My Battle with PTSD

There was no fear when I went down. 

None. 

After I hit those two gates at Killington and somersaulted over my skis, I wasn’t scared. 

Even as I slid on my back into that bright red fence … I wasn’t afraid. 

When I finally came to a stop, I felt no real fear. 

There wasn’t room for any of that … no space left in my brain.    

The only thing that I felt was pain. 

That was all. Nothing else. 

As soon as I stopped moving, I felt this excruciating pain on the right side of my torso. It was like someone was stabbing me with a knife. 

If you watch the video of that crash, you can see me doubling over on the ground, trying to curl in toward my stomach, into the fetal position. 

But I couldn’t even do that, because that hurt too.  

And it’s honestly kind of difficult to explain what the pain felt like. But the closest I can get would probably be, it was like … not only was there a knife stabbing me, but the knife was actually still inside of me. Like if someone had stabbed me in my abdomen, and then, instead of pulling the knife out, they, I don’t know, they just … left it there? 

Sitting motionless in the snow — all bent over, holding my side, one ski still attached to my boot, the other one lying on the ground 20 meters up the hill — it was the most pain I’d ever been in. By far. And that’s saying something. 

When you’re a downhill skier, pain is just a part of the whole deal. All of our backs are a mess. You have knee soreness basically 24/7. And that’s before you even get to the falling part — the tumbling over, the getting bent and twisted all around because of how fast you’re moving. You get used to soreness and pain of all types. After a while, it’s almost like: OK, at this point, I’ve felt all the different pains a human being could possibly feel.  

So that’s kind of where I was before November 30, 2024, at Killington. 

But this pain … this was a new one for me. 

I was just sitting there on the side of the slope. Unable to move. Unable to really even breathe.   

When the medical people got me onto that sled to take me down the mountain, I think that’s when I was first able to feel something beyond just pain. I distinctly remember how weird it felt being pulled on that sled — lying flat on my back, someone in front on skis steering the sled, another person in back holding the rope that was keeping us from moving too fast. As we got closer to the bottom, I remember being able to hear the award ceremony music. And wanting to see the women who won, wanting to congratulate them, to let them know that they were amazing and that I was happy for them. I could tell everyone at the bottom was still in shock because of my crash, almost as if everyone there was holding their breath and didn’t know what to do or say. 

And I distinctly remember hating that.   

I wanted the crowd to be cheering, for everyone to be happy, for the winners to be celebrating.  

I wanted all of those things. 

But, more than anything, I just really wanted the pain to go away.

When you crash the way I did that day, almost immediately you have a bunch of people asking you questions and making statements. Question, statement, question, statement, nonstop. And they try to act all calm, but you can tell that they can tell that something is really wrong. It’s like….

“Mikaela, are your legs OK?”

“Does anyone have a jacket for her? It’s getting cold.”

“What about your neck? Mikaela, is your neck OK?”

“Stay awake!”

“Does anything else on your body hurt, Mikaela?”

 “She looks pale. Struggling to stay awake.”

“Mikaela, can you move your fingers and toes?”

“Can you remember the whole crash, Mikaela? Did you ever lose consciousness?”

All the while, they’ve got to get your boots off. They have to cut your race suit off. You’re squirming around and trying to help them get you undressed, while also trying to stay perfectly still so as not to make things hurt even more. 

And the shivering … the shivering was awful. It was like: Am I cold, in shock, or both? Who cares, just make it stop. 

As long as I was shivering, I was in pain.

Everything’s so hectic, with all those people moving around you in different directions. And the questions just keep coming. 

I remember I tried to keep looking to my mom. Just trying to stay focused on her face. And then, at certain points, there were these moments when I would sort of, I don’t know, I guess just … drift off. 

It probably sounds weird, but it was like all I wanted to do was fall asleep. Just close my eyes, fall asleep, and then wake up when everything was OK again and there was nothing wrong. 

Of course, in those situations, that’s the absolute last thing you’re supposed to do, so pretty much everyone milling around was trying to keep me awake and alert. In that moment, when you’re wanting more than anything to just close your eyes, everyone is constantly trying to engage with you. It’s like….  

“Hey Mikaela … how are your shins? Hey … HEY! Stay with me here!!! How are your shins?”

What? My shins? What?!?!?

“Are you sure you didn’t lose consciousness Mikaela? Can you describe the crash for me? Does your head hurt?”

At one point I remember telling the medics that the whole right side of my body was “not OK.” But to go into more detail than that … it was something I couldn’t really do. It was like, “I can’t really explain exactly what’s wrong.” 

“I can’t move my leg,” I told them. “But my knees and my feet feel fine.” 

“Here, though,” I said, pointing to the side of my belly, “right here … something’s wrong.” 

Then, once we got into the ambulance … I don’t know if the road actually was super bumpy, or whether it just felt that way because of the shivering and the pain magnifying every little bump. As we made our way, to stay distracted, I imagined that we were driving through craters on the surface of the moon.    

At one point, they were cutting away my clothes, and that’s the first time when….

That’s when we saw the blood.  

And at that point, seeing all that blood, that’s when it wasn’t just pain anymore.

That’s when I started getting really scared.

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It turns out that whatever it was that stabbed into me when I was falling, it didn’t puncture my colon.

It almost did. But it missed. 

The doctors said it was about a millimeter away from puncturing my colon — how can they even measure it that close? — and if that had happened we’d be talking about a life-or-death situation. (They mentioned something about fecal matter. It was like: “There’s no fecal matter coming through the hole. That’s a good sign.” Oh, goodie!)

But since that didn’t happen, and it wasn’t life or death, when the pain subsided, I just treated everything about my recovery like any other injury I’d experienced. It was like: OK, I’m alive. Great. Now I just need to put everything I have into getting my body right. Into getting back in shape.

I had surgery 12 days after the crash, and I knew that I wanted to try to compete again before the season finished up at the end of winter. Which, I mean … that didn’t give me much downtime. I think it was about six weeks off snow. And pretty much the only thing I was concerned about was whether that would be enough time to build back my physical strength to be able to do full-power skiing. I knew that once you return to the snow, your body has to go through a whole process of adapting to the load of ski racing again, and that adds another month to two. So I’m basically just doing the math in my head like: With all the markers that I need to hit — walking to jogging to core exercises to strength work to finally getting back on the mountain — is there gonna be enough time for me to get back? 

I figured it’d be tight, but there was nothing too complicated about it. It was: Train hard. Like always. Been there, done that. In reality, though…

I had no idea what was in store for me.

When I got back out on the snow — the part that I hoped would be fun and fulfilling again — something weird happened. For whatever reason, during my training runs, everything was just feeling kind of awful, and so far away from how I wanted to feel. My turns weren’t right, my movement was off, everything was just … bad.

I guess the best way to describe it is that I didn’t feel like myself out there on the mountain. It was like there was this strange disconnect between my body and my mind.

And that was definitely scary. 

When you’re trying to ski a slalom course, the gates are coming at you extremely fast, and you’ve got to be able to throw your skis from one side to the other, with precision, on an icy slope. Your skis are basically tipped up on edge anywhere between 45 to 60 degrees. And you’re going from one side to the other side insanely fast. So there’s not a lot of time to be contemplating things while you’re doing that. You have to remember — almost innately, in real time, in a split second — where you need to be going on the course. And sometimes there’s fog, or it’s a bit dark, or sometimes the surface is icy on one turn and soft on the other. So you have to process all that in the moment, immediately. Which means you absolutely need to be able to trust that what you see happening in your mind is fully connected with what you then do with your body. 

If that connection is off, even slightly, or there’s a misfire there, the danger level increases exponentially. 

And having just had my delightful little run-in with the outer-wall of my colon … I wasn’t feeling particularly open-minded about exploring the danger of ski racing.

I’ve always known the mind-body connection in skiing. Always appreciated that mental element of our sport. But, for whatever reason, I wasn’t thinking about that stuff much at all during my rehab. I was too focused on the details, the small steps. It was all about getting in shape, and about things like technique and speed. 

Then I’d be up at the top of the mountain during training to make my comeback, and everything was just … how can I explain this?  

Have you ever had one of those dreams where you’re like … running in molasses? You’re being chased or whatever, and your body won’t move fast enough for you to get away? Or you’re just stuck in some goop and trying to move your body to get out of it, but you can’t really get going as fast as you want to? 

That’s what it felt like for me in real life while I was skiing. It was like, in my mind, I saw how everything was supposed to happen. I knew how coordinated I needed to be. But my body wouldn’t do what I needed it to do. It wouldn’t move fast enough.  

Molasses, basically. 

So I just kept sliding turns. Over and over again. And then, the weirdest thing was, a bunch of times I would just stop, right in the middle of a training course. Like I’m going through the course, doing my thing, and then, all of a sudden, I’d stop. I didn’t have any intention of stopping. I wasn’t planning to stop. But I’d stop. I’d slow myself down, and then just … stop. 

It was almost as though I was no longer in control of my body. 

It was so frustrating. But also like … so dark. 

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One of the odd things about my crash at Killington was that there was nothing really accounting for it. Nothing I could point to and be like … OK, just don’t do that one thing you did that other time and you’ll be fine. 

There was nothing to grasp onto. Nothing to guard against. 

Before I went down, I felt great. I had skied so well that day, and in the days of training leading up to that event. Everything seemed to be clicking for me. 

I’ve watched the video of that race a ton since my fall, and what I can tell you is that I was actually at my best, my most athletic, during the runs I put down at Killington — including most of the run when I fell. Which … that makes everything tough to figure out, right? If it had happened at a time when I was skiing super tentative, or tight, that would’ve made sense. It would’ve explained a lot. Because when your body is tentative, when you’re holding something back athletically, a lot of times that’s what will actually bring about a crash. 

But this? 

Nothing about it made sense. There was nothing to put my finger on. No real lessons to learn.  

I just kind of had to get back on the horse, to power through. 

And what I didn’t fully comprehend at the time is … my mind wasn’t completely ready for something like that.

In rehabbing after my fall, I wasn’t entirely prepared for what the mental side of things was going to morph into. I wanted to be prepared. I had preemptive chats with my psychologist to plan for all the possible challenges I could face mentally. But you can’t exactly plan for that kind of thing. And I for sure didn’t understand what was happening initially, as my training sessions kept going sideways. 

I remember being out there on the snow and thinking: Wow, this is just really, really unpleasant right now.  

And I can admit that there were some extremely low moments. Times when I started second-guessing myself, or was critical of myself because I felt like I was letting what happened mess with me so much. It was like: Come on, Mikaela, people have had way worse crashes than that, way worse injuries. Those people got through it. What is wrong with you? 

On particularly bad days, I’d question my motivation, or whether I still wanted to do this anymore. In my head, I’d be saying to myself: You know what, I kind of couldn’t care less if I ever race again. 

Come on, Mikaela, people have had way worse crashes than that, way worse injuries. Those people got through it. What is wrong with you?

- Mikaela Shiffrin

A lot of those emotions, and much of what I was feeling … it was all because I didn’t understand what was going on, or how to “fix” it.   

I felt fine physically. And I wasn’t scared or afraid of the act of skiing. But I’d be trying really hard to be precise with my training runs, and my body just wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do. Then, at some points, I’d get these random flashes in my mind. These really grim images. I’d be anticipating crashes. I’d see them in my head. See myself falling and going down. The pain would flash through my body, only this time, it was my neck too. My leg. My colon. 

We’d be training somewhere in Europe, and in a quiet moment, randomly, completely unexpected, I’d sort of imagine the mechanics of the crash I had at Killington … but just transferred to this new place. I’d see it happening on the course ahead of me, on the mountain range that I was looking down at. So I wasn’t reliving that crash, actually. I’d imagine it in the present, instead of reliving what I felt in the past. There was this expectation that it was going to happen to me in real time, in the next few minutes. And I’d be overtaken by the feeling of an impending threat to my life.

Eventually, I knew I needed to do something. To try something different. I couldn’t just keep having these scary visions and not be able to get my body to do what I wanted and then ... expect everything to sort itself out from there just because.

My therapist is the one who first brought up the idea of looking at things from the lens of PTSD.

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One of the first things my therapist said to me about PTSD is that it’s different for everyone. It’s not like a cough or a sprained ankle, where, if you talk to someone about it, they’re pretty much going to be able to know and understand what you’re feeling. 

Everyone knows what it feels like to have a bad cough. But PTSD … it’s not like that. It comes in all shapes and sizes. Everyone experiences it in their own way, and no two cases are exactly alike. 

There are some commonalities, though, I learned. Some elements that a lot of people have experienced. One that really resonated with me is that, for many people, they describe it as viewing the world like you have a film over your eyes. Like everything is a little bit darker, or there’s a layer of grease on everything. (Maybe in my case it was molasses, but I totally got that part of it.)

With me, I also think it’s possible that the crash I had at the beginning of 2024 in Cortina, and then Killington happening … that those two crashes maybe built on one another. I talked with my therapist about that, and she let me know that past trauma, or a history of traumatic events, can sometimes affect your reaction to new traumatic events. I thought of my dad’s sudden accident and passing in 2020, as well as the life-threatening crash my fiancé, Aleks, had in Wengen last year. Maybe when I crashed and got that puncture wound, maybe that was kind of a perfect-storm situation for PTSD to take hold. But who knows, really. With all this stuff, there’s just a ton of nuance, and so much that we don’t know for certain.   

The good news, my therapist said, was that this feeling … it almost certainly would not last forever. She was very clear and up-front about that. She told me that it was kind of like having a new reality for now. And that working through it can take time, but that exposure and developing an understanding of what’s happening can be massively helpful. 

She let me know that it’s an ongoing process. Something that takes work.

What has made the most difference for me, in working to overcome the visions and the images I kept seeing … it was just continuing to get back up to the start gate. Just literally the process of going up the mountain and doing the thing I know how to do, again and again. 

I just needed to keep doing it. Needed to keep reminding myself — proving to myself, really — that the vast majority of times when I am training or racing … nothing terrible happens. The vast majority of times, I don’t end up with a puncture wound through my obliques. Like, most of the time, everything really does end up OK. 

I needed to go through the process of isolating that one incident and contextualizing it along with everything else I’ve experienced in this sport — which is normally good and fun and often something that makes me feel proud and just on and on. It was like: This can all also be VERY GOOD. It almost always IS very good.  

So realizing that, along with understanding that things will ultimately get better with time and exposure, it’s been like peeling a bunch of layers of an onion for me. And that understanding has helped me manage over the past several months. This may not be the case for everyone — like I said, PTSD comes in all different varieties — but for me, when I’m able to dig in and really understand something, for whatever reason, that allows me to be less scared of it. Less afraid. 

And, thankfully, after a while, my body … it has started to remember what to do again.

After a few weeks, my therapist took me back through the PTSD diagnosis chart that we had used early on and, even just over the course of a couple weeks, I’d already made several improvements. My symptoms were much less pronounced. And I truly believe that it was because, with massive help from my team, I was able to keep putting myself into that start-gate situation, and I found a way to keep telling myself that just because something bad happened once … that didn’t mean it was going to happen again. 

And my improvements … they weren’t just something some chart showed. I could actually feel the difference. It was real. 

From the time of the World Championships in Austria in February — when I decided to pull out of the giant slalom when we realized I was not in the right frame of mind to compete in that race — to just a few weeks later in Italy, the progress I’d made couldn’t have been more evident to me. I mean, yes, I got my 100th World Cup victory in a slalom in Italy, and that was awesome. But I was probably even more proud and hopeful because … I was able to get back in the gate in giant slalom again! 

That was a huge accomplishment for me. Even though I wasn’t particularly fast in those first giant slalom races back, just being willing to take on that challenge, to get back in the race? Being willing to try … that felt like a tangible improvement. 

Then, after a few more weeks, to go to Åre, and to have a moment where … it almost sounds silly but … where I went in with the right mindset. To be at the top, at the start gate, feeling all the feelings — nervous, excited, adrenaline, and ready … ready to take it on. And to just have that experience again where I was racing like before and skiing fast?

It was like I could breathe again.

Looking at things now in retrospect, I feel like I made the most progress in working my way back when I got to a place where I didn’t care about my times or where I placed in races. 

I knew there were more important things that I needed to be concerned about. And I’m proud of myself for keeping those priorities straight. Especially in a sport where it’s all about competing and clocking the best times. 

For me, it became more about: Did you get to the start gate with a better mindset? Are you more connected to your own body? Do you feel more in control? Do you feel more like you want to take on this challenge? 

I realized that I needed to give attention to my mental health. I came to understand that winning races, or even something as significant as winning for the 100th time and accomplishing something no one else has ever done … that stuff is great, of course, but what does it really mean if my mental health is suffering and I’m struggling to do something that I previously loved? 

Getting there mentally, though, to that place, that perspective … it has been a process. It’s not like flipping a switch. 

I remember, when I won number 100 at Sestriere, there were a bunch of people who came up to me after and were like: “Wow, you sure kicked that PTSD quick.” And I’m not trying to judge that … their hearts were in the right place. They were trying to say something nice.  

But, I mean … that’s just not how it works. 

It’s totally one step at a time. And no one can tell you when you’ve gotten past something, or how long it “should” take. It’s an individual journey, something very personal, and something that may not be as linear as everyone hopes. 

In all honesty, it can be a slog.  

But, for me, one of the things that really helped me to keep putting one foot after another was just … getting back to a place of joy.

And, the more I think about it … maybe not just getting back to such a place, but also the idea of possibly reaching the best possible version of that place — pure joy — for what might be the first time in my life.

So then it becomes like, for me … What does that look like, that place of absolute joy?

And I’ve thought about that quite a bit. I think I know, actually. 

For me, I really do think it is.… 

The perfect day on the mountain. The perfect day on skis. 

I just keep envisioning that ideal. Thinking and dreaming about what that perfect day might look like. And, big surprise … it’s not a race. 

It’s a training session.

Just me and my team and the mountain. Me doing what I do. For my own enjoyment, my own sense of pride. 

It’s a training session on a beautiful day, where I get a ton of laps in on a course. And with each run … maybe I make some mistakes, there are flaws, things to work on … but each run I’m executing, I’m improving. Little by little I’m getting better. Each run I’m a little cleaner with my turns, a little faster. 

And, all the while, I can tell that, beyond a shadow of a doubt … what I imagine doing in my mind, the technical movements, what I’m seeing, that message, it’s coming through loud and clear to my entire body. 

It translates to what I’m actually doing. In lockstep. To perfection.  

That clarity, the mind-body connection, it’s present to the greatest extent possible. It’s just totally synched up. I feel it with every fiber of my being. And all I can do is smile with appreciation. Because, finally….

I feel like myself again.