When More is Better: Ingrid Backstrom Reconnects After Skiing 100 Days in a Row

When More is Better

By: Ingrid Backstrom

I wanted to ski 100 days in a row. January 1st seemed as good a day to start as any. New year, new goal.

New Year’s Eve, the night before, I was super nervous. I didn’t know if I could ski five days in a row, let alone 100. How would my body hold up? Was this a responsible choice as a mom? What about the logistics, the scheduling, all of the unforeseen complications that could arise? I tried to block out all of the what if’s, set my alarm, and went to bed.

We got up in the dark, bundling sleepy kids in the car to get to Stevens Pass early on the busy holiday. We futzed with gear, waited in line to get the kids their passes, and herded our 4 and 6 year olds to the beginner lift. We made a few, turtle-slow runs, the kids’ whining at a minimum thanks to the gummy candy stashed in my pocket. My husband, who is really the true hero of this story and who deserves an award for me skiing 100 days in a row, noted my antsy demeanor and my frequent glances towards the upper part of the mountain, blanketed with a foot of fresh snow. “Just go,” he said, “take a few runs. We’ll be fine.”

I looked at him with the look I’d given him a thousand times since having kids, the inner struggle of every parent who wants to do their job or pursue their passion and also wants to be a good parent, a good partner, and a semi-responsible adult. No biggie, just thousands of years of biology plus decades of societal pressure compounding. A good mom would be with her kids, skiing for myself is selfish, grow up already.

Jim looked at me back, firm, kind, and direct, the result of many conversations, a meaningful look with the deep understanding that skiing is my job. It’s how I help support our family, make a living, and also it’s my passion. I feel the most like myself when I’m skiing, and also, I’m a way better mom and partner when I take the time to do what I love and take care of myself. He knows this, and his look said all of that. It also possibly said, “You’re driving me crazy, Antsy-Pants, and you’ll be way happier later if you go skiing. I mean it.” So I went.

Two lifts up, a short steep hike, and I was breathing heavily on a ridge, absolutely gobsmacked by the glory of it all, giddy like a kid getting away with skipping class. The deep blue of the sky and the sparkly white of the fresh snow was intoxicating. I took a few moments to look around and catch my breath before clicking into my skis and dropping in. The snow was perfect, a floaty foot of fresh on top of a bouncy under layer, and I had the run to myself—a steep, low consequence chute with a nice long apron runout.

Two turns in and I immediately relaxed. Four turns in and I forgot everything. My brain turned off, and I enjoyed the rhythm and the flow of porpoising down a fat snow spine, figure eight-ing the single track already on the slope. I shot out the bottom of the run onto the groomer below, breathing hard. I smiled to myself, and thought, “Maybe this 100 day thing is going to work out after all.”

My motivation was simple: after 20 years of skiing professionally, with many ups and downs including: losing my brother and countless friends in the mountains, injuries, moving states, marriage, three pregnancies, two amazing kids (one pregnancy ended in a miscarriage at 3 months), and career highs and lows, I was missing that pure connection with skiing that I used to have. I wanted to see if I could get it back, and 100 days in a row would be the closest I could get to a permission slip to try.

The catalyst for my 100-day quest had been a ski crash. In April 2022, I was in Haines, Alaska, filming for The Approach 2, a film project I was helping produce. The year before, also for The Approach, had been my first time skiing in Alaska since 2014 (before I got pregnant with our first child). I kept it mellow, letting others go first, simultaneously thrilled to be back in Alaska where I wanted to be and also terrified that I would crash and confirm my fears that I was a bad mom for still wanting to ski professionally.

So when I found myself on top of an actually decent line in April 2022, I let my ego take over, wanting to seize this chance to show I still had it. There’s a right way to turn my brain off, which is being in the flow state, and a wrong way to turn my brain off, like, F it, YOLO, let’s goooo. I turned it off in the wrong way. Instead of overthinking, I underthought, and dropped in without doing my due diligence, making a total rookie mistake and getting taken out by my sluff. I pulled my airbag. I was totally fine, but I lost a ski, and had to ski the remainder of the trip on my itty bitty all-mountain resort skis, ashamed and with my tail between my legs. How had I let myself make such a foolish error?

It’s not that I hadn’t wanted to go to Alaska since having a kid, it’s more that the opportunity hadn’t presented itself. Things in the ski industry are changing, but at the time, in 2015 when I told my then-sponsors and a few potential sponsors that I was pregnant, several of my existing contracts got cut in half, and the potential sponsors just sort of said something to the effect that maybe we could talk later.

It wasn’t exactly trendy to be a mom athlete—and apparently no one thought that pregnant me in my massive yellow jacket—barreling down the slopes like a mustard-colored hippo with a very wide turning radius—would sell gear. They were probably right. Hell, it freaked out lots of people when they saw me skiing pregnant, many of whom tended to point out that I needed to be careful, or asked, “Isn’t it time you stick to the groomers?” I was coaching freeride at the time, helping run the junior freeride program at Crystal Mountain, and the biggest air I did all winter was ten feet which I thought was very careful, thank you very much.

In the intervening years, I made as many ski projects happen as I could, mostly small projects with the help of some kind filmers including a movie, Lineage, about a winter spent on the road to find our top 25 lift-accessed ski runs with our 8-month-old daughter in tow. We had our second child. I had a knee injury, and recovered from that surgery while also healing from pregnancy and childbirth, yet I couldn’t quite find my flow.

I was struggling to figure out where I fit in professionally at this new stage, to balance a ski career with family, and also literally was having difficulty finding the flow state in my skiing. Before, I skied every day I could. Crappy days, rainy days, crunchy hardpack, I was out there, like a dog that can’t stop chasing the ball. The positive feedback loop was firing: I skied hard, I felt good about my skiing, I was professionally rewarded, so I was motivated to ski more, both for my job and for myself.

Now, it has become so much easier to prioritize the immediate needs of my kids, my family, the other parts of my career like social media, production, events, and the business side of it, so I was skiing less. If the snow was mediocre, it was really hard to leave my kids (which also meant asking my parents or my husband to put their work/life on hold to be childcare) to drive up to the mountain for some mediocre skiing. In addition, I didn’t always feel like I was skiing great, and my phone wasn’t exactly ringing off the hook with professional opportunities. When I did find myself on top of a line, I was agitated, overly nervous, second-guessing my every impulse, and I skied poorly. The feedback loop was short-circuiting. The crash had been a wakeup call that helped me see I had been skiing skittishly and out of my flow for a while now.

In South America that following summer, I watched some friends under the lift beneath me, effortlessly on-sighting a fresh rope drop on a chute with a mandatory air at the bottom. They skied like a choreographed dance, no hesitation, each turn perfectly placed. My companions on the lift were chatting about world travel, and I rudely blurted out, “Now THAT’S what it looks like to ski with total confidence!” The realization hit me like a fresh cold powder face shot: I used to have that, and I want it back.

The sort of anticlimactic end of the story is that yes, I skied 100 days in a row, and I got to ski some super fun lines.

The hardest parts were not physical (mostly I felt great, if tired sometimes), but logistical. There was a 3am wakeup to ski tour for 40 minutes before a drive and flight. There were several night time headlamp ski outings after my PRO 1 avalanche class, and once when my family waited in the car, grouchy after a long travel day, while I snuck a few night ski laps at Stevens Pass.

I made Anne ski with me in the rain in Juneau at Eaglecrest, taking a taxi for an hour and then nearly missing our flight. Our youngest had walking pneumonia, and the guilt about that was maybe the hardest moment of the whole winter. Yeah, great job mom, you’ve skied 70 days in a row and your kid is sick! To be fair, she’s so tough and had acted nearly normal until one day she mentioned that her lungs hurt. She recovered quickly, but still. Not my proudest moment.

The best parts were learning that my instinct had been right. It allowed me to access glimpses of my flow, which has continued to develop and allow me to ski not for who I was before, but for who I am right now.

When I ski more, I ski like myself and I truly enjoy every turn. When I ski more, I’m a happier person and a better mom. My kids get special time with dad and grandparents, without micromanaging mom getting in the way. They get to see that it’s okay for parents to have jobs they love and passions they go to ridiculous lengths to pursue.

Skiing doesn’t always have to be about the super gnar or the raddest line for me. Skiing can be as simple as a groomer from a rope tow, the wind in my hair, or feeling wild and a bit silly for hiking up to make 600 feet of pow turns with my headlamp at night in a storm all by myself.

Making time for skiing became a game in itself, sometimes a logistical headache but almost always worth it for the memorable experiences, like skiing on Easter on the way to Seattle to see my family and my 100 year old grandma, with my parents and my kids and my cousin, groomers in the rain, eating candy on the chairlift.

Skiing is hard, which is part of what makes it so attractive in the first place. It’s not a day at the beach. It requires effort, knowledge, and commitment. Finishing 100 days was a good reminder that, like most skiers, I find things most satisfying when they are a bit cold and out of reach.

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