Thousands of miles from home, standing in the starting gate atop an East Coast mountain, Whitefish’s Mikaela Daniels recites her mantra — “Just ski.”

For five months now, the 16-year old downhill skier has been living and training with the New York Ski Education Foundation at the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, New York, quickly making her way up the national rankings.

As she learns how to hold her own against the best skiers in the country, Daniels said she still struggles to combat the one thing she considers her toughest obstacle — her own mind.

“I am pretty good at overthinking everything and I know that I should stop worrying, but I have a very hard time doing that,” Daniels said. “I often go into races always worrying about qualifying for the next race. It’s hard to not worry about anything beyond what you are doing at the moment.”

With the help of her sports psychologist, Daniels has come to use her simple two-word phrase to help her block out everything else and just concentrate on the moment at hand.

“When I block everything else out and just ski, that’s when I am able to do my best. If I worry about doing my best, I won’t do well,” she said.

For Daniels, the road to the Olympic Training Center started at age 7 when she participated in her first Tommy Moe race on Big Mountain. Daniels quickly fell in love with the speed of the sport and was hooked.

“As I got older, skiing was everything I thought about,” she said. “I kept placing higher in a more competitive field and it just made me more determined to get even better. I wanted to strive for something bigger.”

Schooled online since the eighth grade, Daniels began her training with the Flathead Valley Ski Education Foundation, skiing with the Whitefish Mountain Race Team before making the move to Blacktail Mountain with coach John Steitz when he opened the Montana Alpine Race School (MARS) Foundation there in 2016. As the number of MARS students waned in 2017, Daniels competed as part of the Whitefish team, but continued to train as Steitz’s only student, working on her technique in the slalom, super G and giant slalom while also learning to combat her mental hurdles.

“Your mind is probably your most valuable tool when it comes to skiing. Ability is important, too, but your mind can totally destroy your race if you are not careful. That is probably the most important thing I learned from John,” Daniels said.

In December 2017, Daniels was selected to train at the U16 National Performance Series project at Copper Mountain, Colorado, where she joined a select number of athletes chosen using rankings from the U16 National Championship results.

At the conclusion of the 2018-19 ski season, Steitz felt there was little more that he could teach Daniels at Blacktail Mountain and he suggested she look into more advanced training, leading her to look into the New York Ski Education Foundation training program in Lake Placid, where Steitz had been an instructor before moving to Montana. Daniels was thrilled to learn she was one of 30 racers from around the country selected for the program.

Daniels’s work with program at Lake Placid began in October in Austria, where she had to adjust to a whole new level of training and competition. The team returned to the U.S. later that month, where Daniels found her new training regimen included working six days a week on the mountain, along with two days of strength training and races nearly every weekend against some of the top racers in the world.

Daniels spent several months getting used to the longer and stiffer International Ski Federation regulation skis, as well as the hard snow of the East Coast, but has now found her footing and recently has been finishing in or near the top 30 in most races.

“It was intimidating at first, but at the same time, it wasn’t,” she said. “I knew that being so young, there really weren’t any expectations for me to do well. For me, it was just an amazing accomplishment to qualify for those races.”

After spending some time at home between races last week, Daniels is back in New York as she looks to put together a strong finish to the season. While living and training so far from home does have its drawbacks, Daniels said she is glad she made the decision to work with the program.

“Going to NYSEF was a really hard decision because I did not want to leave here. Now, I am really glad that I decided to go for it,” she said. “There is just so much opportunity to advance in the sport by working with NYSEF. Now, I have seen the top skiers in the world and I know what it takes to get there. It motivates me to work even that much harder.”

Reporter Jeremy Weber may be reached at 758-4446 or jweber@dailyinterlake.com.