Nat Segal. Photo by Brian Parcells

You have to be a little bit crazy to do what Nat Segal does every day.

She’s a 26-year-old Australian big mountain skier that spends most of her days throwing herself down enormous mountains and, well, hoping for the best.

Nat started her skiing career at the ripe old age of two. She comes from a family that’s very into the snow (her sister is Anna Segal, Aussie Winter Olympian that placed fourth in the ski slopestyle event this year) and pursued freestyle, mogul, downhill and freeride skiing for many years, before starting to compete in international big mountain competitions.

For those who are unfamiliar with skiing terms and want to become a bit of a ski expert in less than five minutes (well, we are launching right into winter):

Downhill skiing is what your average skier does when they go skiing; go up the hill on a lift, come back down the hill on a run. Sometimes really quickly.

Freestyle skiing is the tricks that are done off man-made features at the snow, such as rails, boxes and jumps.

Mogul skiing is the skiing over bumps that have been formed in the snow.

Freeride skiing is what is involved when you ski the whole mountain and use the natural features to do tricks and jumps. It’s a case of navigating the natural terrain that hasn’t been moved around by humans.

Nat is a freeride skier and travels constantly between the northern and southern hemisphere winters, chasing competitions on the Freeride World Qualifying Tours so she can qualify for the world tour. She’s incredibly talented, ridiculously busy and has kicked off some incredible projects all over the world just in the last few months – many of which are aimed at trying to get more girls into the sport.

I had a chat to her to find out what she’s been doing for the last six months:

Nat is now heading back to New Zealand for the winter, where she is an ambassador for ski resort Treble Cone. She’ll also spend time supporting the fabulous female ski initiative, Chicks with Stix, which is one of the more supportive and passionate movements in female sport out there at the moment.

If you’re heading along to the Sydney Snow Travel Expo this weekend, you can also hear Nat speak about her trip to Iceland at 1pm.

And in other sports news from the week…

Have you seen anything in the sporting world that you’d like to talk about?