Dan Cnossen competes in the 2023 FIS Para Nordic Skiing World Championships on Jan. 24, 2023 in Oestersund, Sweden.
Dan Cnossen trains every day, but he was careful not to say too much about what his workouts consist of from one day to the next.
“I don’t want to give any secrets away to the competition,” he said, laughing.
Cnossen, who was raised on a family farm just outside Topeka, Kansas, knows how to push his body to its limits. He overcame his initial fear of water and made it through “Hell Week” in February 2003 to become a Navy SEAL.
A few years later, Cnossen was still recovering after losing both of his legs just above the knee in an explosion in Afghanistan when he decided to sign up for a half marathon. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t trained at all for the race.
Now a seven-time Paralympic medalist in Nordic skiing, Cnossen has learned to listen to his body and tweak his workouts so he can continue to ski as fast as he did a decade ago.
A sit skier, Cnossen is competing this week at the Para Nordic world championships in Östersund, Sweden — four months shy of his 43rd birthday and 12 years after he raced at his first world championships.
“When I was in my 30s, I was thinking like when you train you got to be dead tired every day,” Cnossen said. “There may be phases or certain days where you’re doing that, and certainly training should be hard. But then it should not be hard every single day. That’s what I’ve learned, especially as an upper body athlete.”
In March, Cnossen competed in his third Paralympic Winter Games in Beijing and had a full schedule of races while there. He took part in six biathlon and cross-country skiing events and won a gold medal as a member of the U.S. cross-country skiing mixed relay team.
At this point in his career, the three-time Paralympian said he knows his body better than anyone else. He communicates with his coaches and gets their guidance on specific workouts, but he comes up with his daily training plan.
Cnossen said there are days when he wakes up in the morning and must adjust his workouts to how his body is feeling at the moment.
“I’m learning the rhythm to where I can be pretty confident that if I do a certain pattern on the days that I need to be ready to go to do a hard workout that I’ll be fresh,” Cnossen said. “So I’m just learning the pattern.
“You know there’s altitude, there’s travel (associated with Para Nordic skiing), but if I stick with kind of what I’ve been learning the last few months I know that most likely I’ll wake up ready to go on the days that I need to.”
