PROVING IT TO HERSELF

Caroline Tory on the Life Time Grand Prix and skimo racing.

With Caroline Tory

INTRODUCTION

With the exception of some lingering ‘cross, the cycling season is all but finished now, and – like many of you – Caroline Tory is waiting for the ski season to begin. But she isn’t interested in leisurely days being fed powder by a ski lift. Fresh off competing in the Life Time Grand Prix, Caroline is getting ready for her real competitive passion: ski mountaineering, or skimo.

While she’s transitioning from pedaling to planks, Caroline slowed down enough for us to ask her some questions about her opinion on women-only LTGP starts, her white whales of skimo racing, and what it’s like balancing year-round competition with a full-time job – a story familiar to many endurance athletes.

BIKES + BOOKS + BOOT PACKS

“My biggest challenge this season was juggling my full time job with bike racing,” she acknowledged. “I have a very cool but demanding role as managing director at Aspen Words, a literary non-profit, and I often felt stressed and overwhelmed trying to balance racing with work.”

Now that she’s done with the LTGP, Caroline has let Aspen Words take over as she chases everything she didn’t have bandwidth for during the end of the cycling season. Case in point: We found her just returned from a literary festival in Charleston, South Carolina. (“It was so fun to nerd out on books again,” she enthused.)

That’s not to say she can’t balance training, racing, and earning a paycheck; it’s just that Caroline’s competing passions for words and watts are often… less than compatible, even with a Herculean effort to make it all work.

“I could always find enough hours in the early mornings, evenings, and weekends to train, but all the adjacent stuff took a toll.” For Caroline, that includes the usual list of suspects for an athlete with a day job who also maintains their own service course.

“Trying to work remotely from the road, prepping my bike to race, organizing gear and nutrition while being mentally zapped from the work day – I wouldn’t change it because I love my job, but it is an ongoing challenge to balance it all,” she admitted.

The struggle is worth it, though, because she has a similar love for the bike, including a race that surprised her, but which became one of her season’s highlights.

“I loved Unbound,” she told us, “which shocked me because I never would have signed up if it wasn’t part of the Grand Prix. I was dreading it in 2023, having almost no experience racing on flat (at least compared to Colorado) terrain at sea level, and coming off a long winter of skimo where I was unsure if I had enough bike base for a 200-mile race.”

Turns out she did.

“I completely surprised myself, finishing 13th, and loved the vast, adventurous feel of the whole thing with the crazy mud and weather,” she said. That initial impression was confirmed at the 2024 edition, which featured separate fields for men and women, which she attributes to, “our women-only start and big enough time gaps to keep the first several hours of racing separate from the men.

“I’d never done a gravel race that was still rolling 30-women deep 70 miles into the course,” she explained. “It was amazing to finally have our own dynamic and get a feel for each other's strengths and weaknesses.”

She’s quick to praise the LTGP organization for separating the starts, and she thinks the increased accessibility, boosted exposure from equal race coverage, and woman-to-woman competition is going to make women’s cycling grow faster – in fact, she’s already seeing evidence of it, calling it a new standard.

“It’s been incredible to see the progress even over the course of just two seasons in the Grand Prix. The women’s field was so much deeper and the gaps smaller in 2024 as compared to 2023.”

photo: Taylor Chase

Burnout notwithstanding, Caroline tries to stay on the bike into November, when the Colorado weather tends to force a transition to skis. She’ll even afford herself a break of 2-3 weeks (“I rest and sprinkle in other activities like running, yoga, hiking, etc.”), but once the snow gets decent in late November, she straps in for winter.

“When I’m back on skis around Thanksgiving, I spend the first 6 weeks skimo-ing without structure and usually do a week-long backcountry ski trip with my family at a hut in British Columbia over the holidays,” she said of her tendency to ease into the competitive skiing season.

“It’s really important for me mentally to have a long break from the pressure of workouts and racing, but I’m still out there getting a lot of base miles and fun powder skiing in the legs. By January, I’m ready to do some structure and racing on skis.”

SKIMO 101

Skiing during the winter is hardly a new or novel phenomenon for cyclists, runners, and triathletes – though we typically see our peers grinding miles on XC skis or letting gravity do the work on lift-powered alpine laps.

Not Caroline.

She does ski, and she does enjoy a faceful of champagne powder spray as much as the next skier, but she earns her turns.

“On the most basic level,” she told us, “skimo involves skiing up and down mountains.” Any cyclist, swimmer, or runner who’s heard someone reduce the intricacies of their discipline to something like ‘it’s just riding a bike, how hard can it be?’ might suspect there’s more to it than that. They’d be right.

“You use skins that adhere to the bottom of your skis for traction,” explained Caroline, “plus lightweight equipment with a releasable heel on the binding to climb up the mountain. At the top, you rip off the skins, lock down the heels and ski as fast as you can to the next transition zone, where you prepare to climb again.”

Certain difficult terrain requires boot packing, which is exactly what it sounds like, and specialized events include sprints, vertical time trials, relays, and endurance-style competition, with times ranging from a few minutes (the sprints, surely) to several hours or longer. Caroline focuses on endurance races like the Grand Traverse and the Power of Four, “both of which are iconic Colorado events that are done in teams of two and take several hours. These feel more like the mass participation skimo equivalent to gravel racing.”

As anyone familiar with the idea of seasonal weather might imagine, the sport isn’t a year-round endeavor. Skimo racers typically shed the skins and silo the skis for summer to focus on things like trail running (common, and another passion of Caroline’s) and the bike (less common but still obviously applicable).

“Unlike cycling, where the top athletes are basically on their bikes year-round, it’s normal for skimo athletes to be off skis for several months and cross-training,” explained Caroline.

“The sports are complementary in the sense that they combine endurance with power and strength,” she said, reminding us that a full-time job means she doesn’t have the luxury of mid-winter training camps in more temperate climates. Instead of the perpetual summer on the peaks of Tenerife (or the desperate tedium of being chained to the trainer), her offseason program plays out on the alpine slopes of her homebase in Aspen, Colorado.

“The aerobic base that you can build through skimo translates well to the bike, especially for races with a lot of climbing at elevation, she confirmed – with a caveat. “I’d be lying if I said that you could exclusively skimo all winter and still be competitive in a series like the Grand Prix. You need to do a lot of specific training and get bike miles in the legs to be ready for spring races, and that’s not going to happen without significant time on the bike.”

In the end, even skimo athletes make concessions to the villainous trainer.

Another similarity between the sports: They both follow the “what goes up must come down” maxim, and Caroline credits her skimo background for her descending skills on the bike. “It gets you comfortable flying down a mountain at speed, surrounded by obstacles and other people,” she said, noting that in both sports, “you are constantly threading the needle between going fast while ensuring you and your gear make it to the finish in one piece. A broken ski, like a broken wheel, will really ruin your day.”

Despite the similarities, there are obvious differences between skimo and cycling. Equipment, clothing, and venue, of course, but the cold itself is one of the most critical differences to consider for competition, because it can have a deleterious effect on things like nutrition – without prep, it puts even the best laid nutrition plans on ice.

“One of the biggest challenges with skimo is just keeping your nutrition from freezing,” Caroline said, citing the Grand Traverse as a prime example.

“The race crosses over the Elk Mountain range from Crested Butte to Aspen, and it starts at midnight.” In those small hours, the temperature can drop below 0 degrees Fahrenheit, and that indignity is compounded by wind chill on exposed ridges and faces. There is a good reason (“to avoid the avalanche risk that increases as snow heats up later in the day”), but that’s small consolation when you’re confronted with a carb-cicle in miserable conditions.

“The first year I did the race, every ounce of water and food that I had was frozen within an hour of starting. I completed the 9 hours of racing on basically zero nutrition.”

Caroline does have strategies for extreme winter fueling and hydration, including feeding her hydration bladder’s tube through her race suit so her body heat keeps it thawed. Ditto gels and flasks – into the warmth of the race suit they go.

Her hydration also looks different for skimo vs cycling: “In a five-hour skimo race, I’ll do maybe 2L of EFS-PRO High Carb, whereas in a bike race of a similar, I’ll do close to two times that. I rely more on FE Liquid Shots for calories during skimo, since they don’t freeze as fast as pure liquids.”

Nutrition aside, endurance training and competition in extreme cold is just hard, and for Caroline, suffering through that makes suffering through anything she experiences on the bike seem a bit less daunting.

“I think mental fortitude and getting comfortable being very uncomfortable are skills that I developed through skimo that translated well to cycling, particularly the long events that throw a lot of variables at you. When you’ve been out on skimo training days, shivering on a windy ridgeline while trying to dethaw your hands enough to function, it makes a little wind, hail, and mud at Unbound feel pretty tame.”

INTO THE NEW YEAR

Caroline won’t be doing the LTGP in 2025. She does plan to race on the bike, but she’ll be able to take a more selective approach to the calendar – and she’ll also be able to stay on skis longer.

“I can extend my skimo season a little more into the spring and do some classic events that I’ve never done before, like Tellurando in Telluride or Five Peaks in Breckenridge,” she speculated. “There’s also a new race in April based in Silverton, Colorado, which is one of my favorite areas to ski.”

Her ambitions aren’t just stateside, though – she’s also eyeing some Grand Course races, “which are the most famous long-distance events in Europe, like the Pierra Menta stage race in France and the Trofeo Mezzalama in the Italian Alps.” Being competitive in those events rates among her top long-term goals, but there’s also a fair bit of gravel on that list.

“I don’t have a five-year plan, but I’d love to one day represent my home country of Canada at a UCI Gravel World Championship,” she said. “I like to take things year-by-year and focus on improving – and enjoying the process.”

It’s safe to say that constantly improving and enjoying the process are among Caroline’s driving motivations for endurance athletics, whether it’s on two wheels or two skis. That means pushing her limits in the moment, never accepting “no” from herself, and always looking to the future rather than dwelling on the past. At least, that’s our takeaway from her answer when we asked about her fondest memories on the LTGP.

“I think a lot of growth comes from finishing what you started, even when things aren’t going well and you begin to doubt whether you can do it,” she replied. “I don’t have a single most rewarding moment, but I feel proud of my consistency across both my Life Time Grand Prix seasons.” Of those seasons, she finished every race except last year’s Chequamegon – but she has a good reason: “I only missed that one because I was getting married!”

Ultimately – and just like the struggle to maintain a full-time job while training – Caroline’s reason for competing is something that’ll sound familiar to a lot of endurance athletes: “It has been rewarding to prove to myself that I can complete hard things.”