“I’ve always been pretty okay.”

From modest beginnings, Margot West would rise.

A 21 year-old native of Ottawa, West is just completing her fourth year of Mechanical Engineering studies at Laurentian University – and her fourth year as a member of the L.U. Voyageurs nordic ski team.

Truth be told, West is something of an anomaly in this world.

The woman who absolutely loves to train leveraged a very gradual progression through her U Sports career into a bronze medal performance at the recent OUA Nordic Ski Championships hosted in her hometown, finishing third in the 9km skate ski race.

The anomaly part, however, lies in the fact that this multi-sport athlete was introduced to nordic ski in grade nine at Nepean High-School and at no point, prior to her arrival in Sudbury, ever competed on the Ontario Cup circuit that is home to the overwhelming majority of club racers.

“Nordic skiing is a sport where you can develop later,” noted West. “Theoretically, your fitness doesn’t peak until you’re like 30 or something.”

Fitness and Margot West tend to go hand in hand.

Last August, West was one of six women who completed the Beaton Classic as a solo event, finishing second only to perennial race winner, Sara McIlraith (also an accomplished nordic skier).

Where some elite athletes are driven completely by results, Margot West is motivated by the challenge of exploring exactly were hours and hours and hours of training will take her. In her rookie year with the Voyageurs, she placed somewhere in the twenties, moving up roughly ten slots one year later.

“Last year, I was top ten and that was a big deal,” she said. “That’s when I decided and promised myself that I was going to increase my training volume” – which is saying something given the base from which she was working.

“I ramped it up all summer and trained almost 500 hours just with ski, biking and running.”

West is nothing if not keenly aware of the precision in which she approaches her training. She understands fully than when it comes to excelling on the snow in the winter, success is built in the summer – even though the intensity need not be at an all-time high.

“In the summer, with (nordic) ski training, you just want to do volume; volume at a low heart rate is the goal. I definitely increased the amount of hours I was roller-skiing, but it all just contributed to the base. And the base is built on zone one (heart rate) hours.”

The process generally begets the outcome – and that most certainly held true for this varsity athlete whose twin sister wrapped up her varsity field hockey career at Guelph last fall, the girls elder to a younger brother who was big time into ultimate frisbee, with the entire trio immersed in hockey in their youth.

“The goal was at least top ten again (at OUA Championships) – but I knew that I was fitter,” said West. “I just didn’t know how much more fit I was.”

Competing at the Eastern Canadian Championships a few weeks before university provincials, West placed second overall and second within the post-secondary racers, a wonderful sign if a crescendo to her time at L.U. lie in possibly mounting the podium in her fourth and final year.

The staggered starts of nordic ski racing are not always ideal in helping athletes gauge their placement whereabouts, mid-race. West would rely on highly visible chip timing along the 3km loop the skiers would traverse three separate times – as well as plenty of screaming from her coaches and teammates.

Either way, the game plan was likely to be unaffected.

“My mindset is always the same when it comes to individual start racing, and especially when it comes to a race of this distance – and that’s just to go out as hard as I can,” said West. “I’m known to go our hard; that’s how I like to ski. I don’t want to cross the line and think that I didn’t give it everything I have.”

That kind of competitiveness runs somewhat in contrast to steadfast belief that West maintains that the entire package, workouts and races alike, should be fun. It’s a vision in which the welcomed addition to the Sudbury sports scene sees a future for herself in northern Ontario.

“I want to stay in Sudbury,” said West, having accepted an engineering gig in town that will allow her to check that box off the list. “There’s good work for me here and I love the Sudbury racing community.”

“I’m planning on skiing and racing next year under the Laurentian Nordic Ski Club. I don’t really know what to expect with starting a full-time job, but I do want to race some of the bigger races next year: World Junior Trials and Nationals again.”

“I just want to keep skiing and training hard and see where it takes me.”

With an OUA podium finish on her resume, it’s likely further than Margot West ever envisioned when she attended her very first practice on campus some four years ago.