Skier follows 'chill' path to Olympic dream

"She's a super-chill baby," James Southam says.

Prompting friends to howl with laughter.

Like father, like daughter.

Southam, 31, is super-chill himself, say people who know him well. In a sport that demands rest and recovery just as much as it demands suffering and sweat, Southam is as accomplished at the former as he is the latter.

Ask Charlie Renfro what makes his former roommate and training partner good enough to score a second trip to the Winter Olympics and Renfro supplies a ready, if a bit unexpected, response.

"He's so good at recovery," he said. "He'd go out and train really hard and then he'd come home and put on his night clothes in the middle of the afternoon and go to sleep.

"He's the Zen master for just being able to put everything else on hold and rest."

If there was a gold medal for napping, Southam would be a contender.

If there was a gold medal for perseverance, he'd be a contender for that, too.

ONE AND DONE

Southam, who was born in Anchorage and graduated from Dimond High in 1996, grew up loving sports.

His dad Dean, an 800-meter runner, ran track for the University of Oregon, which is like playing basketball for Duke, and later he coached girls basketball at West High.

As a kid, James played football, baseball and basketball. He decided to make basketball his sport as he entered high school, but he didn't have the height, the hops or any of the other necessities to make an impact. He was cut from the team.

"It was a combination of not being tall enough and it not being quite in my wheelhouse in terms of the skill set I've been given," said Southam, who is a quarter-inch shy of 5-foot-10.

"I just always loved sports and I always knew I wanted to be an athlete, but I just knew realistically there was (no chance). Then I came into ski racing and I thought, this is pretty cool, and I'm pretty good at it."

Pretty good, but not great. Not even really good, at least not in the beginning, at least not in a state that turns out junior-level national ski champions the way Texas turns out blue-chip football players.

Southam spent his freshman year at Service High, and by the end of the season he was the team's No. 8 skier, one spot off the varsity squad. The next year he transferred to Dimond, where coaches John Clark and Lin Hinderman helped him become a solid skier who racked up some top-10 finishes at the region and state championships but never contended for Skimeister honors.

"He had no long-term goal connected with skiing," Hinderman said. "After high school, he decided he wanted to see how far he could go in skiing."

Southam spent a year racing for the University of Nevada in Reno but quit the team two weeks into his sophomore season.

"I decided that wasn't the place to be," he said. "I was going to be one of the top guys on the team, and I wasn't that fast. For my development, that wasn't the best thing."

So he came back to Anchorage, where he could live with his parents and take advantage of the city's long snowy winters and world-class trails. He spent a year training and racing before giving college racing another try, this time at Western State College in Colorado. Again, Southam was one-and-done.

"I just realized college skiing wasn't the way I wanted to go with my skiing," he said. "I came back here the next year."

RECIPE FOR SUCCESS

It was the fall of 1999, and Southam was home to stay.

APU was in the process of resurrecting its nordic ski program and joining forces with the Gold 2002 team, the now-defunct nordic program that helped develop Nina Kemppel, Alaska's first four-time Olympian.

He earned a scholarship and paid internship from APU and graduated with a business degree, all the while training on his hometown trails. After that he earned money here and there, working at Skinny Raven, serving as director of the Arctic Bicycle Club, and making it all work out by living at home.

"Fortunately my parents saw this as a job," he said of dad Dean, a teacher, and mom Mary Anne, who ran a doctor's office. "It wasn't always fun for them having their 21-year-old son living at home, but we made it work."

Southam was becoming a better skier, but he wasn't a national-class racer, not like friend and training partner Lars Flora, who made the 2002 Olympic team.

Still, he soldiered on. He skied with Gold 2002 but didn't click with the program well enough to stay for more than a couple years. For two or three seasons leading up to the 2006 Olympics, he was on his own.

"For a big part of that time, he didn't have a coach," Hinderman said.

And then, almost 10 years after high school, Southam had his breakthrough season.

In the 2004-05 season, he spent some time with Torbjorn Karlsen, a respected coach based in the Lower 48 who taught him how to train with a new level of intensity. He made a quantum leap. After having never finished higher than seventh at the national championships, Southam won back-to-back medals -- first silver, then gold -- at the 2005 national championships.

He was named to the 2005 world championship team and, buoyed by his new-found success, he continued to train mostly by himself. The good results kept coming and he earned a spot on the U.S. team that competed in the 2006 Olympic in Turin, where Southam finished 43rd in the 30-kilometer pursuit.

With hard work and perseverance, he had developed his own recipe for success.

"You learn week by week, day by day," Southam said. "A few years ago I learned how hard I can train, and since then I've just been balancing that hard work against rest. It's a bunch of subtle little things that over the course of time make a big difference.

"It was like a big pot of soup, and I kept putting in different ingredients."

ALL IN IT TOGETHER

The fall of 2007 delivered the finishing touch. Flora's brother Erik was hired to coach at APU and Southam finally found the perfect team atmosphere.

By then, he's also found the perfect mate.

While working at Arctic Bicycle Club races in the summer of 2005, Southam met Annie, the new girl in town who had pursued bike racing while in college at Indiana. Soon they were dating, and a year later they were married.

And then in 2008, a couple of years ahead of the game plan, came Hazel.

Southam's friends wondered how their Zen-master napper would cope.

"We thought, oh no, how's he going to be able to lay around all the time when he's got a wife and kid?" Renfro said.

The answer was simple: By virtue of an understanding wife, supportive parents and a baby that, so far, has been super-chill.

Hazel was born at 2 a.m. on Nov. 25, four days before Southam's first important race series of the 2008-09 pre-Olympic season. He stayed for the birth and then bolted for the Lower 48.

"My head and my heart were back home," he said. "At the same time, I was just happy. Considering I was up all night and had one night of sleep for the three days before the races, I skied pretty well. I was top 5 both days."

Since then, he's learned to strike a balance between world-class training and world-class napping, with time factored in to be a husband, dad and son. When he won his fifth career national title last month at Kincaid Park, the gang was all there for him.

"I got a little good-luck kiss from Annie before the race, and then at the finish line there's her and our little girl and my parents. That's just awesome," he said. "We're all in it together. Not many American skiers get to go through that. I just feel pretty lucky."

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Find Beth Bragg online at adn.com/contact/bbragg or call 257-4335.