Nutritionist for Park City, Utah

Park City is full of people who are fitter than average and quietly frustrated about it. When your baseline is skiing sixty days a season and riding all summer, a decline that would be invisible in most places is glaring here — you notice it on the third lap, or on a climb you used to take without thinking. Being told your bloodwork is normal isn't much comfort when your own benchmark says otherwise.

Altitude sharpens all of it. At roughly 7,000 feet, hydration needs, recovery time and sleep quality all shift, and it's easy to spend years attributing the effects to age or to a bad season. Winters here are long, daylight is short at exactly the point in the year when training load is highest, and the combination is unkind to hormones and to vitamin D.

There's also a seasonal rhythm nowhere else in the state has. A winter of long days on the mountain, a mud season of nothing, then a summer of everything at once. Bodies that get worked in bursts and rested in blocks respond differently than bodies on a steady schedule, and a protocol worth having takes that into account.