Jessie Diggins having another big season with lessons learned on handling pressure

Of course, she's proud of the medals. Jessie Diggins collected two of them at last year's Beijing Olympics, a silver and a bronze to go with the gold she won at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games.

She gained something else in China, too, a prize no one else could see. The cross-country skier from Afton said she had never felt as much pressure as she did during those Olympics. To have any hope of bringing home a medal, she had to conquer her own nerves first.

"I survived the most pressure I'll probably ever have on myself in my entire life, coming in as a defending gold medalist and defending overall World Cup champion," Diggins said. "That gave me a lot of tools and coping strategies and mental tactics for how to zoom out and see the big picture."

The expectations remain high as Diggins prepares for the FIS Nordic world ski championships, which begin this week in Planica, Slovenia. This time, she has more ways than ever to deal with them.

Diggins, 31, will make her seventh appearance at worlds. She is in the midst of one of her best seasons ever on the World Cup tour, with seven medals and a No. 2 ranking in the overall standings.

Though her race program hasn't been revealed, Diggins said she and her coaches will plan strategically to maximize her medal chances. The women's schedule includes four individual races, plus a team sprint and a relay. In addition to Diggins, two other Minnesotans — Alayna Sonnesyn of Plymouth and Zak Ketterson of Bloomington — will represent the United States at the world championships.

With four world championship medals and three Olympic podiums on her résumé, Diggins will be expected to add to that total. But she has found the less she thinks about that, the better off she will be.

"Going into the last world champs in 2021, I was putting a lot of pressure on myself," she said. "I felt a lot of pressure from outside sources as well. And I was honestly really struggling with that.

"I spend a lot of time thinking about the things that make me who I am, outside of results. Those are the things I focus on more the higher the stakes get. The closer we get to really tough races, the more I try to zoom out and focus on my family and my husband and the causes I care about."

Last summer, Diggins married longtime boyfriend Wade Poplawski. She has also dug further into her work to combat eating disorders and climate change, and to bring more people to cross-country skiing and other outdoor winter sports.

The richness of her life has flowed into her results. This season, Diggins has two gold medals on the World Cup circuit, in a 20-kilometer freestyle in Davos, Switzerland, and a 10k freestyle in Lillehammer, Norway. The win in Davos was her 14th in an individual World Cup cross-country race, the most ever by an American skier.

She also has a pair of silvers and three bronzes, earning them in two freestyle sprints, two 10k freestyles and a relay.

In her last weekend of racing before the world championships, Diggins left Toblach, Italy with three medals and a banged-up knee. During a silver-medal performance in the 10k freestyle, she skirted too close to the trail's edge and caught the tip of a ski in a snowbank. Though she said she "smashed it pretty good," Diggins added she is fully healed and pain-free.

From Wednesday through March 5, Diggins will be pursuing her first world championships medals since the 2017 edition. Though she's sweeping into the championships on a wave of success, she's also been talking to a sports psychologist about managing expectations.

She might not be able to avoid them, but the past few years have taught her how to out-ski them.

"This season has given me a lot of confidence," Diggins said. "And at the same time, that makes it easy for me to put a lot of pressure on myself. … But I promise to cross the finish line with nothing left. And that's a promise I know I can keep."