I didn't know it at the time, but I grew up training.

 

I was raised in the Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie, MN, where my life revolved around family, school, sports, and sports. I never really had a favorite sport, although I dreamed of playing in the NBA (despite the naysayers, the dream is still alive!), and I wasn't particularly good at any of them. I've dropped a fly ball in right field for an inside-the-park grand slam, tried to score on the wrong basket (I missed the shot), and lost to an overweight classmate in the 60-yard dash in sixth grade... he was running backwards. But as one of my sports-science professors at Northern Michigan says,"You don't choose the sport, the sport chooses you."

​

Cross-country skiing was something my dad did that made him smell like sweat and outside, and why he loved winter so irrationally much. And all I knew was that my dad was, like, really fast. Like one of the best. He was in the first wave of the Birkebeiner. The first one! Sometimes I'd sit next to my dad in the basement while he hammered sweat into a 1990s Nordic-Track. On the TV was my Dad's motivation: a tape of the 1998 Nagano Olympics with Norwegians Thomas Alsgaard and Bjørn Dæhlie leading the way. Cross-country skiing was something my Dad did, but I secretly loved it.

​

When my family moved from Eden Prairie to St. Paul and I started high school at Minnehaha Academy, I got the chance to join a real cross-country ski team. In high school I thrived in the sports where hard work and pure effort directly translate into success: running cross-country was my first love and both running and skiing stayed with me all the way through college. After graduating from St. Olaf College in 2015 I had an opportunity to pursue a job in healthcare or a master's degree in Exercise Science at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, MI, where I would be able to finish my NCAA skiing eligibility. While at NMU I trained under the best coaches (Sten Fjeldheim and Shane McDowell) and with the fastest teammates in the country. Success breeds success, and thanks to them I was able to finish my NCAA skiing career as an All-American in Steamboat Springs, CO. 

​

My experience at NMU fueled my passion to continue my journey as a biathlete, a sport which I was first exposed to as a young-hearted 23-year old at the 2015 USBA Talent ID camp. So, with a car full of skis, rollerskis, shoes, camping and climbing gear, random sports equipment, and a bike, I made my way out to Lake Placid, New York in the spring of 2016 to take a shot at biathlon. A longtime hockey fan, I often think it's nothing short of a miracle that I'm here in Lake Placid, striving for daily self-improvement. There's still plenty of work to do... "again."

​

I could say that this is me pursuing a dream. Competing on the IBU World Cup, the Olympics, podiums, medals, etc. I suppose in a way that is true, but my journey with sport is something bigger than that. It's sharing the outdoor, active lifestyle that cross-country skiing and biathlon cultivate with people in communities wherever these sports take me. It's pursuing God's greater plan, which has taken steps and will continue to take steps that I can never imagine. It's pursuing perfection, something that we are called to do but something that we can't achieve alone -- and so I run the race set before me. In pursuit. 

​

Jake Brown

June, 2016

​

​

​

​

​

​

​