Mikaela Shiffrin says winning her 100th World Cup race has helped her cope with fear after a recent stressful and traumatic injury.
"I'm going to be honest with you. I didn't really see myself achieving this milestone this year either," Shiffrin said Tuesday on "Good Morning America" in a live interview. "So, it's pretty overwhelming."
Shiffrin, 29, took home her 100th World Cup victory in the slalom in Sestriere, Italy, on Feb. 23.
Her victory came less than three months after she crashed during a giant slalom race in Killington, Vermont, where she was also going for her 100th World Cup win.
Simone Biles tweets support to Mikaela Shiffrin after she exits 2nd Olympics eventShiffrin sustained a deep puncture to her abdomen during the Nov. 30, crash, which also tore her oblique muscle, according to ESPN. The injuries required Shiffrin to undergo surgery and endure a weeks-long recovery at home in Colorado.
Shiffrin told "GMA" that the injuries also left her with mental obstacles that she's working to overcome in her recovery.
"Honestly, I've been struggling with this sort of, like, this kind of PTSD -- I guess you can call it fear, but it's not this sort of like cognitive awareness of fear. It's like my body is aware of the risk," she said. "When my mind says, 'Go,' my body won't. And that on top of everything else, and trying to get the training and the repetition and just to prepare for racing, has been, like I said, overwhelming."
Shiffrin added that her 100th World Cup victory is one she hopes will not just be another record for her, but a motivation to continue racing and to have fun.
1-on-1 with Mikaela Shiffrin"The 100th victory was in a slalom and that's always come a little bit more naturally to me," she said. "And I'm hoping that having this exposure to racing in slalom ... is going to help me kind of build up the, I don't know, the fun, and the the ability to take on that risk again and hopefully enjoy it."
In honor of her 100th victory, Shiffrin is working with the Share Winter Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works to give more young people access to winter sports, to raise $100,000 for ski and snowboard programs.
"Ski racing is a niche sort of sport, and there's a lot of people out there, there's a lot of youth, that [are] really denied access to it," she said, adding, "This collaboration is to raise $100,000 for Shared Winter to help in this goal, this dream of sharing winter with more people and more youth that would be denied access otherwise."
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