Six weeks ago, Mikaela Shiffrin didn’t have the core strength to even rise out of a chair. A sneeze or a laugh brought on instant pain. That was all due to a serious crash in a giant slalom race on Nov. 30 in Killington, Vermont, where something punctured her in the side — still a mystery — and caused severe trauma to her oblique muscles.

It’s been a demanding and difficult road back for the fast-healing Shiffrin, who plans to make her World Cup return at a slalom race in Courchevel, France, next Thursday.

Her journey to the start gate included preventative surgery to ward off an infection inside a wound that penetrated through three layers of muscle to hours of arduous rehab to reactivate those crucial core muscles to feeling comfortable again weaving through a course.

That’s why Shiffrin’s focus is solely on progression, not so much her pursuit of World Cup win No. 100.

“It’s going to be a little bit nerve-wracking, to be honest,” Shiffrin said. “These past six weeks, every step it’s like, ‘Geez, should this be hurting less? Should I be better at this? Should I be more tolerant of the pain?’ There are so many questions that come up in your mind of basically whether or not you’re doing well enough.”