STRATTON, Vt. — After winning Olympic gold, silver and bronze medals and, just last winter, her third cross-country season World Cup, Jessie Diggins could be forgiven for lazing away the summer and fall on vacation. So why has the most decorated U.S. Nordic skier in history instead run, biked, roller-skied and weightlifted the past six months in Vermont?
“This is the best place in the world to train,” the 34-year-old said recently atop Stratton Mountain as she pointed to steep trails and a nearby gym. “There’s everything you need.”
Diggins isn’t alone in her assessment. She’s one of a half-dozen athletes — including fellow U.S. Olympians Julia Kern and Ben Ogden, Canadian colleague Rémi Drolet and U.S. development team members Fin Bailey and Jack Lange — capping their offseason in the Green Mountain State as part of the SMS T2 elite cross-country team.
The team — formed in 2012 by Stratton Mountain School and the T2 Foundation, a nonprofit that’s now part of the World Cup Dreams Foundation — trains annually from May to the start of racing in November.
“We’re getting prepped all the ways you can when you don’t have snow underneath your feet,” said head coach Colin Rodgers, a former Middlebury College ski team captain and recent U.S. Ski & Snowboard coach of the year. “This place has a tradition and track record that’s probably unmatched anywhere else.”
Or at least in the “lower 48” United States. Diggins, Kern and Ogden just scored three of the seven top “A” slots on the 2025-26 U.S. cross country ski team (which also includes “B” racer Jack Young of the Craftsbury Outdoor Center’s Green Racing Project). Alaska Pacific University’s elite team snagged another three “A” positions, while a Mainer training in Norway took the final spot.
Sverre Caldwell, a retired four-decade Stratton Mountain School coach, has been there from the beginning.
“I remember talking with a couple of people about starting this,” said Caldwell, now 70.
Those “couple of people” weren’t random folk. Take Caldwell: A 2013 inductee into the Vermont Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame, he’s the father of 2014 and 2018 Olympian Sophie Caldwell and the son of 1952 Olympian John Caldwell — the latter who literally wrote the book on cross-country skiing in a trailblazing 1964 guide the Boston Globe calls “the bible of the sport.”
Another team founder: Caldwell’s friend and fellow Vermonter Bill Koch, the first American to win an Olympic Nordic medal, in 1976, and U.S. flag bearer at the 1992 Winter Games. Koch, 70, remembers when offseason training was limited to cycling the back roads of his childhood Windham County.
“We weren’t pricking our fingers and taking blood samples — that’s all new to me,” Koch said of today’s physical and physiological performance testing. “We know a lot more now than we did then.”
So much so, Diggins devoted an entire chapter of her recent memoir “Brave Enough” to her Stratton workout.
“We hike, swim, gravel bike, run … this incredible mix of different things,” she said in an interview. “You’re trying to train as hard and as much as you can, but not stepping over into injury or burnout.”
“I think of it as stacking bricks,” Diggins continued. “Every day that you work out you add another, and then the weeks build into a really strong base, an incredible fortress of fitness.”
Diggins elaborated on the regimen on comedian Paula Poundstone’s podcast.
“Roller skis,” the Olympian told the host, “are kind of like speedy death traps because they don’t have brakes.”
Diggins said she can wheel more than 50 miles an hour, spurring Poundstone to wonder if everyone on the team was still standing.
“We’ve lost the ability to have a knee-modeling career or an elbow-modeling career,” the skier replied, “but other than that, we’ve lost nobody.”
Instead, all are somebodies. Kern, named to the U.S. cross-country ski team at 17, is now a 28-year-old two-time World Championship medalist.
“I wanted to train with the best,” Kern said of her arrival at Stratton a decade ago.
Ogden, for his part, is the son of two other of those founding “couple of people,” John and Andrea Ogden of nearby Landgrove. But the 25-year-old University of Vermont graduate earned his place on the team as a two-time NCAA national champion and winner of the World Cup’s 2023 Green Bib for fastest male skier under age 23.
“I’ve been coming up to Stratton since I was a kid,” he said.
The team works out six days a week, then kicks back on Mondays.
“There are certain times you need to train really, really hard, but there also are times when you need to be recovering,” Rodgers said. “Your body’s only able to absorb the training if you give it proper rest.”
The team took side trips this summer and fall to Olympic venues in Lake Placid, New York, and Park City, Utah. Diggins and Kern also flew to the Snow Farm cross-country ski area in New Zealand.
“Although we can replicate training on roller-skis,” Kern said, “nothing beats being on snow.”
Then again, working out amid green grass and flaming foliage has its benefits.
“You just feel really supported by this close-knit community,” Diggins said.
In appreciation, the team gathered more than 100 local Bill Koch Youth Ski League students at the base of Stratton Mountain in August for a question-and-answer session.
“What’s your favorite glitter color?” one girl asked Diggins, who often bedazzles her face.
“One time I got to glitter Ben’s mustache for a team relay,” she said of Ogden, “and that was a combo of blue and red.”
The team is wrapping up its training before the start of international racing Nov. 28 in Finland, the 2026 Olympics Feb. 6-22 in Italy and the first-ever World Cup cross-country finals in the United States March 20-22 in Lake Placid.
But while at Stratton, members are focused less on the future than on the present.
“The process of being fit enough to try to win the race is the fun part, and you have to really love and enjoy all that goes into that,” Diggins said. “The race is like the cherry on top.”
This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To learn more, visit vtdigger.org/community-news-sharing-project.