Two months before her first race of the year, third-year neuroscience student Zoë Williams moves from one exercise to another in the gym—focusing with precision, challenging herself with each movement, and her mind on the future of the upcoming race season as she works out.
Cross-country skiing requires 11 months of the year dedicated to training. Williams said she will train around 550 hours this year, just like her competition at the top of the Canadian cross-country skiing. Williams, a two-time Carleton ski team MVP and multi-national championships medalist, understands this and strives to train her hardest.
“As athletes, we’re always analyzing our performance, our training, and it’s an easy next step to start analyzing your weight to look as a place where you can make gains,” Williams said. “It’s also easy to look at your competitors and to start comparing how they look and how you look.”
The commitment takes a huge toll on athletes, one which became familiar to Williams as she ascended the ranks of cross-country skiing in Canada. Over the last two years, Williams has struggled with body image issues and fatigue caused by overtraining—an epidemic very common for women and men in the sport.
Prior to being a high-level competitor, cross-country skiing was a family affair for Zoë.
“I’ve been skiing since I was about two and, before that, probably riding along in my mom’s backpack,” Williams said.
As the third of six children, her entire family is prominent members of local ski club Nakkertok Nordic. Her father is a professor at Carleton University and her eldest brother, Ezekiel, is a former national junior team member.
The support of her family is key to Williams as she takes on the massive load of training two hours a day, six days a week—a routine that frequently breaks athletes mentally.
Though not exclusive to cross-country skiing, competitors can push themselves to the point that they begin to suffer from Relative Energy Deficiency Syndrome (RED-S). RED-S is a result of the body’s intake of food not being sufficient to its caloric output. Williams said cross-country skiing is a sport that ties performance to low weight in a problematic way.
“Improvement in training is not easily quantifiable,” Williams said. “It can be difficult to see how hours of training can be hard to see how they relate to on-snow results.”
In this sense, Williams says that weight is “dangerously quantifiable,” as weight is an easily trackable metric. In 2016, Williams fell down a slippery slope known to many athletes.
“I remember one week in that fall, I sort of thought to myself, ‘okay now I’m going to cut back my weight. I’m going to cut down what I’m eating and lose some weight,’” Williams said.
It started as “nothing crazy,” but the fine line between a regular control over her own diet and pushing herself to an unhealthy limit became a problem for Williams.
“About two years ago, I lost my period—that’s a sign that things are not good . . . That’s pretty common in endurance female athletes,” Williams said.
She cited prominent American Olympic skier Holly Brooks as somebody who also spoke out about similar issues in a blog post.
“For most girls, it’s a big deal,” she added, “but I honestly didn’t think about it too much. Things were going well, so I just kind of ignored it.”
Unfortunately for Williams, things started to slide further. Over the course of the 2016 race, she lost five pounds. She remembers struggling at the World Junior Trials in Mont St-Anne, Qué., after not consuming the proper caloric intake needed for the amount of energy she wanted to use. Her weight loss started to impact her sport in a negative manner. She says she started thinking about weight to the point of obsession with a frequency that was “way more than was healthy.”
Realizing she had a problem last winter, Williams went to several doctors to undergo blood testing and find a new, healthier way forward.
After having conversations with her doctors and conducting her own research, she made the difficult choice to not go on hormone therapy or the birth control pill. She said these methods were more of a “band-aid solution,” adding that she addressed the problem head-on.
Since then, Williams has decided not to focus on her weight and prioritize “fuelling [herself] adequately.” While she said there are still times where she is haunted by the thought of eating too much, Williams feels “much better and way more energetic.”
She went on to have a successful 2017-18 season, being crowned Ontario University Athletics (OUA) champion and ranking third cumulatively across five races at the Canadian Colleges University National Championships (CCUNC).
The workload and sheer demand for ski racing means many of Williams’ competitors don’t attend school or go online part-time while living at a national training centre. Williams has never taken this route, always viewing skiing as a part of her life.
Williams’ coach, Kieran Jones, has seen issues with control over skiing, school, and busy schedules often manifest themselves in body image.
“When I see an athlete who feels like they are losing control, that they are really busy and they aren’t happy with their training, the first thing I see them do is start to worry about their weight,” Jones said.
Jones, who has been working with Williams for seven years as a high performance coach, said conversations about weight bear no fruit.
“For me as a coach in this sport, I see there is so much to work [to do], any time I spend talking about weight is time wasted,” Jones said.
Despite the difficulties she’s faced in managing energy and balancing school, regret is not a word that comes to mind for Williams when asked about her journey.
“I don’t have time to worry about what this athlete is doing or what that athlete is doing or how much school this athlete is doing,” Williams said. “I don’t worry about that anymore, I focus on what I can control.”
Looking forward to this season, which starts on Dec. 8 in Vernon, B.C., Williams says she hopes that these struggles are behind her. She says she has changed her mentality.
“I realize my goal is not to be the lightest—it’s to be the fastest.”
Photo by Tim Austen
