Tag: smst2

Somewhere over the Atlantic, on a red-eye to another winter in Europe, Ben Ogden opens his laptop and stares at a grid of digital joinery. Tiny posts, miniature knee braces, angled mortises — a small timber-frame sauna, scaled down to the dimensions of an airline tray table. He sketches in precise strokes, clicking through angles and offsets, rotating the model the way he rotates race courses in his head: looking for structure, looking for flow.

“I learned CAD in college,” he says. “Something that I hope to use in a future career post-skiing. It feels good to keep those skills up.” For the past several winters, Ogden has leaned into his engineering degree, which he earned at the University of Vermont. When you talk to him outside of training and racing, you realize this engineering mind was not learned at UVM; it is deeply ingrained in who he is, who he has always been. On planes, in wax truck corners, in small Scandinavian hotel rooms, he opens the software that once helped him model truss systems for class projects. Now, it helps him breathe.

“It kind of gives me a good outlet,” he says. “It’s exactly like you say — the projects in the summertime are fun, and you learn a lot, but ultimately for me the biggest reason to do them is that it gives me this outlet from skiing… gives me a break from everything that’s going on.”

This winter’s project is ambitious in a miniature way: a timber-framed sauna built from small hand-cut pieces, a practice run for a full-sized dream he can’t yet afford the time or money to tackle. In his travel bag, he carries a book — The Art of Japanese Joinery — the same way another skier might carry a novel. “I’m gonna use my CAD software and sort of build all the little pieces,” he says. “Then I’ll have a little plan for what joints get cut where.”

The sauna will be small. The intention behind it is anything but.

Vermont Roots, Wide Horizons

Ogden left for Finland on November 17 — a date marked not with dread, but with a kind of vibrating readiness. “I’m super pumped,” he says. “This season has come with more anticipation than any other.” Partly because it’s the Olympic year, but also because he feels “a little bit better equipped” each season, even as he accepts that no amount of planning can smooth the chaos of a World Cup winter.

“There’s guaranteed curveballs and sicknesses and highs and lows,” he says. “You can only manipulate that so much… at a certain point, you just have to get going.”

He arrived in Europe later than many teammates. While some seek early-snow training blocks, Ogden stays in Vermont — a deliberate choice, not an oversight. “I decided not to change that this year,” he says. “It’s important for me to be home, and the season is very long. I didn’t really want to elongate that by going to Europe or finding snow pre-Finland.”

That choice means his first days on snow in Ruka can feel awkward, but the tradeoff is worth it. It’s also an expression of who he is. Ogden’s identity is tied to Vermont in ways both obvious and subtle — in his work ethic, his self-sufficiency, and the ease with which he moves between elite training sessions and OD runs with college teams.

He feels tugs of longing, at times, when he thinks of the powerhouse men’s group training year-round with Alaska Pacific University. But the pang is mild, not consuming. “I do,” he admits, “feel a little bit” of FOMO. But he has “recognized the importance for me to just kind of live my own life, be a little bit removed from the intense, Nordie vibe all the time.”

Staying rooted means staying whole. It also means arriving each winter hungry for the team environment, not burnt out from it.

It is unusual for a top U.S. skier to build a World Cup foundation outside of a mega-group or a Western training hub. But Ogden sees the value in his separateness. “I kind of took pride in the fact that I was a little bit different,” he says. “Came from a different group and was able to mesh right in when we did come together.”

This, too, is its own kind of engineering: building stability into a system that demands constant travel, constant performance, constant uncertainty.

 

The Body as a Machine, the Mind as a Circuit

When Ogden talks about training, he toggles easily between the physical and the psychological — but if asked which is more important, he leans toward the mind.

“I think… ski training is a combination of physical and mental adaptations,” he says. “It can be fun to think of things as mental adaptations. I like to, because the power of the mind is just so huge.”

In the fall, he transitions into higher-intensity workouts earlier than he did in college, where the NCAA season starts late and dictates the timeline. “It’s just really good,” he says, “because I find that coming to Ruka and getting into the race season… I’ve had to remind myself what it feels like to go hard for that long.”

That reminder is primarily mental. Hard workouts aren’t just about generating lactate or cardiovascular strain; they’re about rehearsing discomfort.

“You have to learn how to push yourself,” he says. “You have to learn how to go hard, and you have to learn how to pace for a 10k… that, to me, feels like a mental battle.”

This is where his internal monologue — the one few athletes talk about, but all experience — becomes central to his craft.

His best sessions come when he stops listening to the noise inside his body — the burning legs, the heavy breathing — and instead directs his mind outward. “My best races… come when I’m not dwelling on ‘my legs hurt’ or ‘I’m breathing really hard,’” he says. “I’ll be thinking: ‘All right, the top of the hill is right there. I’m gonna push hard until there, and after that I’ll figure it out.’”

But the ideal and the real don’t always align. Not every October time trial feels like a breakthrough. Sometimes he finishes intervals worried that the heaviness in his legs signals doom for the season ahead.

“You sort of forget that you’re still training hard otherwise,” he says. “You don’t have respect for the fact that you’re just tired… it wasn’t a day you wanted to be in peak form, so you’re not.”

In those moments, doubt tries to multiply. It’s a habit of the mind he has learned to anticipate. And anticipation is power.

“When it happens, you can say, ‘Remember, I knew this was gonna happen,’” he says. “Every time, I’ve been happier if I don’t allow it to take over.”

Landmarks on the Course, Checkpoints in the Head

Ogden’s most vivid explanation of mental strategy comes when discussing something humble and universal: a hill in a cross-country running race.

If you tell him two high school runners are nervous about a big climb at the two-mile mark. His response is instant and intuitive — as if he’s revisiting a dozen races at once.

“I would set goals on the course,” he says. “Each goal would have a physical location attached to it.” A tree. A signpost. A bend in the trail. Something visible and near.

He creates segments rather than distances—dividing the race into digestible tasks rather than one looming ascent. “You can really make a hill feel like nothing,” he says, “because you’re like, ‘Okay, I know I can do it if I check these boxes.’”

He gives the example of a 14-minute climb he does in Vermont, a personal benchmark of suffering. The first five to eight minutes are brutally hard. “All you’re thinking about is, ‘Oh my God… this isn’t even the first half.’” But with preparation — knowing where a micro-rest appears, where the next pitch starts, where the end is “in striking distance” — the pain becomes structured. Predictable. Contained.

The same approach guides his 10ks. In the first 5k, he aims to crest hills “breathing, but able to ski crisp.” In the second half, he allows himself to reach the edge — “gassed to the point where I can’t ski with as good of technique” — but only once it’s time.

This is pacing, not as restraint, but as architecture.

The Gus Workout

If the sauna project is the mental escape hatch, then the “Gus Workout” is Ogden’s sharpening stone — a ritual he returns to every year to feel strong again.

“It’s a workout I randomly did in college before a Junior Worlds event with Gus [Schumacher],” he says. The structure is beautifully nerdy and deeply painful:

• Six minutes of 20 seconds on / 40 seconds off
• Another six minutes of the same
• Three minutes of 1 minute on / 1 minute off
• All layered on top of an L3 warmup and a progressive L4 effort

Sometimes he does two sets of the 6-minute blocks. The effect is both physiological and emotional.

“It’s an awesome, total sharpening workout,” he says. “It gets you moving at high speed without being a huge cost… By the time you’re done, it’s a pretty hard L4 workout.”

But the real value is how it makes him feel.

“It has often mentally made me feel really good. I think it makes me feel strong… confident.”

He’s done it before “every major championship and before every season since 2017.”

Coaching the Machine

Ogden works closely with both longtime mentor Patrick Weaver and newer SMS T2 coach Colin Rodgers, each offering different inputs into the system.

Weaver provides the long arc — the accumulated wisdom of years together, the memory of what has always worked. “Having Patrick involved… is really nice for me mentally,” Ogden says. “We’ve had so many good years together.”

Rodgers provides the in-person structure: “Colin is kind of coming in as the day-to-day,” Ogden says. “He’s the one at practice.” They build training plans collaboratively, with Ogden adjusting based on feel, Weaver offering feedback from afar, and Colin guiding technique and lactate testing.

It’s a three-person engineering team working on a single, complex machine.

The Long Game: From Sprinter to All-Arounder

Ogden first burst onto the circuit as a sprinter, but his distance results have steadily climbed. He attributes that evolution to two things: years of accumulation and a physiological quirk he had to learn to manage.

“I’m capable of generating tremendous lactate,” he says. “If I went out right now and sprinted for 90 seconds, my lactate could easily be in the 20s.”

That makes him a powerful sprinter — and a volatile distance racer. Early in his career, he went out too hard too often. The memory that stays with him is the 2020 Junior Worlds 10k, when he led early and paid dearly late. “I just pushed so freaking hard,” he says. “I think I was winning the race by… 10 seconds. And then at the end, I just lost so much time.”

Learning patience, he says, has been “huge.” Now, he races distance events with far more control — waiting, building, resisting the temptation to detonate early.

Every year, he gets better at it, not by magic, but with patience and discipline.

The Olympic Year and the Team Sprint Dream

His biggest goal this year is clear: “An Olympic medal for sure.” He’s unafraid to say it out loud. It’s a reach, he says, but not an impossible one — especially in the team events.

“I’ve had a big asterisk on the team sprint,” he says. “I really want to be on that team, and I really want to just dream big for that event.”

He spent the summer training specifically for it — brutal intervals on the Lake Placid roller-ski track, demanding repeats in Park City. The process goals between now and February are equally mental and physical: “Coming at those two team sprints before the Olympics mentally prepared and ready to execute at a high level.”

Team sprinting is a balancing act. “There’s always this balance of exerting energy… staying at the front, staying out of trouble… and saving energy, staying in the pack,” he says. Believing he can do both — that duality — is the mindset he’s chasing.

The Lake Placid Homecoming

After the Olympics, he returns to something nearly as meaningful: a World Cup in Lake Placid, practically down the road from home.

“I’m so fired up for that,” he says. Friends from UVM plan to come — people who helped him survive the missed classes, late assignments, and months of absences that came with racing the World Cup while still in school.

“I always joke with them… they helped in my success as much as anybody,” he says. “They helped me by sending notes, helping with homework.” The Lake Placid races are his chance to show them the world he kept disappearing into.

He’s excited for Vermonters — new fans, old friends, teachers, kids from ski programs — to see a World Cup in person. “Everybody who ever goes to a World Cup has a good time,” he says. “Even if they’re not huge ski fans.”

The people who buoyed him will finally see the thing he disappears into all winter.

Legacy: What He Wants to Build

Ask Ogden how he wants to look back on his career decades from now, and the answer arrives with unmistakable clarity.

“More than results,” he says, “I want to be remembered as something that was positive for the ski community.”

He talks about the junior camps, the youth programs, the OD runs with college teams, and the way he feels energized by the enthusiasm of younger skiers. He talks about his “little side quest” of collecting T-shirts from New England ski programs: “Every one represents a skiing community I’ve reached out to or been part of in some capacity.”

He lights up when discussing a recent run with the St. Michael’s College team. “It was raining and miserable, and we just had a great time,” he says. “That is so inspiring to me.”

He wants to help more people get out the door. He wants skiing to feel accessible, exciting, and normal.

And, like all good stories, this one has a lineage. His late father, a beloved figure in Vermont skiing, built communities the same way Ogden now does — with enthusiasm, generosity, and the kind of spirit that makes kids believe in themselves.

“There’s nobody I’ve ever wanted to be like more than him,” he says. “He just made kids fired up. And I feel like I can do the same.”

The Blueprint Ahead

By the time January arrives, the first pieces of the miniature timber-frame sauna will be designed, and the digital modeling will start to look recognizable, even to those of us without an engineering degree.

His book on Japanese joinery tucked among race suits and heart-rate straps — a reminder that even in the chaos of a World Cup season, he is building something.

A structure.

A mindset.

A legacy.

He is engineering a career that is not only about skiing fast, but about making more people love the sport he grew up in.

He is designing a life that holds both ambition and community.

Both suffering and joy.

Both structure and imagination.

He is building — in every sense of the word — something that will last.

 

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