In this one, Cody talks to former Olympian Rosey Fletcher. Rosey grew up in Girdwood, Alaska, and remembers having an unconditional love for snowboarding. The riding, the friendships and the competition. There was nothing she wanted to do more and she had aspirations of being the best. So, she worked three jobs to pay for her coaching lessons — the video store in Girdwood, The Bakeshop and a little restaurant in Bird Creek. As she got better at snowboarding and at competing, she started winning local competitions. Then, when she started winning those local competitions, she was invited to national competitions. When she started winning those, she was invited to competitions where she competed against the best in the world.

 

She competed for 15 years, from her late teens into adulthood. In that time, she reached the podium locally, nationally and globally. She received silver medals at the World Championships, World Cup gold medals, and a Bronze medal in the 2006 Winter Olympics. That same year — in 2006, at the Olympics — she made a decision to leave the world of competitive snowboarding. It was a quiet exit. She didn’t make a big deal out of it and she didn’t tell anyone. Instead, she savored everything about the experience — the stops at ski resorts, the hotels, the people she met and her fellow competitors. To this day, she doesn’t regret her decision to leave because she accomplished what she set out to accomplish.

 

She says that her strongest attribute is her perseverance. How whenever she’s faced with life’s obstacles, she keeps going. When she left the competitive snowboard scene, for example, she jokes that she didn’t have any life skills and that she barely knew how to boil water. So, she made a point of learning how to cook. Now, she loves everything about the process of cooking, down to the meditative practice of preparing the food. That same passion goes into her work as a health and wellness instructor. She approaches it like an athlete. She only gets an hour with her clients and she intends to use that time to its full potential.