Nordic skiers are very good at pushing. We log miles, chase vert, stack intervals, and take pride in toughness. What we’re often less skilled at is knowing when—and how—to pull back. “In the endurance world, this particularly gets skipped,” says Katie Hardie, a Colorado-based holistic wellness coach and nutritionist. “There’s a type-A mentality where more is better—meaning more physical activity. But what we need more of is recovery and bringing down the nervous system.”
Hardie is the founder of My Peak, where she works with endurance athletes and active adults using a systems-based approach that blends nutrition, performance physiology, stress hormones, gut health, sleep, and nervous system regulation. Her services range from one-on-one coaching and lab analysis to group education and retreats. While her work can go deep into biometrics—everything from cortisol balance to continuous glucose monitoring—her message to skiers is refreshingly practical: if recovery is an afterthought, performance will always plateau.
“People think recovery is for lazy people,” Hardie says. “They don’t understand how much of an ergogenic aid appropriate recovery actually is—for performance and just feeling good.” Below are five recovery priorities she believes Nordic skiers often get wrong—and how to start getting them right.
1. Recovery Is About Quality, Not Just Taking a Day Off
What many skiers call recovery is really just “less intensity.” Hardie challenges that framing. “People measure miles and minutes instead of quality,” she says. “They grind, grind, grind, and think recovery means you can’t handle it.”
Instead, she urges athletes to think in push–recover cycles, not one long endurance slog. Training activates the fight-or-flight nervous system; recovery is what brings it back down. “That variability—heart rate variability—is so important for resilience,” she explains. Without it, skiers feel flat, heavy, and stuck without a clear reason why.
2. Mobility and Strength Are Part of Recovery
Recovery doesn’t mean doing nothing; it means doing something different. Hardie encourages skiers to “drop some of the miles days” in favor of mobility, strength training, or even low-key walking.
“People get so one-dimensional,” she says, “that they forget about the strength training component and all the other pieces that allow them to do well when they’re on the snow.” Yoga, mobility work, and functional strength help reset the nervous system while building durability—key for long seasons and aging bodies alike.
3. Protein Fuels the Rebuild—If It’s Real Food
Hardie is blunt about nutrition for recovery. “Nutrition isn’t just what we eat—it’s what we digest, absorb, and assimilate,” she says. Muscle fibers break down during training, but they rebuild between sessions, and that process requires essential amino acids from complete protein sources.
“I’m talking about real food—fish, chicken, beef—not powders or protein Doritos,” she says. One big opportunity? Breakfast. “A lot of women, especially, start the day with nothing, or a bar, or sweetened coffee. There’s no real substance there, she says.” Her fix: savory, protein-forward breakfasts that stabilize energy and support recovery all day.
4. Adaptation Happens Between Workouts
Hardie explains training adaptation simply: stress, recover, rebound higher. Skip the recovery, and you just dig a deeper hole. “If you train back-to-back-to-back days on the same systems, you go deeper and deeper in the hole,” she says.
Intentional overreaching has a place—but only with intentional recovery afterward. “It’s all part of a greater plan,” Hardie notes. Without one, skiers mistake chronic fatigue for dedication and wonder why fitness never quite materializes.
5. Sleep and Nervous System Downshifting Are Non-Negotiable
Sleep is where everything integrates, and the body and mind reboot and build. Hardie emphasizes timing as much as duration: “Every hour of sleep you get before midnight is worth two after,” she says. For athletes, winding down by 9 p.m. matters. “Start transitioning away from being busy,” she says. “Get off the screens. Let your body get out of fight or flight.”
Breathwork, meditation, or simply creating margins in the day—like a few minutes to quietly read—helps activate the parasympathetic “rest and digest” system. “We need to balance the stress of training with things that bring the nervous system down,” Hardie explains. Without that balance, recovery and ultimately performance stalls.
For Nordic skiers chasing better racing, stronger training blocks, or simply more good days on snow, Hardie’s message is clear: recovery isn’t weakness. It’s the mechanism that makes everything else work. Or as she puts it, “People have been feeling ‘meh’ for so long, they don’t even know what feeling great feels like anymore. Integrating more purposeful recovery lets you feel the difference.”