Kimmy Fasani is a groundbreaking figure in women’s snowboarding, known for her fearless innovation and inspiring journey. She began competing nationally at just 15 and made history as the first woman to land a double backflip in a terrain park. Since becoming a mom six years ago, Kimmy has continued to break barriers for women in sports while navigating profound challenges, including a breast cancer diagnosis. Through it all, Kimmy has shared her story with remarkable courage, empowering others along the way.
Kimmy Fasani is a groundbreaking figure in women’s snowboarding, known for her fearless innovation and inspiring journey. She began competing nationally at just 15 and made history as the first woman to land a double backflip in a terrain park. Since becoming a mom six years ago, Kimmy has continued to break barriers for women in sports while navigating profound challenges, including a breast cancer diagnosis. Through it all, Kimmy has shared her story with remarkable courage, empowering others along the way.
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This episode is presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op® Mastercard®.
Kimmy Fasani:
Snowboarding has always taught me to be present. You have to be so calculated and so aware, it's like this hyper focus. And I think that is why jumping into motherhood shifted my mental state so much, was because now my child was that hyper state and yet I needed snowboarding because that was my medicine or my meditation. And so trying to find that balance between the both was maybe the most complicated part.
Shelby Stanger:
Kimmy Fasani is one of the most influential female snowboarders of our time. She started competing nationally at age 15 and she hasn't stopped since. In 2011, she made history as the first woman to land a double backflip in a terrain park. She's won multiple industry awards like Transworld Snowboarding's Rider of the Year, and the X Games Real Women Award. I've admired Kimmy for a long time. She's a resilient person and a talented athlete. Since becoming a mom six years ago, Kimmy has continued to blaze a trail for women in sports, overcome multiple challenges, and share it all bravely with the world. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.
When I first interviewed Kimmy Fasani back in 2018, we talked about her impressive snowboarding career. Shortly after our interview, Kimmy gave birth to her first child. Becoming a parent had a huge impact on her, both physically and mentally. She had to figure out how to balance motherhood with her desire to be in the mountains. Three years later, after giving birth to her second son, Kimmy was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she made the courageous decision to go public about it. Throughout all of this, Kimmy's been documenting her journey, and in March of this year, she's coming out with a film called Butterfly in a Blizzard. The movie beautifully captures the complexity of this period in her life, and how all of these changes have made Kimmy a stronger, more intuitive woman.
Kimmy Fasani, welcome back to Wild Ideas Worth Living, in person, I'm so excited to have you. It's been since 2018 and so much of your life has changed, and also we're in person in Solana Beach, California, which is lovely.
Kimmy Fasani:
It's so wonderful to be back, thank you so much. Yes, a lot of life has happened between now and then.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you want to talk a little bit about some of that life? First of all, you gave life, so when we spoke, you were really pregnant.
Kimmy Fasani:
That's right. I was pregnant with my first son, Koa, he's six years old now, and I have a three-year-old.
Shelby Stanger:
How is it being a mom?
Kimmy Fasani:
Being a mom is the most transformational journey you can ever go on. It's something that has brought out so much depth and vulnerability, and I feel like I've learned who I am in a totally different way.
Shelby Stanger:
Even after you set up the nursery and you read the baby books, it's hard to know all the ways that becoming a parent will change you. In addition to preparing for the baby, Kimmy also had to think about how motherhood would affect her career. For years, she'd been sponsored by the snowboard company Burton, but she wasn't sure how the brand would react to her pregnancy. She sat down with CEO Donna Carpenter to discuss what would happen with her contract during this time.
When we last talked, there weren't a lot of professional female athletes at the time, especially in action sports, that were moms, and then continued to compete. And not even compete, but be sponsored athletes after that. And you had this pretty powerful but scary conversation with Donna. I'd love for you just to tell us how that went and what she said.
Kimmy Fasani:
Yeah, so when I found out that I was pregnant in 2017, I went to all of my sponsors and just tried to figure out how I could maintain my role as a professional snowboarder and also become a mom. And I was pretty confident that my career wouldn't change, that I was going to go through a lot of growth, but I didn't want to give up my success and my dedication to the sport. I felt like there was room to expand how women were able to navigate maternity and balance their career. And in contracts there was what felt like to be a lot of limitations, because pregnancy could fall under the same category as being injured, where your contract would be terminated after a handful of months if you didn't perform on your snowboard.
And so when I went to Donna and I expressed my desire to keep snowboarding, she immediately agreed that we should work through the contract and figure out verbiage that would support me and hopefully more women down the road. And I look back at six years now and I see how many more women are not only embracing their pregnancies and their maternity journey, but how many brands are now supporting women through this journey of becoming a mom and also elevating them while they're a mom. Because I think that is the biggest miss, as women, we become more multidimensional after we have a family.
If we choose to have a family, I think there's a lot of opportunity for brands that they may be missing, like you're investing in these women, invest in them in the most critical time of their life when they're going through a huge transformation, because then their confidence in being an employee or an ambassador for you is only going to grow.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, it was awesome of her to say that and just keep supporting, because not a lot of brands were doing that, and did set the bar for I think some other people down the road. And it's really cool to see. What do you think, are there yet, or do we still have a way to go?
Kimmy Fasani:
I think we still have room to grow. I think the conversation still has to be in the forefront of every woman's brain when they sign a contract. Does this contract, no matter if you are 15 years old or 30 years old or 45 years old, does this contract include the verbiage that supports me in my desire to be a woman and potentially a mother? And if you don't ask until you're 30 years old, they're immediately going to assume that you are trying to become a mom in that current contract, and that puts a lot of pressure on us as athletes. It's a scary conversation to have to say, "Well, I might want to be a mom, so I'm asking for this verbiage because I don't want to lose my career at the same time."
Shelby Stanger:
Kimmy's new contract was unique. At the time, there weren't a lot of women athletes who received support from sponsors during their pregnancy and postpartum periods. Kimmy gave birth to her first son in 2018. Even though she had the financial support from Burton, being a professional athlete and a parent weren't the easiest lifestyles to merge. Kimmy's husband, Chris Benchetler, is a professional skier and artist, and the two of them were constantly on the road chasing the best snow around the world. With a baby in the mix, figuring out their travel schedules became a logistical headache. To make it even harder, Kimmy was also grieving the loss of her mom who had passed away shortly before her first son was born.
Kimmy Fasani:
In the moment that I was in when I started my family, my mom had just died. I was going through a lot of grief and processing at the same time I was welcoming our son to the world. And so I was doing everything I could to make it possible to maintain my career, and I was just moving a little bit too quickly I felt like at that moment. I was trying to do too many things at once and trying to get back on my board as quickly as possible, not really giving much space to go through postpartum, not really giving much space to grieve the loss of my mom.
So my first son was a huge learning curve. I think maybe for every person that becomes a parent, we realize how quickly our priorities shift. And as I was trying to navigate my career, I realized I just really wanted to be with my baby, but I didn't know how to do both. I didn't know how to give to my under a year old and also give to my sponsors, and so that was putting a pretty big amount of pressure on me and a pretty big divide on this tug of war with my heart. I didn't know where I should be.
Shelby Stanger:
How did you tap into your heart and finally listen?
Kimmy Fasani:
I think collectively the universe kept redirecting me, and whether it was through injuries or just my own mental health, trying to pull me back into a space that felt right. And then also teaching me a lot about creating boundaries, things that made me feel safe, having reliable and trustworthy child care was a huge component of my success in the mountains. And so I think once I figured out reliable child care and I was able to trust in my heart that Koa was okay, and if I was not too far away and I wasn't really out of service for that long, I would feel a lot better.
Shelby Stanger:
It took a while for Kimmy and Chris to grapple with the realities of becoming new parents. A couple years in, they were starting to make it work. Kimmy said she'd finally figured out how to walk the line between her athletic career and her family responsibilities. Then life threw her another curve ball.
Just as professional snowboarder Kimmy Fasani was settling back into her career after having her first child, the COVID pandemic shut everything down. The only silver lining was that because she was forced to be at home, Kimmy was able to spend more time with her husband, Chris, and their first son, Koa. A year later, in 2021, Kimmy gave birth to her second son, Zeppelin. This second postpartum period went much smoother. But a few months after Zeppelin was born, Kimmy found a lump in her breast.
In 2021, your life shifted again. So you had two kids now at this point, Koa was-
Kimmy Fasani:
Three.
Shelby Stanger:
Three, and Zep was just born, baby. And you've got this life-changing diagnosis of cancer, which is horrific. How did you even find out to test that you had cancer?
Kimmy Fasani:
So Zeppelin was nine months old when I got diagnosed, and it was basically I discovered doing a self breast check, I felt a lump in my armpit. And I had already had this maybe odd mass in my right breast, but I just was equating that to breastfeeding. Your boobs change and form and shape, and the feeling, the texture of them. And after I had already had one, I just kept assuming, like this is just part of my breasts changing, going through postpartum. And when I felt that lump in my armpit, me and Chris both just froze and realized that maybe there was something bigger going on. And we reached out to my doctor and then she reached out to another doctor. And thankfully living in a small community, I was able to get in and see somebody within 24 hours. And I think that quickness is really what saved my life, because I was able to see somebody so quickly, I was able to get my results quicker, I was able to get into chemo quicker.
And from my moment of diagnosis to chemo, it was only three weeks, so it was very expedited. I had to stop breastfeeding within that timeframe. I had to re-plan, restructure how our life was going to work for the next year within three weeks, right at the beginning of a season. It was in November, end of November when I was diagnosed. So I was going into a new season thinking I had all this openness for getting back on my board now having a nine-month-old, and we quickly had to move down to Southern California to re-prioritize what my healthcare plan was going to look like.
Shelby Stanger:
Is that how your mom passed away?
Kimmy Fasani:
Yeah, both my parents died from cancer, so it was extremely scary. Chris's dad died from cancer. We have a lot of cancer in our family. And so that diagnosis, just those words alone, I just never... And this is such a privileged thought process, but I thought that I had navigated my life in a way that would make it so I didn't get cancer. I thought that I was eating healthy. I thought that I was active. I'm a professional athlete, I'm doing everything I can to take care of my body. I'm an ambassador for Boarding for Breast Cancer. I know what breast cancer might look like, and I still not only got it, but I waited a long time before I went into the doctor. I had that mass in my breast for seven, eight months and never thought that was my warning sign.
Shelby Stanger:
I thought it was really brave that you guys chose to share it publicly. And I'm curious, how did you do that? What did it look like?
Kimmy Fasani:
We realized really quickly that we were getting so many people coming forward, saying, "How can we help?" And I'm not one to necessarily take help. And that was a big important role of this, is I had to let people help. Chemo was very hard, and yet I knew they had such a strong protocol and they had such strong results that that is what was going to save my life. I was stage three inflammatory breast cancer. It's rare. It's aggressive. I didn't have time to waste. I had to trust the process. And at the same time, I had to learn to trust our whole community to step forward and help us. And in having that community, it made me realize, I had so many questions going through my own treatment, I'm like, "If I have questions, maybe other people do too." So sharing and being more open and talking about the hardest moments, hopefully that makes other people feel less alone and less isolated in this journey.
Shelby Stanger:
What were some of the things you did that made chemo somewhat less horrific? It's just horrific, but was there anything you did that made you have a little bit more comfort?
Kimmy Fasani:
The mountains were my best gift going through chemo, not necessarily because I was in them, but because of the time I've spent out in them. I had this very clear mental practice of thinking that every treatment I went through was getting me closer to the top of a mountain. As we navigate time and nature, it gives us so many tools that we might not even realize we're getting. And for me, it was this testament of strength, courage, resilience, overcoming, patience, and also the temporary side of life. Everything we do, all the struggles, all the pain, everything is temporary. Even life itself is temporary, we're all going to die. So what if I eliminate the fear of that and I trust the process?
And in navigating mountains, you're having to stay so focused on every footstep, every stride, navigating the terrain. There's so many decisions to make. So I started thinking about my journey through cancer and through chemo as climbing this mountain. There's dark, scary parts, but there's also places where the sun shines and it feels so good. And can I allow my body to feel both, that joy and that sorrow and that pain and that suffering, and also the growth of the experience?
Shelby Stanger:
Can I allow my body to feel both? I have no problem feeling joy, but allowing my body to feel suffering, I don't like that. How did you come terms with that one?
Kimmy Fasani:
I think through life's, this telescope, if I pulled this big view perspective back, like I zoomed back on life, there's always suffering. All of us go through hard times. It doesn't last forever. And so I guess it was trusting, like this isn't going to last forever. And knowing that, yes, it's six months of really hard chemo treatment and it's going to be a year and then a lifetime of potential worry, but it's trusting in that process of knowing I navigated those big mountains when I didn't think I could. This is going to be okay. I can navigate this, I just have to take it one day at a time. I have to shift my mindset. I have to focus on the positives.
Going into my treatments, I would picture sunshine as the drugs that were getting flooded into my body as a way of taking the cancer away instead of feeling this crazy darkness of the fear of what the side effects were. And so if I just stayed, okay, one more treatment's down, I'm a third of the way up the mountain. And then I'm almost there. Okay, I've reached the top. It's the sixth treatment. I don't know what's to come, but I know I've made it through that part. It's taking life one step at a time. It's focusing more on the present. It's enjoying the small things. It's surrounding yourself with people that you feel like lift you up. That's really how I got through it.
Shelby Stanger:
Kimmy's cancer diagnosis and treatment is just one piece of her new film, Butterfly in a Blizzard. The movie also shows the challenges of becoming a parent and how Kimmy balanced this new identity with her career as a professional snowboarder.
Okay, so when we first spoke in 2018 you were working on a movie, and it's called Butterfly in a Blizzard. Was that always the name or did that change?
Kimmy Fasani:
When I became pregnant with Koa, we decided to start documenting the journey. We had already had a filmer that traveled with us for the season and captured us in the mountains, and because I was trying to navigate my career and standing up for the verbiage changing in my contracts, we decided to just start filming and see where the story led us. We thought it was going to be a story about two professional athletes navigating our careers as parents and the things that we were going to learn along the way.
And about a year in, I was dealing with a lot of postpartum depression and my own postpartum journey, and I realized that this story was not going to be that, it was going to be a lot more deep. And learning about my childhood traumas, that really triggered me, because I just could not trust anybody to be with my child. And I have to be far away in the mountains, and that felt really hard. So we started getting deeper and more verte with this film, and we had a lot of big things happen. And the film morphed, and we just never felt like we were done. We actually thought we were done right before I got diagnosed, and we were going into editing and then I got sick. And we were like, "Well, we have to know now how the story ends."
I'm so proud of this film, because Rose Corr, our co-director and editor, along with Tyler Hamlet, our cinematographer and co-director, have worked so hard to create this film in a way that feels hopefully inspiring, empowering, and real. Showing that, yes, Chris and I have done amazing things, but we're also humans. And we've been through challenging moments. We've fought to live a very big life, and sometimes behind closed doors things happen, and we don't know, we don't know what that looks like, but for this film, I think it's just a very real deep dive into our life in a way that people have never seen us exposed before.
Shelby Stanger:
Or any athlete, to be honest. How did you finally decide to actually like, "Okay, we're done. We are going to put this movie out." Because your story, life keeps going, it's like deciding when to end a memoir. Your life doesn't end.
Kimmy Fasani:
We decided that ending the film, without giving away this film, it's me finding my place again back in the mountains, taking agency back over my body after I've been through treatment. Finding that control again, but in a more delicate, appreciative way, where I was meeting myself where I wanted to be. My biggest goal after going through becoming a mom and going through all these growth spurts, and then going through cancer, was really to tap back into the life that I loved. And that is spending time out in nature, spending time in the big mountains, being back on my snowboard, and being surrounded by the community that has uplifted us.
Life will always keep going, but those are my three pillars now. Doing what you truly love, leaning into the people that make you feel fulfilled, and surrounding yourself by the elements that make you feel most alive.
Shelby Stanger:
Kimmy's film, Butterfly in a Blizzard, is a beautiful ode to motherhood and a heart-wrenching depiction of her journey with cancer. It comes out in March, and before that, it will be at the Big Sky Film Festival and the Mammoth Film Festival. You can find more about showings at ButterflyInABlizzard.com or on Instagram at ButterflyInABlizzard. If you want to stay up to date with Kimmy's latest adventures, you can follow her on Instagram. @KimmyFasani. That's K-I-M-M-Y-F-A-S-A-N-I.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hanna Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.