GRP: Where Are They Now? - Lauren Jacobs

Lauren with her husband and their dog, Sadie.

Written by Jake Brown

[The GRP: Where Are They Now? series highlights Green Racing Project alumni and the different paths they have taken since moving on from professional sport.]

This week we catch up with Lauren Jacobs, a native of Winthrop, Maine and alum of the Green Racing Project ski team who now works as a professor in outdoor education at the University of Maine. Lauren graduated from Bates in 2007 with a degree in English and continued ski racing after college while living in Quebec. When the GRP team announced its inception in 2009, Lauren had just completed her best season of ski racing yet and was excited to see how far she could go in the world of professional skiing. She decided to “throw her hat in the ring,” applied, and was accepted as a member of the inaugural GRP. Lauren raced for the GRP for two seasons and worked primarily with the BKL programs while at the Outdoor Center, work that has greatly influenced her path since. After the 2011 season, Lauren took a job with the Maine Winter Sports Center in youth development. While with MWSC, Lauren began a master’s degree in Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Maine. In 2016 Lauren left MWSC to pursue her studies full-time, and, after completing her degree the following year, Lauren was hired by U Maine’s School of Kinesiology, Physical Education, and Athletic Training to launch and coordinate the School’s Outdoor Leadership program. In her official position as full-time lecturer she is frequently teaching outdoors in addition to running the program and… pursuing her PhD! And that’s not to mention the 110-mile canoe epic she completed last summer! Read on to hear more from Lauren about her memories of Pepa, her PhD research, and how she’s followed her great-grandfather’s footsteps… er, paddle strokes.

What were your primary work contributions while at Craftsbury?

“You know it was funny to be there at the beginning and it was really an amazing opportunity, because we really helped shape how it all worked, what it all meant. We even named it, it didn’t have a name, so we came up with the GRP! So it was really cool to be part of those conversations and a part of that process.

I definitely coached BKL and ran the BKL camps, which was awesome and a great experience. I also helped get gardens going, the gardens behind the office. I don’t even know if they are still using that, it’s kind of wet.

And there were a lot of projects that we all worked on together, like the pizza oven was a massive project and the compost was a huge project. Hannah headed that up but we all worked on it together.”

Do you have a memory of a favorite workout? 

“I could not pick just one. Frog hops up the sledding hill are very memorable, between the lower field and the upper field, mostly for the amount of pain involved. And I loved learning to row! I had never rowed before coming to Craftsbury, so learning to row was super fun as a cross-training tool.”

Hardest workout? 

“Pepa would make us do those glycogen depletion workouts, so those are memorable for how hard they were.”

Do you have a favorite memory of training with a teammate or interaction with a coach?

“We were in Finland, in Munio, for three weeks one November and we were staying in these tiny little cabins, and it was just dark all the time so when we weren’t skiing we were in the cabin just trying to rest and eat. And Pepa made us Borst one night, like her own recipe, and that is super memorable to me because Pepa is not super into cooking. And it was just really fun to have her make us food from here childhood growing up.”

Was it good?

“Oh it was delicious! I feel like Pepa’s cooking skills, she didn’t give herself enough credit; she could definitely cook, she just didn’t like to.”

What was your favorite thing about your time in Craftsbury?

“You know, there were so many parts of it that were just amazing, but being a part of a really vibrant, close knit, super rural - which I loved – community was my favorite part. It was just really fun to make connections and get to know people really well, and be part of that community. And I still go back to Craftsbury once a year (so I actually was just there last weekend, that was sort of our annual weekend skiing at Craftsbury) and it’s so cool to see how it’s grown but also how it hasn’t really changed in a lot of ways; and I love seeing how you can build a community like that, of people who love the outdoors and I’ve tried to take that with me in what I do professionally and personally- so how can we build really vibrant outdoor communities in lots of different rural places? And I don’t think anything can really emulate exactly what Craftsbury’s done, but taking bits of pieces of it and trying to build that- that has stayed with me, and has definitely impacted what I do.

My job is to teach university undergraduates but really my job is to impact the greater state of Maine by sending all my students out into the world and have them become the next outdoor leaders. So I see it that I’m a step removed, but hopefully am impacting the growth of outdoor communities in other places.”

What do you do at Craftsbury when you go back once a year? Do you meet friends there, or go with family?

“My husband and I go and we meet friends of ours who live in Vermont. We meet in Craftsbury… and it’s just a tradition we started. So we ski, and eat way too much in the dining hall and play outside… it’s just really fun.”

Either personally or professionally, what goals are you working towards? 

“I’m working on my PhD, so that I would say is definitely a personal and a professional goal.

 So I’m working on an interdisciplinary PhD at U Maine. I have about 3 more courses to go before I do my comps and then my dissertation. So I’ve got a long ways but I’m getting there.”

What are you studying for your PhD?

“So I’m using a methodology tool that’s often used in public health. It’s called Positive Deviant Model where there is a desired outcome and that outcome is hard to come by, for whatever reason, and so what you do is you go into a community and you look at either people or places that have had that desired outcome and you try to study them to see how they have gotten there. So I’m going to use that methodology and look at schools, Maine schools specifically just because that’s where I am, but schools that get kids outside during the schoolday as part of their academic experiences. And we know there are a lot of barriers to that. So for schools that do that very well, [we are looking at] how are they overcoming those barriers and what is it about maybe the physical infrastructure of the school, the schedule, the community, the culture, the people, what is it about all those variables that gets them to get kids outside.”

Do you stay active in your sport, or have you found a new athletic or adventurous endeavor that you enjoy? 

“I don’t really race that much anymore; I volunteer coach for the local high school cross-coutnry team, so I’m more worried about them than I am myself, racing. I have started doing a lot more like big backcountry trips, so like last summer I went on this epic canoeing and hiking trip with a friend of mine that was wild and crazy. It was like 110 miles and following, actually, a trip that my great grandfather did in 1915.”

Wow, where did it go?

“Down the west branch of Penobscot, basically from Moose Head into the Penobscot Watershed, then all the way down the west branch to Millanauket. And we did a side trip where we hiked Katahdin from the shores of the west branch, which is a very long day! I would not recommend it. So, yeah, my grandfather did it with his buddies when he was like 18, this trip, in 1915. There is a cool photo of my friend and I on the river in the exact same spot that my grandfather was and I have both pictures side-by-side.”

Any current (new or old) hobbies, besides your new adventures?

“Definitely still gardening; I feel like I found my love of gardening in Craftsbury and now I do it a lot at home. And it’s so funny to think about how I was only there for 2 years but it totally impacted life in a million ways. Like I got into yoga more when I was a Craftsbury and then went on to get my yoga teaching certificate- so that’s a way that I’ve grown from my Craftsbury time but am still connected to it.”

Do you have family?

“We have a 4-legged child named Sadie, and she’s a dog.”

What advice would you have for current professional athletes worrying about future career, or to your former self on the GRP?

“My advice specifically to GRPers would be to take the time to get into projects that you really care about. I think it’s good for your skiing, like I think it’s really important to use your brain in other ways and not just be thinking and doing training. And it will also set you up to have an impact on your future steps, even if it has nothing to do with your next career, I think just the experiences you can get from working on and diving into a project can be really beneficial.”

If you were a super-hero, who would you be or what magical powers would you have?

“I don’t know what super hero this would be but it I could have a magical power it would be to make it snow whenever I needed, because I’m getting annoyed with our lack of snow!”

If you returned to Craftsbury to work but not as a GRP athlete, where would you be found?

“I think it would be in the youth programming, like Hosmer Point.”