Larkyn Austman’s skating season is not going quite as she’d planned.
Instead of competing at international Grand Prix events like Skate Canada, the Grand Prix of Helsinki and the Internationaux de France in Grenoble, France, the Canadian Olympian is lacing up her boots with her teammates at the Coquitlam Skating Club in preparation for the Skate Canada B.C. and Yukon Territory sectional championships that will be held at the Poirier Sport and Leisure Complex beginning on Thursday.
After a summer of illness and injury, learning new short and long programs then scrapping the latter in favour of her tried and true routine from the musical Phantom of the Opera, Austman is getting back into shape physically and mentally.
Last June, Austman was diagnosed with mononucleosis after struggling with fatigue for weeks as she worked on her new programs. Then, while she was attending a training camp in Colorado Springs in August, she sprained her ankle.
But, Austman said, it’s been the mental toil of being an Olympian and the weight of expectation that brings from herself and from others that’s been the most gruelling.
Last January, Austman bounced back from a disappointing skate in her short program at the Canadian National Skating Championships, held at the Doug Mitchell Thunderbird sports centre in Vancouver, to score a personal best in the free skate and finish third amongst the senior women. That put her on Canada’s national team and a chance to compete at the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, as well as the World Championships in Milan, Italy.
While Austman failed to qualify for the finals in either event, she said putting on a red Canada jacket and competing with the best of her sport at its highest level was the fulfillment of her life’s dream.
But waking from that was hard, she said.
“You come home, and now what,” Austman said. “It bring expectations that no matter what I did, I’m still an Olympian.”
Austman, 20, said as she recovered from her illness and worked through her injury, she also struggled to reconcile her status as an elite athlete with her love for the sport that got her there.
“All of a sudden I have this invisible label,” she said. “It’s so important just to get your feet under you.”
To help her achieve that, Austman kept up her work coaching some of the youngest skaters at her home club. She also begged off the travel, glamour and pressure of the international Grand Prix circuit for smaller, regional competitions so she could smooth out the kinks in her programs and get into shape for another run at the 2019 Canadian National Skating Championship, to be held in January in Saint John, N.B.
Being surrounded by young skaters fuelled by their dreams and enthusiasm has helped Austman reconnect with her own passion for skating she said.
“I forgot why I love to skate,” she said. “I have to simplify and focus on what I can do really well.”
