Jamie Anderson
Welcome Jamie Anderson to the Just Live Team
It’s all information you can easily get from the Internet, but it’s got a different ring to it when you hear pro snowboarder and Just Live athlete Jamie Anderson list off her career achievements.
“I've won about 17 X Games medals, three Olympic medals, two gold and a silver, a handful of US Open titles. I won the TTR World Tour a couple of times back in the day. One year, I won all the opens, like New Zealand, Australia, Europe, Japan, Canada, and U.S.”
Anderson, widely considered the most dominant female competitive snowboarder in history, is not finished. “I won the Global Open Series. I won the Roxy Chicken Jams, O'Neill Evolutions, Grand Prix."
When asked… what about ESPY’s? She adds, “Oh yeah, 4 ESPYs and two Globes from the FIS World Cup Tour. Yeah, holy smokes, quite a few events.”
Since birth, the ingredients for a career in snowboarding have been present in Jamie’s life. She grew up in Lake Tahoe -- the fifth of eight homeschooled children -- surrounded by snow, outdoor activities and siblings from whom to learn and emulate.
By age 9, she had her own snowboard. By age 13, she was competing in local snowboarding competitions. And by 15, she had become the youngest X Games gold medalist in history.
In 2009 at the age of 17, riding high on a bright professional career that was just getting started, Jamie was the favorite to win the Burton U.S. Open Snowboarding Championship, held at Stratton Mountain in Vermont. During a practice run, she fell and ruptured her spleen.
“I was at the U.S. Open and I was favored to win. I was going to win the overall tour. In practice, random fall, hook toe scorpion, ruptured my spleen. We're in Stratton, which is really far away from the hospital. It was the most pain I've ever been in.”
While she avoided surgery, her recovery wasn’t without its perils. “I remember after my spleen injury, I was given so many pain killers, Percocet, Vicodin, with a couple extra prescriptions and I remember how just gnarly it felt. I couldn't drive. I couldn't really, like, function. I felt really foggy. So my goal was to get off the opiates as soon as possible and incorporate more alternatives.”
That life-threatening injury easily could’ve derailed her career, but she was fortunate enough to make a full recovery -- albeit without part of her spleen. “That was definitely like, ‘Holy sh*t,’ woke me up, made me realize for one, how precious our body is.”
She continues, “Through that injury, I remember having such an insane, sincere appreciation for my health.” Anderson began to take a hard look at how she treated her body. Despite an active and athletic upbringing, early success in her teenage years yielded some undesirable habits.
"I went through a phase of not really caring about food or eating fast food or not really nourishing myself. After I hurt my [spleen], I was like, ‘I want to really treat my body like a temple and really take care of it,’ because our bodies are amazing."
It turns out that the accident might have been one of the best things that happened to her, because it completely changed her outlook on life and health. Injuries come with the territory in a sport as physical as snowboarding, so the name of the game wasn’t how to avoid injuries; it was how to best recover from them -- and she’s had quite a few.
“Yeah, broken elbow, hurt knee, broken foot. I hurt my shoulder pretty bad last year. I broke a collarbone on this side. I've hit my face; huge black eye. I don't think I broke my nose, but it felt like it. Yeah, jaw, gosh, lots of whiplash,” she muses.
Now 30 years old and still competing, Anderson says that to recover from everyday aches and pains, it’s “key to incorporate really high quality CBD,” adding, “I've really been a fan for years with recovery, with sleep, with muscle aches and pains, peace of mind.”
“Traveling all winter and going across the ocean to different time zones, it's obviously exhausting and sleep can be a little bit of a roller coaster, but having a natural CBD-based sleeping aid that can just help you rest,” she says, “is crucial.” For that, Jamie chooses Just Live’s 750mg Deep Sleep Softgels.
It’s obviously working for her, because earlier this year she won a gold medal in the slopestyle event at the 2020 Burton US Open and at the 2020 Winter X Games Aspen, where she became the most-medaled female competitor in the history of X Games.
In addition to her career accomplishments, Jamie has been giving back to the snowboarding community through her participation in camps as well as her active hand in non-profits that promote mindful purchasing and charities assisting those in need all around the world.
Always looking to use her platform for positive contributions within her community, Jamie collaborated with her old middle school to develop a sponsorship program for gifted children who would like to snowboard but lack the funds to do so.
Outside of snowboarding, she practices yoga and works with Protect Our Winters (POW) in the fight against climate change, even going so far as to donate all of her winnings from the 2019 FIS Snowboard World Championships to POW in response to an article from Deadspin, where FIS President Gian-Franco Kasper "denied the existence of climate change and spoke disparagingly about immigrants and lauded the ease of working with dictators to organize Olympic Games."
Jamie is a perfect fit for the Just Live Community because of her achievements, compassion, mindfulness and activism, and we’re extremely proud to welcome her aboard.
