May 2009

Surprise: The snowboarding gold medalist shapeshifts into one of us when the weather gets warm.

Interview by Dan Harrington

Since taking home a gold medal in the 2006 Winter Olympics, Maine native Seth Wescott has become an icon for snowboarders everywhere. So what does this winter Olympian do in the summer? Turns out, he loves the sun and the sand nearly as much as he loves the snow. Whether he’s surfing on Scarborough Beach or golfing at Sugarloaf, Wescott likes to stay healthy and keep fit, no matter the season.

Seth, you’re known for winter sports. Do you feel less famous in the summer?

I don’t know if I ever feel famous. For me, summertime [here] is pretty unique…Maine is kind of like my grounding place and my balance. June through December is the time I get to be home and enjoy the slower pace of Maine and not be flying all around and busy.

[So] I guess, yeah, I feel less famous in the summer. Having spent my whole life here–coming to Portland, stopping in Farmington, being up at Sugarloaf–it’s neat because I get to reconnect with all my friends here. That’s part of what I really enjoy.

How do you prepare for snowboarding in the summer?

It’s all physical training, really. For the Olympics, you need a deeper level of fitness, and a lot of that is cardiovascular. I do a ton of running and a ton of mountain biking and then cross train with weightlifting and all the stuff pro-athletes do to be strong.

Any advice for people who might need to lose some winter weight?

I might be an Olympic gold medalist, but [exercise is] not the first thing I want to do when I wake up in the morning. There’s a level of dedication it takes to stay healthy. It’s hard work. It’s hard work for professional athletes, and it’s hard work for the average person.

Do you have a special diet?

Not really. I pretty much have a hyper-active metabolism. Cross training is a weird thing for me. I try to find other sports I can do. I run. I still skateboard a lot. I mountain bike a lot. For quite a few years, I was into whitewater kayaking and surfing, finding other sports I can do to get strong.

I also do physical labor. Part of owning my restaurant [The Rack] up there [at Sugarloaf] is cutting and trimming trees, [the] sort of monotonous day-to-day stuff of having a business. I’ve got a piece of property, too, that I’ve been logging by hand. Physical labor’s great for keeping me strong.

Diet wise, I’m pretty conscious of stuff, but I probably burn two or three times the calories of a normal person, so I can eat and eat. For me, it’s harder to put on weight than take it off. That’s kind of a focus [for the summer]–to build muscle. My goal for this summer is to put on at least 10 pounds to get back to where I was for the Olympics in 2006.

Do you have a guilty-pleasure food?

Whether it’s ice cream or Ben and Jerry’s, I don’t feel that guilty. I love sushi. Sushi’s my favorite food in the world.

What’s a typical summer weekend for you?

For quite a few years, it was going up to the Forks to go whitewater kayaking. The last couple years, most of my kayaking partners have moved west, so I haven’t done that as much. At home at Sugarloaf, a lot of my friends are working through the week, and it means spending time with them. The last few years, it’s involved a lot of golf on the weekend.

This summer is about setting time aside for myself to be able to get in cardio workouts and get time in at the gym and relax and be around friends and stuff as well. For me, it’s always a process of finding a balance in life.

When you wake up and you know today is a training day, do you have a certain regimen that you follow?

It depends. I get into a system in the summer. Three of the days I focus on cardiovascular fitness. Three days I focus on strength training. It depends on the day of the week. Trying to do at least a couple two-hour sessions during the day, and then some kind of light activity in between as well. It’s more of a time commitment and setting blocks of time for yourself.

I set different patterns for myself. I have different loops like a 5-mile loop, and a 7-mile loop, and a 30-mile mountain-bike loop, depending on the day and how I feel energy wise. It’s a commitment to doing stuff every day and judging where your energy levels are. You can do too much and over train. You don’t want to do that. You want to push to that level but not overtax yourself.

Ever just sit around and watch TV?

Absolutely, and I love those days. I love watching sports on TV. Like at the end of Lance Armstrong’s career, I’d pretty much watch the entirety of the Tour De France–for a month. With early broadcasts, I could watch it in the morning and it would give me such motivation to go out and train that day. It’s the same thing with Tiger Woods in golf. Days for me watching Tiger Woods win the U.S. Open are the type of things that give me fire to go back to my own sport.

Most of us have winter blues. Do you have summer blues?

Not really. There were years when I’d go out to Oregon in the summer, and I was never more than a month away from snow. Now that I get a little older, I’m growing to appreciate summer a lot more.

More and more, I try to spend as much time away from snow as possible, because it makes me that much more excited when I get back to it.

What’s it like to be recognized as a gold medalist?

It’s always been kind of a weird thing. We never thought [snowboarding] was going to become an Olympic sport. To see the sport grow as much as it has and to have success on that level, it still kind of blows me away. That was never the goal in the whole process. It kind of became an opportunity along the way.

It’s been [interesting] these last three years to meet people you’ve never met who are following what you’re doing. Mainers are really proud people. It’s a moving experience to have people take pride in what I’ve done.

How often do people ask to see the medal?

Not that often. The first year or so, people thought I always had it in my pocket. The reality is, it’s not like I carry it around with me. It’s just sitting at home. It can be interesting because you’ll run into people who are blown away that you don’t have it with you. It’s kind of heavy. I don’t really want to carry it every day of my life.

The title for this article is “The Secret Summers of Seth Wescott.”  Are there secrets to your summers?

Now the biggest part of summer for me is just being peaceful, having that time to myself, spending time on the golf course in Sugarloaf, and spending time in the ocean surfing at Scarborough Beach. Those are a couple of the gems of the state. Getting to spend time at those places lets me reconnect with Maine and just feel down-to-earth.

If you’re on Scarborough Beach surfing, and you see a girl you like, do you whip out the gold medal then?

(Laughs) No, but being involved in surfing is neat–to see the community of surfers grow so much. It’s a strange place to meet people because you’re in your wet suit and people just start talking to you in the surf. Maine surfers are pretty committed. The water is cold. It’s not like growing up in Southern California.

It’s a unique thing and strikes a chord of what it was like growing up as a snowboarder in Maine. You were committed to doing that lifestyle. When I started snowboarding in Maine, people didn’t really do it. You’re part of a small community, and that’s what surfing in Maine is like to me: being part of small community.

You do a lot of interviews. Can you tell us about an experience you remember with an interviewer?

[It’s] the day of the Olympics in ‘06. I’d done the Today Show eight times, I think, in the year prior to the games. Matt Lauer had come up to Killington to spend a day with me to go skiing and stuff…We’d spent the whole day out on the hill, [with] sit-down interview that night. I got to know him pretty well, and I’d met him multiple times before that.

I get into the car, [with] a police escort. We’re speeding like crazy to get to the medal ceremony that night. I turn my phone on, and within a couple of minutes the phone rings. It‘s a New York City number. The voice on the other end is, like, ‘Wescott! That’s (bleeping) awesome! Yes!”
I was, like, ‘Who is this?’ He was, like, ‘It’s Lauer! It’s Matt! Man, that was awesome. I can’t believe you did that today. We talked about it, and you made it happen. I’m so (bleeping) proud.’ He dropped the F bomb, like, 10 times. For me that was a moment of realizing, it’s not just a story anymore.

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