Pursuit is a sports feature series highlighting Athletes, Coaches and Staff and significant sporting events from North Bay and the surrounding area.
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0.1 seconds.
That’s the margin with which Alex Maycock finished ahead of his opponent to capture a gold medal at the 2023 OUA Nordic Ski Championships in the 15K Classic Mass Start event this past February.
“I really just trusted in my confidence of being a veteran skier, racing in my fifth OUA championship,” says Maycock. “I sat in the lead pack of four guys and then with about a kilometer to go, two of us broke away and then I won the race in a photo finish.”
The Orangeville native says it was a perfect way to close out his competitive career at Nipissing University.
“That 15-kilometer race felt like the culmination of a lot of hard work over the years here and it was a nice way to cap off my ski career. It was 42 minutes of racing just to come down to being 0.1 seconds apart.”
Maycock had the opportunity to participate in a variety of sports at a young age including hockey and soccer but says it was individual endurance sports such as track and field and cross country running which really resonated with him.
“I felt like I had a good engine to pursue endurance sports and fortunately my elementary school had a Cross Country Ski Team, so I was able to start doing that in Grade Five,” says Maycock.
“Spending time doing other sports like cross country running and track and field helped develop really good dry land conditioning for me personally, and I would also roller ski during the summer and then by high school I was pursuing OFSAA medals with Orangeville District Secondary School,” says Maycock, who won two OFSAA Nordic ski Championships.
Turning his attention to post-secondary, Maycock says he was looking to go somewhere he could spend more time on the snow than the warmer climate of southern Ontario offered.
"In southern Ontario we'd be skiing on ice half the winter, so for me knowing that when I came to North Bay, I was going to be on snow five months a year I knew that would be a game changer,” says Maycock.
“I also knew that Nipissing was a smaller school, and you could develop close relationships with your professors and also have very supportive coaches. I was fortunate to come to Nipissing where there’s also a lot of really good scholarship incentives and North Bay Nordic's a great facility just on the other side of town from the university that we get out to a few times a week to ski. Seeing the support cross country skiing is getting in North Bay is awesome.”
As a Nipissing student Athlete, Maycock has been recognized for his impressive career, winning the 2023 Al Carfagnini Male Athlete of the Year, as well as being named the Nordic Ski Team’s MVP and was recognized as an OUA All-Star. He's also had the chance to represent the university and his country at the biggest event university sports has to offer, the FISU Universiade Winter Games. Maycock was competed at the 2019 event and in 2023 was chosen as a flag bearer for Canada.
“Ben Matchett from the University of Calgary was the trip lead, and he called me about five or six days before the opening ceremony and he asked me if I'd take that on and I was very honored and thrilled to do so,” says Maycock. “At that point I put together a little speech for our delegation to try to get the whole team fired up for at that long 10-day championship.”
Maycock says he was proud to be joined by his teammate Joe Hutton and another Lakers Varsity Athlete, North Bay native Maria Dominico who was playing for Team Canada’s womens hockey team at this past year's games which took place in Lake Placid.
“That was sweet having three Lakers there and my family came down to watch. It was the first time my parents watched me at an international event and that was really cool and carrying the flag at the opening ceremonies was pretty special. In 2019 I was only in my second year, and I used those games as an opportunity to learn what that level of competition was like and then these past games I wanted to really try and go for it. My training leading in was pretty solid I was also managing being a grad student and doing a lot of data collection so maybe less than just training perfectly it was more kind of having confidence that I've been there before and confidence that my experience with this sport would mean something at those games the second time around.”
Maycock’s methodical approach to his training and performance is something that has caught the attention of other athletes around the area. So much so, that he has started his own professional coaching business called Maycock Performance Coach.
“I have about 5 to 10 athletes I coach privately using some of the sports experience I've gained and my education in kinesiology to develop training programs for these individuals. Some of the important lifestyle factors like diet, nutrition and sleep are things I look at in a holistic way to improve sport performance and that's just something I started about three years ago while finishing up my undergrad,” says Maycock who says Lakers Nordic Head Coach Toivo Koivukoski helped him with these philosophies.
“He tells us that we get faster in our sleep and that we're slower after that training session than we were before. It's not till you take the time to really recover and absorb the training day after day and week after week that you see those gains. If you're not taking the time to recover you're just going to injure your body and it will take longer to get where you want to be.”
Maycock says being in that space helps in a sport that’s not just physically gruelling but mentally as well.
“I think it’s just realizing that there is a lot of discipline and we’re often training 500 to 600 hours a year in a very sport specific session. Whether that's running, roller skiing, strength training to build fitness to be the best we can on race day, there is a lot of discipline there,” says Maycock. “There are days where I don't want to get out to train, especially if the weather is not great or maybe you are doing it alone because your teammates aren't in town but for me it's having that discipline because sometimes in other aspects of life you may not want to go to school or work or do that assignment but there are just things in life that we have to do and so that's built some resiliency for me.”
Maycock says with his university career wrapping up, he’s looking at ways to help mentor that next generation of athletes.
“Whether that’s through the university or other potential opportunities in Ontario, but I'm definitely open to North Bay as a place to continue working as a professional. I've considered being a sports physiologist eventually so working with athletes to optimize their performance, their recovery and their training so I think high performance sport is still what I want to stay involved with.”
If you have a story for the “Pursuit” feature series, send Matt an email at [email protected]
