How Jessie Diggins Trains (Twice a Day, and Why She Calls Food Fuel)

Jessie Diggins retires at the end of the 2025-26 season, after fifteen years on the World Cup, an Olympic gold, a bronze in the 10km freestyle at Milano Cortina, and a set of Crystal Globes that make her the most decorated cross-country skier the United States has produced.

The training is not a secret. She trains twice a day, six days a week, and in high-volume periods skis four to five hours a day, mixing roller-skiing, running, lifting and cross-training, with intensity sessions, speed work, long slow distance and gym work every week.

She talks more about the other half of it, which is eating enough to do the work.

Volume has an entry fee

Two sessions a day, six days a week, four to five hours in the big weeks. That is a very large amount of work, and cross-country skiing is the most metabolically expensive endurance sport there is, because it recruits arms and legs at the same time.

Work at that volume does not fail because the sessions are too hard. It fails because the athlete cannot cover the cost of them, and the body starts shutting things down to balance the books.

The term for the input side is energy availability: the energy left over for everything your body has to do once the cost of training is taken out, expressed relative to your fat-free mass. When it stays low, the consequences are not cosmetic. Hormonal function, bone density, immunity, mood and, eventually, performance all degrade. The International Olympic Committee groups these under Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, or RED-S, and low energy availability is the thing at the root of it.

Get a baseline for the output side first:

It gives a daily energy target from your body data and activity. Treat it as a starting estimate rather than a verdict, and remember that on a two-session day the number that matters is not the average week, it is that day. Fuelling inside sessions is a separate problem again, covered by carb intake.

Why Diggins talks about this at all

She has spoken publicly, for years and in her own words, about having had bulimia as a teenager, going into treatment at The Emily Program, and building a career afterwards. She has described the fears that went with it clearly: that without the eating disorder she would get slower, that she would not make the national team, that treatment would mean she could not train enough.

What she says now is simpler. Food is fuel, and you cannot hold on at an elite level for long if you are starving yourself.

She has kept saying it while winning, which is the part that matters for anyone reading. The message is not that it worked out despite the fuelling. It is that fifteen years at the top of the most aerobically demanding sport in the world is only available to someone who eats for the work.

If any of this describes you or someone you train with, an eating disorder is a medical condition with real treatment and good outcomes, and a doctor or a registered dietitian is the right place to start, not a training plan.

What we can and cannot say about her week

Her exact annual hours and her zone distribution are not published, so this is not a place to invent a training log. The structure is on the record: two sessions a day, six days a week, weekly intensity and speed sessions alongside long easy work and strength. That shape is the standard elite Nordic model, the same one behind Klæbo's six Olympic golds, and its defining feature is that the great majority of the hours are easy.

What you can steal from it

• Fuel the work you are actually doing. Under-eating does not make you lighter and faster for long. It makes you injured, ill and slow.
• Count the day, not the week. A two-session day costs what it costs, and an average across seven days hides it.
• Volume first, intensity second. Most of the hours in an elite Nordic week are easy. That is what makes two sessions a day survivable.
• Get a number, then adjust to reality. Start with daily calories and carb intake, then correct based on how you recover, sleep and perform.
• Longevity is the goal. Fifteen seasons at the front is the outcome of being able to train year after year, not of any single season's peak.

More in this series: Johannes Klæbo, Sturla Holm Lægreid and Marianne Vos.

Sources

• Wikipedia
• Olympics.com on her retirement
• Olympics.com on the end of her Olympic career
• NPR on her final Olympic season
• ESPN on her recovery
• The Emily Program on her recovery story

Cover photo by Stein Langørgen, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.