skiing rekindled. I found that when I could be with my friends, the joy of skiing was amplified.
There is something so satisfying about a “ski and chat” that just isn’t captured by any other form of exercise.
Over time, I’ve reconciled my differences with skiing. I’ve come to recognize that I feel most like myself when I am on my skis. I have finally arrived at a place where I don’t need my high school pals to go skiing and enjoy it. That being said, my high school teammates are still my best friends, and we ski together whenever we can. Our lives have definitely shifted since our high school days, with marriage and kids, but there is something about skiing with each other that hasn’t changed.
Recently, my husband and I traveled to my childhood home for a ski weekend and found ourselves fawning over the incredible snow conditions on a trail that holds a number of core memories from high school. After a tiring stretch of cold winter days and feeling drained from work, I was struggling to find the motivation to ski, knowing how exhausted and sore I would feel despite the stellar conditions.
On a whim, I texted my high school bestie who still lives in the area and asked if she was available to go skiing. My mood instantly changed upon receiving her message that she was in need of some time away from her littles and that skiing was the perfect activity to do just that.
The entire way out to our favorite trail, we reminisced about our high school team and how the conditions felt like the ski days we took for granted as kids. Along the way, we passed reminders of our old hijinks, from building “Peggy the Snowman” to seeing how far we could ride the track after tucking on a downhill. When we hit the rollercoaster hills we’d been pining for, we let out a few “yoops” and felt like kids again as we careened down the trail. As we climbed back up a monstrous hill, we stopped midway to laugh about the time we had skied this trail together and gotten passed by an Olympian as we hooted and hollered down those same hills. He had snickered at us, and to this day we hope he thinks about this while skiing the same trail.
It’s moments like these where I am reminded that skiing has brought so much joy to my life. I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours on skis with my best friends, and the memories we share will power us on trails for a lifetime.
Authors Note: As an east coast skier, I've learned to adapt to variable conditions and understand that every pair of skis are rock skis. If I'm not on the trail, you can find me on the side of the trail building a snowman or emphatically ringing a cowbell. When not skiing and chatting with friends, you can find Megan on the grid @meganlabbate
the closer What We're Thinking About.
That Megan's figured out the most important thing about life. Good friends who will grow with you as life changes, and honor the memories made together.
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