Review: Brave Enough, by Jessie Diggins

Title: Brave Enough 

Year: 2020

Author: Jessie Diggins (With Todd Smith)

Genre: Biography

Published by: University of Minnesota Press

Pyeongchang, February 21, 2018. In the nerve-racking final seconds of the women's team sprint freestyle race, Jessie Diggins dug deep. Blowing past two of the best sprinters in the world, she stretched her ski boot across the finish line and lunged straight into Olympic immortality: the first-ever cross-country skiing gold medal for the United States at the Winter Games. Twenty-six-year-old Diggins, a four-time World Championship medalist, was literally a world away from the small town of  Afton, Minnesota, Where she first strapped on skis. Yet for all her history-making achievements, she had never strayed far from the scrappy twelve-year-old who has insisted on portaging her own canoe through the wilderness, yelling happily under the unwieldy weight on her shoulders, "Look! I'm doing it!"

In Brave Enough, Jessie Diggins reveals the true story of her journey from the American Midwest into sports history. With candid charm and characteristic grit, she connects the dots from her free-spirited upbringing in the woods of Minnesota to racing in the bright spotlights of the Olympics. Going far beyond stories of races and ribbons, she describes the challenges and joys of becoming a serious athlete, learning how to push through and beyond physical and psychological limits and managing the intense pressure of competition at the highest levels. She openly shares her harrowing struggle with bulimia, recounting both the adversity and her healing to bring hope and understanding to others experiencing eating disorders.

Between thrilling accounts of moments of triumph, Diggins shows the determination it takes to accomplish dreams -the frustrations and the disappointments, the fun and the hard work, and the importance of listening to that small, fierce voice: I can do it. I am brave enough.

With the Winter Olympic Games starting today in Beijing, I want to talk to you about one of my favorite athlete's biography

The cross-country skier Jessie Diggins shares, with the help of the writer Todd Smith, the story of her life. That is the story of a successful athlete, but also is the story of a happy little girl Who loved the snow, a teenager and a young adult who used to put too much pressure on herself to the point of facing an eating disorder. Yes, Diggins talks in her book about the Olympic gold medal she won in 2018 beside Kikkan Randall,  the United States' first-ever cross-country skiing gold medal at the Winter Olympics in the women's team sprint, but also, talks about the bad times, about her struggle to accept and love herself, about her fears and her doubts.

I've been a cross-country ski and a Jessie Diggins fan for a while so for me was super exciting to be able to read this book. I read it a year ago and it was definitely an inspiring reading to me. I've read comments of people who would have liked she focused more on her professional career in the book instead of dedicating so many pages to her childhood and adolescence but honestly, I loved the book as it is. One of my favorite parts, of course, are the chapters dedicated to her Olympic medal, but also I enjoyed the chapters where she talks about her first experiences with the snow and cross-country ski beside her family when she was a kid. And definitely the part she dedicates to talking about her eating disorder, the Emily program, her mental health, etc. was inspiring to me and definitely helped me to face my own struggles in a different way. But mostly,  You can't understand properly the successful skier without knowing the whole process behind it, the goods and the bads.

I am grateful for Jessie's book. When I read it, I was going through a very difficult time, as probably most of the world population because of the pandemic, and I felt it was a great way to heal. Definitely became one of my favorite books and I highly recommend it.