Decorated Olympian Jessie Diggins tells crowd at Montana State: ‘Winning the Olympics is easy compared to healing your own brain’

BOZEMAN - Students, families, cross-country skiers and other community members gathered in Montana State University's Brick Breeden Fieldhouse Thursday night to hear Jessie Diggins, the most decorated U.S. cross-country skier in history, share stories about her medal-winning performances and about her own experience with an eating disorder.

"If you hear only one thing I say this entire night, I hope it's this," she told the estimated 1,600 people who gathered for her free talk. "It is OK to ask for help, and it is OK to accept it. The only reason I found success on snow and am standing on the stage in front of you right now is because I got amazing help and because I healed with my team."

Over her trailblazing career, Diggins, who is 35 and grew up in Afton, Minnesota, won four Olympic medals, four World Cup overall titles, seven World Championship medals and numerous other event championships and podiums. Among other highlights, she won an Olympic gold medal with her teammate Kikkan Randall at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the first-ever Olympic gold for the U.S. in cross-country skiing. Diggins went on to win individual silver and bronze medals at the 2022 Winter Olympics and another bronze medal at the 2026 Winter Olympics. Diggins also earned a reputation for her legendary grit and mental endurance, often pushing her body to the limit and using every last ounce of her energy in competition - a metaphorical space she calls "the pain cave."

During her talk at MSU, Diggins detailed her Olympic gold medal winning-moment in the team sprint in Pyeongchang. She said she has no memory of the final hundred meters of the race because she was so focused in the moment.

"You see, there are these golden moments in sport that athletes are always searching for, these moments of flow state when time seems to slow and you become one with the task at hand," Diggins said. "But cross-country skiing also combines that flow state with the pain cave."

Diggins described the pain cave as "a place you go to in your mind when everything in your body is screaming at you to stop. When I'm pushing deep into the pain cave in a race, my vision will tint, usually pink. My lungs are screaming at me for air, my muscles are on fire, and my legs will go numb, sometimes all the way up to a waist. The roar of the crowd will dim, like someone's turned the volume down, and all I can taste in the back of my throat is the metallic tang of copper. That is what it physically feels like to be pushing with every fiber of my being."

After racing with her teammate Kikkan Randall for six combined laps, Diggins said, it all came down to one final lunge.

"I don't even remember throwing my leg out," she said. "But what I will remember for the rest of my life is how it felt to have my teammate jump on top of me and then pull me up off the snow so we could turn around and then see the entire team along the finish line boards. People were screaming, cheering, celebrating, and wax techs and coaches who had dedicated their entire life to pursuing this team goal were on their knees crying."

But the moment almost didn't happen. When Diggins was 18, she said, she developed a life-threatening eating disorder.

"The speed with which it took over my entire life was terrifying," she said, describing herself as a type A, perfectionistic teenager.

"I demanded absolute excellence from myself in everything that I did while never cutting back on any of my commitments," she recalled. "This need to be perfect and desire to find control in a life that was quickly feeling out of my control manifested in an eating disorder."

But she found that what had started as a way to try to control stress, anxiety and perfectionism was actually starting to control her.

"It's hard to explain how powerful the hold of any psychiatric illness can really be," Diggins said. "But when an eating disorder takes over your brain, it can quickly become more powerful than family, than love, or even the will to live."

Diggins noted that although she didn't know much about eating disorders when she was 18, she has since learned that they can affect anyone of any age, gender or background, and at any point in their life.

She cited some statistics: Less than 6% of people with an eating disorder are medically underweight; eating disorders have the second highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness, second only to opioid addiction; and every 52 minutes, someone dies as a direct consequence of an eating disorder.

Diggins credits her parents and intensive treatment for saving her life.

"(My parents) brought me to the Emily Program, an eating disorder care and treatment center," Diggins said. "I entered the intensive day program where I had a doctor, a therapist, a sports dietician and group therapy. I was there five days a week, all day long, and make no mistake, this was a long and hard process, and it's the hardest I have ever worked at anything in my entire life, including winning the Olympics. Winning the Olympics is easy compared to healing your own brain."

When she first entered treatment, Diggins said, she thought her worth revolved around external factors like race results, grades, her weight and her food intake. Part of her treatment was learning that all foods fit into a healthy life.

"I also had to relearn that my worth stems from how I act, the values I hold, and the ways in which I can make this world just a little bit brighter," she said.

Diggins recounted a powerful lesson from treatment.

"In group therapy, I would look around the room at these other women who I thought were absolutely deserving of a beautiful life, whom I would never want to say mean things to, and it started to sink in," she said. "They saw me that way, too. Maybe, just maybe, I could learn to talk to myself with kindness."

Building a strong support network helped Diggins heal from her eating disorder, she said, and it also helped her in competition, including in the 30-kilometer freestyle race in the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, China - a race for which Diggins had prepared for years. What was not widely known, Diggins told the crowd, is that she got food poisoning beforehand and almost didn't make it to the start line.

The day before the event, when she was unsure if she would physically be able to race, she focused on what she could control and she relied on her support team.

Gradually, Diggins said, energy came back her. The next morning, she decided to get on the bus and head to the venue. While sitting on the bus, she opened up an email from her mom, who reminded her that she didn't have to race - but that if she wanted to do so, she should do it not for others, or for potential results, but for herself.

"Race because you love to challenge yourself," Diggins recalled her mom emailing her. "Don't set any expectations. Just get out there and see what you can do."

So, she did. Diggins endured brutally cold and windy conditions, a crash early in the race, cramping in her body, and a significant portion of time spent skiing alone, unable to work with other skiers for drafting and pacing.

Diggins said she focused on what she could control in the moment and drew on years of sports psychology training.

"I pep-talked myself through the last 45 minutes of that race, repeating over and over in my mind, 'I can. I can. I can.' … I honestly didn't know if I could make it to the finish line. And then I looked up, and one of the most powerful moments of my entire life was seeing the coaches and wax techs sprinting through the wind and snow to line the side of that trail and lift me up it with the power of their cheering alone."

Diggins won the silver medal that day. She called it the hardest race of her life.

"This was a moment that we fought for as a team, and that's why it meant so much to me," she said. "It represented everything that makes me proud. It was racing through pain, fear, doubt and uncertainty. It was being gritty and brave, and that's why it's the medal that I am most proud of."

Over the years, Diggins said, she has come to realize that the pain cave isn't just for athletes.

"We all have one," she said. "Yours may look completely different than mine and might have nothing to do with sports, but it's there. It's that place where things start to feel really difficult in whatever it is you are trying to accomplish, and that conversation begins in your head about pulling back, giving in, or maybe giving up. The pain cave occupies that critical space between you and your end goal."

As the name suggests, it's a place that hurts, Diggins said, but for those who find the courage to enter, it's where growth happens.

"People often ask me, 'What do you tell yourself in those moments? How do you cope?' The real secret here that I learned … is that I don't have to push the pain away or fear it. I can learn to embrace it, shake hands with it, own it as my own. I learned the pain cave - it isn't a distress call. It isn't something to fear. It's the signal that you've arrived at the sharp edge of getting better, of pushing your limits, testing yourself, growing more resilient."

Diggins noted that the reality of life is that almost nothing goes according to plan, and everyone will face challenges and setbacks.

The real question, she said, is how people choose to react when those challenges arise.

"We don't get to decide what life throws at us, but we do get to decide what we do next," she said. "We can decide to let people in, to allow people who love us to support us and experts to help guide us, whether that is in school, in sports, or in mental health. … When life brings you into your own pain cave, please remember, you do not have to navigate it alone."

Diggins retired from competitive skiing in 2026. Her life and career are the focus of the 2026 feature-length documentary "Threshold." She is the author of a memoir, "Brave Enough," and a board member of Protect Our Winters, a nonprofit that mobilizes passionate outdoor people to advocate for climate action.

MSU co-sponsored the talk with Bridger Ski Foundation, a Bozeman-based nonprofit that provides ski programs for approximately 1,000 youth and maintains approximately 90 kilometers of local cross-country ski trails.

Before her evening talk, Diggins met with members of MSU's Nordic ski team, and she also answered questions related to performance and nutrition from a group of undergraduate and graduate kinesiology students from MSU's College of Education, Health and Human Development. After her talk, Diggins signed autographs and snapped photos with audience members.