Ballet graduation portrait. Photo credit: Bolshoi Ballet Theatre.

What Fourteen Years of Ballet Taught Me About XC Skiing

Guest post by Celine Elisabeth Ho - Skiwax.ca Athlete Support Program member

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At seventeen, I left the choice between college and a professional ballet career to a coin toss.

By then, I had spent fourteen years training in classical ballet, including time with the National Ballet of Canada, Juilliard and the Bolshoi Ballet Theatre. I knew about the discipline that continuing would require. I knew considerably less about what I might do if I stopped. The coin did not have much to contribute on either subject, but I consulted it anyway.

I enrolled at Princeton University with the hope that my four undergraduate years would be exploratory outside of ballet. I knew that after graduation I would return home to the island to help care for my parents and the older members of my family. For now, I had an unusual amount of freedom to learn, and I wanted to make good use of it. I had spent fourteen years working towards one possibility. I wanted to give a few others a fair hearing.

The Momentum of Weakness and Learner’s Ego

Although I was not a recruited athlete, I approached women’s water polo in my sophomore year hoping to become a team manager and ended up walking onto the team. In my junior year, I joined lightweight rowing. My senior year I began training for triathlons, eventually winning my first U-23 title.

A triathlete runs away from the camera on an asphalt course lined with spectators at a Supertri event.

Much of what I enjoyed about college sports was the chance to empirically test my own struggles. Slower times, lighter lifts, fewer kilometers ran. In ballet, I had learned to recognise progress qualitatively, artistically, and perhaps part of ballet’s appeal was that improvement could be evident without being easily measured.

The currency of correction was a concept I learnt while dancing in New York City, and college sports no different. As a ballerina, I used to tolerate criticism, but noticed now I was actively seeking it out. While learning three new sports my weaknesses gave me measurable momentum. Along the way, I discovered how much I enjoyed being taught and corrected.

On the run leg, approaching the finish line at a Supertri triathlon.

Decoding the Engine

My undergraduate studies in Computational and Evolutionary Biology gave me another way to approach questions of quantitative physiology and endurance. My senior thesis looked at limits in metabolism and its relationship to heat stress. I remember my departmental advisors at Princeton, Dr. Shane Campbell-Staton and Dr. Hallie Brown, suggested that there were distinctive avenues in physiology I could pursue, and that I was asking the right questions for it.

Above all, I wanted to understand the physiology of endurance and fatigue, and how it could be numerically mapped out.

I later pursued my master’s thesis research at Harvard University, studying the mechanics of cancer cells, which gave me another setting to consider endurance and persistence, this time at the cellular level.

Graduation from Princeton University, 2025.

Before graduation, I volunteered at a national talent identification camp in Asia, tasked with documenting physiological test results for developing athletes. As the camp drew to a close, I took part in the testing myself, largely out of curiosity. My estimated VOâ‚‚ max fell between 67 and 70 ml/kg/min, prompting introductions to coaches and national sport organisations, and eventually a conversation with Ski Malaysia about joining its growing national team.

The conversation with Ski Malaysia gave those test results a practical consequence I had not anticipated. Skiing was an unlikely direction for someone raised between ballet studios and the rural tropics. My older brothers and I had surfed on the islands, and they eventually took up snowboarding. As the youngest, I was interested in a winter sport that neither of them had already claimed.

Weekly surfing with family in Hawaii, 2012.

Cross-country skiing also brought together questions I had been approaching separately: how to sustain an effort, how to make a movement more efficient, and how much the numbers could explain. An estimated VOâ‚‚ max suggested something about my aerobic capacity. It could tell me considerably less about what I would do with a pair of skis.

Ballet gave me a familiar way to approach that unfamiliarity. I knew how much attention a small adjustment could require, and how long it could take before understanding a correction meant being able to perform it. College sports have made me more willing to seek that correction out. In skiing, I would need both habits.

Choice is a privilege before it is an opportunity

The chance to contribute to a sport still developing its place in Malaysia matters to me. It also makes me think about how much had already been arranged, taught or made available before I could consider such a choice. Across the sports I have taken up, there have been coaches and teammates willing to spend their time helping me learn.

I have often depended on someone else’s patience, particularly at the beginning, when I had little to offer beyond enthusiasm and a willingness to return. The reciprocity of teaching would be a pillar in how I spend my time outside of training.

Since high school, I have helped lead running clinics and served as a guide runner for blind and deaf athletes. Through my involvement with organizations of the Canadian Paralympic Committee and Special Olympics, I have guided runners and learned to stay attentive when fatigue would otherwise turn my attention inward.

Teaching first aid in Vanuatu.

During my ReachOut civic service fellowship through Princeton, I worked with communities I had ties to in Hawaii, Tahiti and Vanuatu on family health, climate change and disaster preparedness. In my free time, I would spend nights teaching adult ballet, swim and first aid lessons, and see myself having this mentorship role with Skiwax in the coming season. I used to think sport was an individual pursuit; and in reflection I see now it is a platform for mentorship

My weeks now include high mileage running and roller ski, with a mixture of aerobic and anaerobic workouts, as I prepare for the North American and Far East Cup season and work towards the 2027 World Championships. Skiwax, through the Athlete Support Program, and my other sponsors through Fischer Sports have given me confidence and experience to draw on as I learn to translate that training into performance on snow.

My first season on skis, on a groomed Nordic trail.

As I find my place in a growing sporting community in Malaysia, I am reminded that despite the individualism of the sport, I am merely the latest iteration of a collective effort.

We are excited to have Celine join our Athlete Support Program. Check out our full roster here: skiwax.ca/pages/asp-athletes

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