Cross-country skiing at the elite level feels closer to survivalism than sport, a staredown with existential resistance that requires a tolerance for suffering bordering on inhumane and an appetite for pushing past the outer limits of what the body and mind believe is possible. Jessie Diggins calls it the “pain cave”, the place that endurance athletes enter when they’ve willed themselves beyond their breaking point and every muscle group is gripped with an agony that would leave the rest of us mortals supine and helpless along the trail. Diggins’ hard-won mastery of this aerobic mental and physical torture chamber is what’s carried her from small-town Minnesota to the summit of a sport that was dominated by Europeans for more than a century. That is, until she came along.

It’s been four days since Diggins nailed down her second World Cup overall title to put the finishing touches on the most successful season ever for an American cross-country skier. The 32-year-old from the tiny St Paul suburb of Afton (population: 2,951), whose trademark glitter, megawatt smile and almost nuclear positivity have become her calling cards, could clinch the crown with no worse than a 20th-place finish in last Sunday’s season-ending women’s 20km mass start freestyle in the Swedish town of Falun. But rather than playing it safe, Diggins conjured a sensational knockout blow on a course tailor-made to her strengths. Clustered with a gaggle of rivals entering the closing 2.5km, Diggins broke free with one final lung-busting sprint and crossed the finish line first by ninth-tenths of a second ahead of Norway’s Heidi Weng for her sixth individual win of the season, cementing herself as the world’s most dominant cross-country skier.

“Even though there was a lot of noise and a lot of pressure and a lot going on, I was racing with a lot of joy and truly having fun,” says Diggins, filling my screen with sparkle and warmth as she grapples with her latest swipe at history. “It felt like making it to the finish line of a four-month season, not just the finish line of a 20km race.”

There may not be a fitter athlete than Diggins who, after more than a decade in cross-country skiing’s top flight, is at the height of her powers. Speaking on Zoom from her Massachusetts home, Diggins rates her strength, endurance and technique as better than ever, the result of “putting money in the bank” through countless training hours. Same for her tactical confidence; in mass start races, where all competitors start at the same time and the first skier across the finish line is the winner, she knows when she can get to the front, when she can tuck in the back, when she needs to move around in the pack. Be disarmed by the bubbly demeanor at your peril. Beneath the Minnesota nice is a unyielding competitor willing to persist through pain unimaginable to the outside observer.

No woman from outside Europe had ever won the overall crystal globe, cross-country skiing’s biggest prize, until Diggins three years ago. Now she’s done it twice. But her career-best campaign was nearly derailed before it started last summer when she experienced a relapse of an eating disorder after more than 12 years of recovery. As the start of the season drew near, she went public with her struggle on social media and spoke with remarkable candor and vulnerability on her “constant battle” with a condition that will affect nearly 10% of Americans at some point in their lives.

“There’s so much stigma and misinformation out there,” Diggins tells me. “Eating disorders are a mental illness, not a behavioral choice. It can affect anyone of any age, any race, any background. It’s not just something that targets skinny white teenage women, right? Because that is often what people think of. That’s not necessarily the case.

“The other thing people should understand is it may, and in fact it often is, not at all about food or your body. It’s about looking for a feeling of control when you feel like you have none in your life. It’s about looking for an illusion of feeling safe when you feel like things are spiraling out of your control. So for me, I had been working too hard for too long and I was feeling incredibly overwhelmed and my eating disorder served as a crutch to kind of numb these overwhelming feelings when I felt like I couldn’t deal with them.”

Diggins was 18, and had just graduated high school, when a mounting battle with bulimia nervosa led her to the doors of the Emily Program, a Minnesota-based recovery treatment center. There she assembled a support group that included a therapist, a dietician, a physician and a sports psychologist who she still works with to this day.

“I have had wonderful consistency in someone who knows my complete history, who knows me super well. We talk pretty much every single week and we’ve built up this very strong safety net in all the good times. When literally nothing is wrong in my life, we’re still going to talk about all things that are going on and figure out different systems so that if something goes wrong, we’re not scrambling. We build the safety net for when we need it,” she says.

“And then when I did need it this year, we brought on a doctor who specializes in eating disorders and a sport dietician who also specializes in outpatient eating disorder recovery. We supplemented my care team with other professionals trained specifically in the eating disorder world.”

That collective proved crucial to getting Diggins to the starting line when the season got under way in November. Her mantra from the outset was to “take it day by day, one race at a time”. She brims with gratitude for her teammates and coaches for accommodating the open-ended challenges that mental health treatment demands.

“It’s very different than let’s say you break your arm and it’s like, alright, you can expect to have a cast on for this many weeks and then this happens and that happens, and you might not exactly stick to that timeline, but you have a pretty good idea of how this is going to go and how you’re going to heal and what that’s going to look like,” she says. “With mental health, you don’t have any of that, and that’s really, really challenging. There isn’t a definitive timeline, it’s not necessarily just linear progress. You might take three steps forward, one step back and so on. So I definitely wasn’t sure how this season was going to look. And it was really important to me that I didn’t commit to the entire season.”

Diggins first made history at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, when she and Kikkan Randall won the team sprint in a heart-stopping finish over Sweden to earn the first ever US Olympic gold for cross-country skiing.

But while the Olympics bring unparalleled attention, winning the crystal globe is cross-country skiing’s most difficult and prestigious feat, rewarding season-long consistency and durability across all disciplines. The grueling World Cup circuit is made up of 34 races from November to March across sprints and distance events in both classic and freestyle techniques, all of them contests of extreme physical and psychological intensity. No woman from outside Europe had ever won the overall World Cup title before Diggins during the Covid-shortened 2020-21 campaign. Winning it again was never going to be easy under the best of circumstances.

Heartened by the support of her team, Diggins relied on her craft and fighting spirit to rack up results early and often. Amid subzero temperatures in a 20km freestyle race on the season-opening weekend in Ruka, Finland, just below the Arctic Circle, she managed to climb back through the pack and finish second after losing her right ski-pole and glove with about one mile left and suffering a bleeding gash, red-lining it through the final stretch with her right hand exposed to the elements. Think Eric Liddell on powder.

Her first win of the year came the next week in a notice-serving 10k skate in Gällivare, Sweden. She went on to win the marquee Tour de Ski, a seven-stage, nine-day series of races modeled after the Tour de France that straddles the New Year, for the second time. By the middle of February, she’d opened a yawning lead of 340 points atop the overall leaderboard, spending more than 100 days wearing the yellow overall leader’s bib. Sweden’s Linn Svahn was able to narrow the gap to 75 points entering Sunday’s season finale, but Diggins closed in style for her sixth solo win of the year, surpassing Randall’s single-season American mark. She also secured her second distance crown, finishing 224 points ahead of Germany’s Victoria Carl.

But for all the history made, records broken and rivals bested, what Diggins calls the highlight of her career happened in February when her long-sought dream of competing on home soil was realized with the Stifel Loppet Cup in Minneapolis, only 25 miles west of her hometown, drawing more than 40,000 spectators over two days to the first World Cup race to be staged in the US in 23 years. From the day after she’d won Olympic gold in South Korea, Diggins had made it her personal mission to leverage her elevated profile toward bringing the World Cup circuit back to the US, an exhaustive process that included courting sponsors behind the scenes.

“It was surreal and I had dreamed about this for my entire career,” says Diggins, whose only exposure to World Cup races growing up was on the VHS tapes her father would buy at a local ski shop months after they took place. “It was something I’d always wanted. The biggest thing that I’d wanted to do is race at home and having 20,000 people each day, people screaming your name grown men wearing glitter all over their faces because they were cheering for me. It was so special to feel so connected to the ski community and to see what this sport meant to so many other people.”

Moments like these comes few and far between in a sport that rarely captures the attention of the American public, even during the Winter Olympics. Compared to the heart-pounding velocity of alpine skiing, exhilarating beauty of figure skating and Nascar-on-ice voyeurism of short track, the grind of cross-country skiing has never been an easy sell for US audiences. But few have done more than Diggins to raise the sport’s profile. Before 2018, the United States had won only a single medal in cross-country skiing at the Olympics, back in 1976. By completing her color set in Beijing with a silver (in the 30km freestyle) and bronze (the individual sprint), Diggins tripled that haul by herself within a four-year span.

When it comes to disadvantages facing US cross-country skiers, Diggins points to the comparatively small base of athletes and lack of funding relative to the Nordic countries, where the sport is far more popular and lucrative professionally. “We have to be really scrappy,” she says. “A lot of people who are racing World Cup are working second jobs, fundraising really hard to get over there. So you’re definitely in the sport for the right reasons, because you’re not in the sport to get rich and famous. I think that’s one of the reasons it draws such incredible people, but it also becomes a very big challenge and hurdle, and you don’t want anyone to have to give up their career dreams because of funding. That’s a hard reason to have to be done in the sport. And so that’s something that we’re always working on, is how do we support athletes as they work to get to that next level and take those next steps.”

It’s no secret that many Olympians devote their lives to activities that aren’t exactly fast tracks to fame and fortune. But even by that standard, cross-country skiing is a hard bargain, right there with boxing for the least favorable pain-to-prestige ratio of any sport. Asked what keeps her motivated after more than half a lifetime in the pain cave and with so little remaining to achieve, Diggins’ infectious passion shoots to the surface.

“I love the people and the culture,” she says. “This sport attracts really remarkable people and nobody’s too cool. You can’t be too cool when you’re covered in frozen snot and you’re exhausted at the finish line. It’s just such a humbling sport.”

Opportunities to build on her legacy abound. The world championships, which are held every other winter, will take place next year in Norway. Beyond that, a fourth Olympic appearance at the 2026 Winter Games in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo is clearly there for the taking, where Diggins could round off her résumé as the first American to win an individual Olympic cross-country skiing gold.

But for now, skiing can wait. Diggins will spend her offseason rewatching Ted Lasso, her new favorite show which, she keenly observes, “really nails it from a sports psychology perspective”, as well as hiking in Patagonia with her husband of two years on their long-delayed honeymoon.

“I haven’t even thought about [next year],” Diggins says. “I think I’m still absorbing this season. I always want to improve my process. I always want to improve my technique. I always want to improve on those process-oriented goals. Honestly, I may not even set outcome-oriented goals. It just needs to stay about the process.”

• In the US, help is available at nationaleatingdisorders.org or by calling ANAD’s eating disorders hotline at 800-375-7767. In the UK, Beat can be contacted on 0808-801-0677. In Australia, the Butterfly Foundation is at 1800 33 4673. Other international helplines can be found at Eating Disorder Hope