ROLE MODEL
15 hardworking years.
“When I finished third at NCAAs as a junior, I
think it was the best result an American had had
in a few years,” Freeman says. “It was during an
era when Europeans completely dominated college ski racing, and I don’t think it was until then
that I started to think seriously about skiing beyond college.”
Freeman followed up on his stellar junior year
by earning All-America honors in both running
and skiing as a senior at Bates. He then moved to
Boulder, Colo., to pursue an advanced degree in
physics while he continued ski racing. Though he
was on a Ph.D. track, Freeman left the University
of Colorado with a Master’s degree in 2000 because the pull of skiing at a world-class level simply wouldn’t go away.
“Eventually, I decided that graduate school and
skiing weren’t compatible and I moved back East
to train for a few years,” Freeman says. “I made the
World Championship team in 2003, was named
to the U.S. Ski Team, then moved to Utah. I didn’t
perform well, got cut from the U. S. Ski Team, then
made the U.S. Olympic team and interviewed for
my current position at New Hampton School from
the Olympic Village at the Torino Games.”
Freeman says missing the Olympics in 2002
was a difficult pill to swallow after he’d committed himself entirely to achieving that end, but he
toughed it out for another four years and the hard
work paid off.
“A faculty member at New Hampton once asked
me if it was worth spending six years of my life to
make the Olympics so I could go there and race
for 40 minutes,” Freeman says. “The answer is,
‘Absolutely.’”
Freeman says that he decided in advance that
the 2006 season would be his last year as a full-
time ski racer because he and his wife, Heidi,
didn’t want to put off starting a family any longer.
That explains why he was interviewing for a high
school teaching job from the Olympic Village.
Juggling Olympic races with job interviews was a
taste of the multitasking he’d encounter in board-
ing school the subsequent year.
“Working at a boarding school has been a huge
transition,” Freeman says. “When I was an athlete,
my primary concerns
were training twice a
day and making sure I
was well rested. Now,
I get up and play with
my kids for a little bit,
eat breakfast, and I’m
off to teach all day. In
the spring and the fall,
I leave the classroom
and immediately jump
into either my cycling
or running gear to go
coach. I come back from
that, shower, cook din-
ner, put my kids to bed,
prep for classes the next
morning, and then go to
bed. It’s very busy.”
Freeman says the
greatest challenge of
working at a boarding
school comes in juggling all those responsibilities.
“You never feel like you’ve got everything under
control,” he says, adding with a laugh, “at least not
until graduation each year.”
Working with adolescents can be frustrating be-
cause as they mature they’re sometimes inconsis-
tent and inconsiderate, Freeman says. “But they’re
also capable of tremendous growth, and it’s always
amazing to me when a student goes out of his way
to help the class with a study guide, or a cyclist
makes tremendous progress.”
Piloting a nearly nonstop work life and balanc-
ing that with family (daughters Iris and Sage are
now 3 and 1, respectively) is made possible, Free-
man says, by the fact that ski racing has made him
an athlete for life.
“This may be a bit oblique, but I think the biggest thing ski racing helped me with is that I get
away to train for an hour or more every day by
myself,” Freeman says. “I get that time to collect
my thoughts and reflect, and without that I find it
hard to function. The physical act of training really keeps me grounded.”
“The physical act of training keeps me grounded,” says Freeman.
Skiing
few years, Freeman has been writing as a blogger for the popular nordic website
fasterskier.com.
“They emailed me and said they wanted me to
be a part of blogs they were starting,” Freeman
says. “It was a chance to get a little bit more
exposure and plug what sponsors I have left, so
I said, ‘Sure.’ I started writing when I had time
to document my successes and my failures and
my training. I did it for a while and assumed that
just my mom was reading it, but I now go to ski
races and clinics and continue to get comments
from people I don’t even know, so I figure I’ll keep
writing.”
Those who follow Freeman’s blog will see the full
range of his wit and wisdom. An example:
Jan 16
BOB ALLEN (2)
