Every spring, Jessie Diggins and Jason Cork, her coach since 2010, gather for a goals session: a meeting to go over the previous cross-country skiing season and look ahead to the next one.
They have evolved over time, but in recent years Diggins and Cork have reviewed about four single-spaced pages — about 1,700 words in total — that include categories of goals: physical, technique, mental, community, team, etc. The session can take more than two hours.
“With some people, having 2-4 big goals is their process, but for Jessie’s personality (and, frankly, mine) having a million boxes to check works,” Cork wrote in an email.
Diggins said that 99.9% of her goals have nothing to do with the outcomes of races. They’re about the process. They can be specific, such as how to avoid cramping in longer events.
“We go through the entire goal sheet, and we hold me accountable,” she said. “Like, did I do everything I said I was going to do?”
This year, Diggins copied and pasted her 2023-24 goal sheets into a 2024-25 document and commented and edited from there. Cork called it “a pretty standard review session, compared to others.”
Diggins is coming off, statistically, the most successful winter in U.S. cross-country skiing history. She had scheduled two weeks of complete rest after the season. She found it difficult to sit still.
“It was actually harder to stop, and that was probably a good sign that I’m really not done, like, mentally,” she said. “When it was time where I was like, OK, I’ve given my body a chance to really reset, and mentally reset, then when I could start training again, I was like, I am so ready. Like, I’m psyched. I want to do this. I was really motivated in setting process goals for the new season.”
The season begins this weekend with the first World Cup races in Ruka, Finland. It includes the Tour de Ski in Italy wrapping around New Year’s and the biennial World Championships in Norway in late February and early March. It ends with the last World Cup races in Finland in late March.
Diggins, 33, now owns the outright American cross-country skiing records for Olympic medals (three, one of every color), World Championships medals (six, two of every color), World Cup victories (23, including 21 individual) and World Cup overall season titles (two).
“There are definitely things that I have not won,” she said, “and most of them start with classic.”
All of Diggins’ individual World Cup victories came in the freestyle technique, though she does have podiums in the classic technique. The first two races this season -- a 10km on Friday and a sprint on Saturday -- are in classic.
“One of the things that keeps me coming back is that I feel like I’m never done learning, and I’m never done trying to improve,” she said.
Diggins said that this season’s “holy grail” will come March 7: the women’s relay at the World Championships. The U.S. has never won an Olympic or World Championships relay medal.
Over the last decade, the U.S. women have finished fourth, fourth, fifth, fifth, fourth, sixth and fifth between the Olympics and World Championships.
"(A relay medal) is something that we’ve been working towards for so, so long,” Diggins said. “It takes every little puzzle piece coming together to make it happen, of course, and that’s why it’s so exciting and so hard to do. I think that would be the ultimate amazing thing.”
It’s the entire U.S. cross-country skiing team — the women, the men, the staff — that motivates Diggins to still commit to spending four months in Europe year after year. They’re also part of her goals.
“How do I want to show up for my team?” she said. “How do I want to be a leader? How do I want to help make sure the next generation can come along and kick my ass? So there’s a lot of different categories of goals there, and we go through all of that.”
