At the intersection of outdoors and pursuits, the street signs read “myth” and “heroes.” And we, those who spend our time outside, are here to patiently listen.

That intersection has given rise to classics across the myriad of ways humans interact with various natural playgrounds. Surfing has the permanent nostalgia laced in Endless Summer, rock climbing has the steady, emotive death-defying of Free Solo, and alpine skiing has the entire catalog of Warren Miller. These submissions to the genre are appropriate for their outdoor pursuits: flash-in-the-pan instances of action, bringing together visual and audio media to make something that’s brilliant. 

But also, brilliance that’s just, well, oh-so accessible.

For cross country skiing? The individualistic and energy intensive mode of moving through winter’s harsh environment on skis requires a medium suggestive of walking its lonesome valley, and the ancient timelessness of doing so. It’s perhaps less glamorous than climbing nearly 3000 vertical feet up a cliff face with no rope, but also easier to connect with; less documentary, and more rhapsody. 

With “Winter’s Children: A Celebration of Nordic Skiing,” Ryan Rodgers has accomplished just that. His work is a well-researched, extensively reported history that gets at the Norwegian ideal, sought throughout, of idraet – ski-sport, the mixing of ancient technique with spiritual renewal. Rodgers takes the epic tales of American skiing, and allows its practitioners to work together with his prose to form a journey with all the ebbs, flows, wanderings and epiphanies of a long ski in the woods. In doing so, he lifts the stories of this sport, done at the edges of frozen existence, out of the ether and into something material.

Rogers himself quickly sets the limits of what his project is from the outset; this is ostensibly the story of skiing centered around the Midwest. Not, as he says “a comprehensive look at the almost unfathomably long history of Nordic skiing,” but instead, “a celebration of an often-intertwined array of people and places.”  In other words, he is out to tell a folk-history.

In doing so, Rodgers’ focus lies primarily on the folks in that history, interweaving the individual stories of people – some well known to the world, some well known to the Nordic community, and some simply not well known at all – who found the crevices and creases of human life using a pair of free-heeled skis as a medium. This is a work about skiing, yes, but also one in which the storytelling lets tales of freedom, fraternity, courage, and humor shine through.

I highlight this strength first because it gets to the heart of who should read this book. That is, although this is a Midwestern-centric skiing history, the bounds of that history include people and places that will be of interest to skiers from all over. Yes, the narrative, especially when skiing first hits America in the late 19th century, returns again and again to figures that touched the Midwest, but that is only a consequence of accurate historiography. 

That is clear from the outset here. The first figure that Rodgers illuminates is Sondre Norheim, so-regarded as the father of modern skiing in his native Norway that both times the country has hosted the Winter Olympics (Olso in 1952, Lillehammer in 1994) the torch relay has begun with a flame from his hearth in Morgedal, Telemark. He is a national hero. And yet, he lived most of his life in Minnesota and died in North Dakota. The intercontinental connection is a common theme for most of the early history of skiing in the United States. Nordic Skiing was the great cultural product exchanged between those Scandinavians who came to America, with its port of entry the Twin Cities, farm fields of Wisconsin, and mining camps of the Iron Range.

From Norheim, Winter’s Children begins to layer in the stories of the types of names that most of us skiers have come across in the name of a memorial race, or on a trophy or trail system. Rodger’s strength, especially in the early days of American skiing, is being precise in which characters he fully fleshes out, and then jutting and jiving between their narratives to interweave the particular pressures of a period on racers, organizers, and promoters alike. Then, like seeing a technical downhill off-shooting from a flat ski trail, he is willing to make us stop, turn at full speed, and take off to complexity and joy in his storytelling.

That’s how tales that for many skiers may have been whispers and vague allusions brought up at their local ski chalet become full-on stories – rising action, climax, denouement and all – in Rodger’s voice. Anders Haugen and his brother Lars become the main characters to illuminate the heyday of American ski jumping, the dominant discipline in skiing before WWII, with Rodgers recounting the brothers’ countless national titles after the formation of the National Ski Association (the former name of U.S. Ski & Snowboard).

After detailing Anders Haugen’s foray into winning US Skiing’s first Olympic Medal at the 1924 Chamonix Games, Rodgers shifts to Lars trouncing over the Colorado Rockies between Estes Park and Steamboat Springs with skiing pioneer Erling Strom. From there we follow Strom ascending Denali on skis for the first time with Al Lindley, a Minneapolis-debonair who represented the US at the 1932 and 1936 games. The whole time we’re treated to a storytelling style which forgoes lyricism in favor of carefully plucked anecdotes that set them in a Midwestern simplicity and witticism which reaffirm the place these stories emanate from.

The best, most fully expressive character in the book hops off from Lindley, with his wife Grace Carter. Carter and Lindley met at the tryouts for the 1936 Olympics, with Grace becoming one of the first two American women to represent the US in skiing on the Olympic stage. Her story begins the earnest exploration of the exclusion and challenges that women have faced surrounding skiing since the sport’s inception in the United States. We follow her courage, effervescence, and brilliance through to the end of her life in 2002 in Duluth. 

Carter shines through best when Rodgers puts her attitude towards the skiing world that tried to exclude her in her own words, citing a column she wrote in the 1960s where “several times each year parents asked her if they should allow their daughters to race. ‘I usually tell the parent no…because that’s what he wants to hear…if a girl is really keen she’ll race anyway. When the girl asks me, I say yes.’” Carter’s attitude also seems to sum up the broad arc of women’s sporting history, which is one of the key themes of Winter’s Children. 

Skiing, at points, has been a site for progressive attitudes towards women’s participation in sport, but at others, it’s also been caught up in the same history of misogyny found elsewhere.

Earlier than one might expect in his history, Rodger’s starts to introduce characters that some of us may have shook hands or looked up to out on the trail during our own lifetimes. At that inflection point lies one of the most poignant reasons to read Rodger’s work; the inclusion of snippets from an interview with George Hovland, capturing the former Olympian and Midwest’s foremost ambassador of the sport earnestly reflecting on his life’s work shortly before he passed away, at age 94, last May. 

In the context of Winter’s Children, the reader can fully pair the vignettes Hovland might offer you if you were lucky enough to run into him out at Chester Bowl in Duluth with the full life and joy that he first found there as a youth in the 1940s. Back then, the Bowl was home to a ski jumping scene that was something akin to what one might find at a skate park today.

The strength of Winter’s Children is not only remaining in, but building on, the mythos of those types of characters and those types of places strewn across the Midwest. Rodgers makes it foundational, with the most widely-known myths in the sport – that of the Vasaloppet and Birkiebeiner – being recounted in the first pages. When Winter’s Children does get to the Midwestern revival of those myths with the founding of both the Mora Vasaloppet and American Birkiebeiner in 1973, there is an ironic coming back down-to-Earth. It’s when the history starts to feel more vivid. When, for many readers, the recollections on the page will mix with those in their own minds. Of their own experience, perhaps.

That leads to the temptation to say that things aren’t how you remember them in Rogers’ words. You might think ceded some of its accuracy and cohesiveness as it gets closer to the present. If the reader catches that thought, they should hold two idea’s in mind. 1) First and foremost, is that Rogers’ is most likely correct, this is a painstakingly well-researched project, and 2) that their own mind’s wanderings add to the folk history that Rogers’ set out with here. Rodgers’ biographical sketches of Bill Koch (who isn’t a Midwesterner, but did design the trails at Telemark, and that seems like tangential connection enough to explore his influence here) and Jessie Diggins aren’t nearly as fleshed-out and richly-woven into the story of skiing as the athletes who came a half-century before them. He stops the story of the Birkie right after its originator Tony Wise loses control of the race in 1985, without detailing how the race continues to be the “Rome” in Midwestern skiing’s empire – all the youth skiing, citizen racing, and training developments seemingly leading to it. That’s ok, those histories and those stories continue to go on. Reading their introductions here is a great primer to join in.

There are the accurate appraisals, too, on modern issues in the community – climate change, the influx of money into youth training programs, and the lack of racial and socioeconomic diversity in the sport. They all remind the reader that the individual and communal elements of nordic skiing’s history are both active agents. Rodger’s can’t fully portray the sport as it is today, sending us as readers back to the ether and implying that you yourself need to feel them as part of the living, breathing, gliding AND kicking community of nordic skiing as it continues its odyssey here and now.

That theme: the vitality of skiing’s history, is how Winter’s Children comes to an end. Our rhapsode, Ryan Rodgers, ends by tying up the loose ends of the narrative thread of Charlie Banks and Mark Helmer. 

It is a long one. We are first introduced to Charlie Banks when he wins one the first Minnesota High School State Meets in 1941, before he fights in WWII, returns, and splits for the forests that extend past the Duluth hillside. Living an ascetic, but sturdy life in those Northwoods, Banks cut a trail system called Korkki on his property where he started the oldest continuous race in the Midwest, the Judeen Memorial 10 k, in 1962. Twenty years later, Mark Helmer was living down the road and decided to ask Banks if he could use the trails. 

The meeting soon evolved into a deep friendship built around skiing, saunas, and more than a few PBRs. Banks sold Helmer 20 acres of his property in 1993 to build himself a house and a warming chalet at the trailhead of the newly public Korkki trails. Banks passed away in 1998, with Helmer saying in an interview for Winter’s Children that “he was my best friend and still is my best friend; there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about the man.” It is one final parable that points towards the magical juxtaposition at the heart of nordic skiing – a cold, individual pursuit that brings out the warmest of human connections.

A simple sport that was, and still is, the core around which a person can organize a life.

Winter’s Children: A Celebration of Nordic Skiing by Ryan Rodgers is available at local bookstores and ski shops throughout the Midwest, major book retailers, and online from the University of Minnesota Press.

How far women’s skiing has come, and how hard women have worked to bring the program to its current status was recently highlighted to me in Trail to Gold, The Journey of 53 Women Skiers, a collection of stories written by the 1972-2018 U.S. Olympic Women Cross-Country Skiers. This is a book that will be impactful in a unique way to each reader. As a relatively-young member of the nordic skiing community, I read it as a story of history, tenacity and teamwork. 

The creation and publication of this book was a collaborative effort that originated when current U.S. cross-country head coach (then women’s team coach) Matt Whitcomb suggested that the 2013-14 national team women interview previous Olympians. While the idea of a book was floated at the time, the project stalled until 2018 when Alison (Owen) Bradley, a member of the first women’s Olympic team, and Kikkan Randall, five time Olympian and 2018 gold-medalist, brought the group of women together again. Through this partnership, USNOW was founded, the U.S. Nordic Olympic Women. Tying history to the present, the group began recognizing a current standout U.S. female skier with the annual Gold Rush Award, the first of which was awarded to Rosie Brennan at the Quebec City World Cup in 2019. 

With the founding of USNOW came a renewed motivation for writing a book. 1984 Olympian, Sue (Long) Wemyss, headed a committee composed of eight former and current U.S. Olympians, and the book project began in earnest in May of 2020. With the interviews conducted in 2013-14 as a base, USNOW members contributed additional written recollections and photographs. These accounts were woven together by four of the 53 women Olympians to form chapters and provide a collective narrative. They write, “this book tells our stories as committed international competitors through five decades of history. In our own words, we reveal how the sport has developed, grown and changed. We hope you enjoy our journey.” 

While the book is perhaps not a suspenseful page-turner, it is compelling, informative, and important, and should be a staple in any cross-country skiing household. 

I consider myself to be close with three of the fifty three women Olympians; one of whom is my mother, the other my aunt, and the third a family friend and former coach. Growing up, I saw these women as role models and mentors. Not only to me, but to their communities as well. They are also all exceedingly humble and not likely to hold forth on the glory days of their Olympic careers. Thus, much of the history revealed in Trail to Gold was new to me. 

While men competed in cross-country skiing at the very first Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France in 1924, it was another 48 years before the first U.S. women raced. While women from other countries started competing in cross-country at the Olympics beginning in 1952, it wasn’t until 1972 that the U.S. sent a women’s team.

The book details the exceptional path these first five women took to be at that start line in Sapporo, Japan in 1972. Not only were these women blazing a path in the record books of nordic skiing but they were experiencing elements of world history first-hand as well. I was struck by an account from 1972 Olympian, Trina Hosmer, of the 1970 World Championships in the High Tatras, current-day Slovakia. The women flew into Prague, arriving the winter after the Russian army had driven tanks through the city and bombed some of the buildings. At this time, the country was called Czechoslovakia and was still under the rule of Russia and as Hosmer described, “very much an Iron Curtain country, which was quite intimidating for us, naive, first time international skiers.”

The rise of skating was another piece of history that stuck with me from Trail to Gold. Given the popularity and prevalence of the skate technique today, it’s difficult to imagine that it was only adopted as its own race category 35 years ago. For many of these Olympic women, they only competed in classic or they were racing as the transition came about. Sue (Long) Wemyss described how this new technique evolved over the 1984-85 season. She writes, “Most of us really didn’t know what we were doing; we were inventing skating techniques on the spot.”

Throughout the fifty years that U.S. women have raced at the Winter Olympics in nordic skiing, they have faced enormous obstacles in their quest to compete. As much as anything, Trail to Gold is a testament to the tenacity of these 53 women and the many others who weren’t named to an Olympic team. Over the course of its pages, the book lays out many of the challenges these women dealt with over the years. They include: lacking financial support, competing against doped athletes, a lack of club teams, inconsistent leadership and troubled team dynamics, to name a few. 

The period following the 1998 Nagano Olympics was a particular slump for women’s cross-country skiing in the U.S. Many women were leaving the sport at the time, feeling unsupported and discouraged by the team culture. In fact, the year before the 2006 Winter Games in Torino, the U.S. ski team cut the women’s program altogether and did not even name a women’s cross-country team. 

To anyone even remotely familiar with U.S. cross-country skiing, it will not come as a surprise that it was Kikkan Randall who helped lead women’s skiing out of this downturn. For a time, Randall was the only woman on the A-team, having to sit out most team sprints and relay events. In the book, she describes how her vision of a women’s team was inspired by the Canadian women at the time. In 2006, when the U.S. women were at a low point, Canadians Beckie Scott and Sara Renner earned a silver medal in the team sprint. Randall writes, “I was stirred by their transformation and envious of the team they had created.” 

Twelve years later, when Randall and Jessie Diggins earned U.S. women’s cross-country skiing its first medal, gold in the team sprint, it seems safe to say that the U.S. women had also undergone a transformation. Throughout the pages of Trail to Gold lies an underlying theme of the importance of teamwork. But the book also makes it clear that this culture and dynamic was hard-fought. 

From the historical first Olympic appearance in 1972, through the bumps and turns presented in the ensuing years, the teamwork that brought about that gold medal was fifty years in the making. As Diggins writes in her account of that night, “It’s taken years of every member of this team committing to the team goals, coming to training camps, and pushing each other through grueling training sessions,” and the cumulative pages of Trail to Gold support this statement. 

The two-part layout of Trail to Gold, and it’s logical progression from the early trailblazers in the sport to life after retirement makes for easy reading. While part-one tells the story of the 53 women as a whole, part-two gives an individual introduction to each of the women. Through these profiles the reader learns more about these Olympians in their own words. This section provides an excellent reference point for anyone looking to delve deeper into the lives of these 53 unique women. 

Through narratives, anecdotes and photographs, Trail to Gold effectively conveys an influential story of women’s Nordic skiing over the years. I urge everyone to read this book, to discover the story for yourself and find what it means for you. Regardless, it is an important book in the world of U.S. cross-country skiing and deserves a spot on the coffee tables and bookshelves of our ski community. 

Trail to Gold is available from Pathway book distributor at this link. Additionally, personal bulk shipments have been sent to various locations around the country with the idea that the Olympic women will do book presentations, have copies to sell and attend some events. The NENSA Women’s XC Day on January 23rd is one such event where at least four of the women Olympians will be present for book signing.  

Outside her rigorous training schedule and full time job as a nurse practitioner, Ronnander is a passionate writer who regularly shares her race and training experiences on the Vakava team blog. In October 2020, Ronnander’s passion took another step forward with the release of her book, Going the Distance: Piecing Together a Life of Adventure.

Rife with excerpts from an impressively well-kept journal, Going the Distance is a detailed memoir about Ronnander’s quest to find fulfillment in sport and explore her athletic potential. 

In her own words, “It’s a behind-the-scenes story about my struggles with the mental and physical aspects of competitive running and cross-country skiing in high school and beyond, in my tenacious, but mostly futile, attempt to be the best. Essentially, it’s the story of how I, as a citizen cross-country ski marathon racer, came to consider myself an athlete.”

To set the stage, Ronnander reflects on her childhood and the experience of being labeled as average, which lit the fire for her quest for perfection. Raised by parents who chose lifestyle, passion projects, and time together over affluence, her childhood provided her with an appreciation of simple living and self-propelled adventure that developed into remarkable fortitude. 

After moving from Minneapolis to the small town of Bemidji in northern Minnesota, Ronnander found a passion, or perhaps obsession, for endurance challenges like the grueling Chippewa Triathlon, which combines a 16-mile canoe, a 27-mile mountain bike ride, and a 7-mile run. 

After joining the high school team, cross country skiing rose to the top of Ronnander’s priority list. She committed herself to a demanding training schedule, eager to join the more experienced girls on her team at the state championships.  

As was expressed in FasterSkier’s review of Jessie Diggins’ memoir Brave Enough, Ronnander’s recount of a childhood with a wonderfully quirky father, a strong and caring mother, and a supportive brother who doubled as a training partner was perhaps too idyllic to make for an enthralling read. Training logs from adolescence through young adulthood supporting a quest for a six-minute mile and self-actualization as an athlete do not garner universal appeal. 

However, her indefatigable effort to explore just how far her commitment to training could take her is commendable, if not downright impressive, and is perhaps something many determined citizen athletes can relate to. 

On a similar note, in reflecting on the process of writing her own memoir in a recent podcast episode, retired professional runner Lauren Fleshman commented, “Unless you’re writing a memoir about childhood, childhood just turns out to not be that interesting. It’s very difficult to get enough space from your own life to know what is and isn’t vital information for the main points of your book later.”

This may hold true in Going the Distance; journal entries and race narratives provide insight into the inner workings of Ronnander’s mind at various phases of her life, but these storylines tend to be less compelling than her writing surrounding her most significant challenges, which were not connected to her athletic goals. Perseverance is admirable and I love rooting for an underdog, but I find people and emotions are more captivating than intervals and grinding through long ski races in sub-zero temps. 

Two of the people Ronnander highlights well are parents. Their decision to tighten their belts financially in order to prioritize time with family and commitment to making their dreams of seeing the mountains a reality endear them to readers. Her father was completely fascinated by tinkering with bikes; following his creativity, he designed his own recumbent commuter and a three-person side-by-side bike to help a one-car family cart the kids around, though it was never put to use. He’s a great character and seemingly an even better dad.

Another element that caught my attention in Ronnander’s memoir is her description of how her determination and perfectionism in high school unintentionally led her into the throes of an eating disorder coupled with compulsive exercise. Her journal entries and analysis here do an excellent job portraying the counterintuitive thoughts that consume someone struggling with these conditions — knowing you are damaging yourself and reducing your ability to pursue your goals, while feeling trapped and unable to give up the desperation for control that fuels the condition.

“I try to eat, but I know I probably consume fewer calories than I burn. That is scary. Sometimes that scares me; I panic in fear that my heart will stop. Then I have a snack and feel as if I have eaten too much. Then I want to exercise more [to make up for it].” 

Ronnander went from loving training and racing to feel bound to it. She experienced increasing levels of fatigue and a rapidly deteriorating ability to perform at her best. Her clothes hung from her body, her period stopped, and she could recount every piece of food she had put in her mouth at the end of each day. She described feeling lost, frightened, and immensely conflicted, knowing that she needed to eat in order to absorb her training and improve, but also could not allow herself to eat a sufficient amount. She didn’t want to harm herself, but also couldn’t let go of her harmful behaviors.

“Eating healthy makes me feel cleansed. I feel good… After I exercise, I feel whole and pure and then I fill myself with food, which makes me feel impure again. What is wrong with me? How sick am I?… I don’t want to have a problem. I don’t think I’m anorexic… Food tempts me, and I try to control this temptation. I know I have to eat in order to exercise. I know when I do not consume enough food I am hungry and I am doing myself no good to work out. I don’t want to stop exercising, which means I need to eat more — of what is my problem.”

Ronnander later learned about the condition “eating disorder not otherwise specified” (EDNOS), which involves components of multiple disorders — in her case, the restrictive behaviors of anorexia, compared with the purging of bulimia in the form of exercise. She feels this condition was totally cured from one epic bonk induced from racing her first ski marathon at the age of eighteen with a deep calorie deficit that decided the day’s outcome before she even toed the line.  

The other poignant experience Ronnander includes is that of abruptly losing her father, who had been most impactful in sparking her love of the outdoors. Out of the blue, she received a call at work from a family friend with whom her father had been cycling, his greatest passion, letting her know that he had collapsed mid-ride. They started CPR and a defibrillator was used once the ambulance arrived, but the emergency respondents carted him away to the hospital recognizing there was nothing they would be able to do. Ronnander had to bear this news to her mother and brother, who had been unreachable while en route to visit her in Minneapolis, where she was attending college. 

She describes the hollow disbelief, the rollercoaster of grief, and the resulting understanding of the uncertainty of life that still inspires her to live to the fullest and carry on his legacy. She explored more, checked items off her bucket list, and slowly wrapped her head around wanting to call him to share these stories while knowing he would not pick up the phone. 

“By this time, the years had passed. The emotions were significantly subdued. I had become accustomed to Dad not being around. But I still wanted to tell him about all my adventures. And I still felt compelled to go on these adventures — to explore new rivers and climb mountains and hike new trails. I got my adventurous nature from him. And I try to make my life as full as possible because ultimately Dad taught me life is short.”

Other captivating themes include the developing relationships — often through Type 2 fun — with Ronnander’s closest friends, Kathryn and Erik, the latter who eventually became her boyfriend and now husband. They remain in a life-long contest of who can complete the most pull ups. The presence and support of these partners makes one consider the unique bond that forms from countless hours running, canoeing, skiing, and traveling with friends.

So, if you’ve covered long distances over snow, dirt, or water through the North Woods, if you’re an intrepid citizen athlete exploring the limits of your athletic potential, or you simply enjoy reading the stories of those who have, consider adding Going the Distance to your reading list.

You can find Going the Distance on Amazon or at select retailers in the Midwest.  

Starting with a quick disclaimer, I’ve been a fan of Emma Coburn, Olympic Bronze Medalist and World Champion steeplechaser, for most of her career. Spending this winter in her hometown of Crested Butte, Colorado has, if anything, amplified my appreciation for her as both an athlete and role model for other female runners. As such, I was very excited this fall when she announced the release of her cookbook, “The Runner’s Kitchen”, and immediately pre-ordered.

I’m pleased to say the purchase did not disappoint.

For starters, the food philosophy Coburn promotes is a breath of fresh air. Contrasting the fad diets often promoted as a panacea in mainstream media — Paleo, keto, vegan, gluten-free — she promotes an “everything in moderation” approach. Her recipes emphasize creating balanced meals that help athletes get the nutrients they need without cutting out foods that simply bring joy and taste delicious.

Through my time in sport, I’ve seen the prevalence of disordered eating in endurance sport from coach, teammate, and personal perspectives. My history involves a tenuous-at-best relationship with food body image, which I’ve recognized in countless others, male and female. I love the message that butter, all-purpose flour, and bacon are part of an Olympian’s diet even during peak competition season. Yes, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains are important (and prevalent in the recipes), but Coburn eschews the idea that restriction is a necessary element of a healthy diet. It’s a message that athletes of all ages can benefit from.

“Fueling for performance doesn’t mean that you have to eat only ‘clean’ foods and cut out all of the foods you enjoy,” writes Coburn. “It means finding a balance that allows you to provide your body with the fuel it needs to perform and recover while still enjoying the foods you love.”

In the introduction, Coburn breaks down how her nutrition strategy changes during the different phases of a training cycle: off-season, mileage increase, and peak season. She guides readers to recipes that can help them similarly tailor their nutrition to meet the demands of their training.

As her volume and intensity builds from January through April, she notes, “During this phase, I increase my carbs, I am diligent about eating enough protein, and when in doubt, I try to over-fuel a bit. I would rather be eating too much and feeling strong and healthy than be restrictive and risk any injury or illness.”

While you’ll find recipes for roasted beets, cauliflower-based vegan “mac and cheese”, and kale salad, The Runner’s Kitchen also has recipes for french toast with a brown sugar crumb topping, a baked “fried chicken” sandwich with bacon, and a from-scratch chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream. I most appreciated that the ingredient lists were easy to find –most were already in my pantry– and the recipes were both creative and user friendly.

Despite being packed with flavor and inspired by a variety of cuisine, few recipes require too much chopping or time in the kitchen — a plus for those of us squeezing in skiing around work and/or family.

So far, all of the recipes we’ve tried from The Runner’s Kitchen have been remarkably tasty, despite our relatively mediocre cooking skills. As we’ve been trying to avoid frequent trips to the grocery store since last March, it also helped my family break out of a rut from cooking the same meals on repeat.

The first recipe that caught my attention was maple turmeric chicken thighs, marinated and cooked in a flavorful sauce that has just the right amount of sweetness. Placed atop some rice and veggies, this recipe is unbelievably good. It is by far our most repeated recipe — we’ve made it five times in the two months since receiving the book. Yum.

Topped with marinated and grilled pineapple (or broiled/pan-seared when your grill is buried in snow), the teriyaki turkey burgers check all the boxes: sweet, savory, spicy, and satisfying. We also love the buffalo chicken meatballs — even my husband, who previously was opposed to ground poultry as he didn’t think it could quell his voracious appetite.

Both the beet and arugula cashew pesto recipes offer a quick and refreshing alternative to our pasta routines, while also being packed with nutrient-rich ingredients.

On long ski days, I’ve taken to making the golden milk latte (with coconut milk because I don’t mix well with dairy) as a satisfying way to get in extra calories with the bonus of anti-inflammatory from the turmeric. The aforementioned chocolate cake doesn’t hurt with offsetting calorie deficits either.

My “make soon” list includes brunch options, like veggie or chicken apple sausage frittatas, the dutch baby pancake, and shakshouka. When warm weather returns and I begin to crave crunchy and refreshing salads, I have a feeling that the Asian chicken salad will become a mainstay. I’m also eyeing the bibimbap, butternut squash gnocchi, and Pad Thai egg rolls for when I’ve got a little more meal-prep time on my hands.

If I’ve sold you on Coburn’s message and piqued your interest in these flavorful recipes, you can snag an autographed copy of The Runner’s Kitchen on her website, emmacoburn.com, or order a non-autographed copy on Amazon for $19.99.

Training, even restricted to a single sport, is a complex topic with unending opportunities to dive into bewildering detail and unexplored research topics. Anyone who has spent time in sport will know there is a long history of bad ideas, pseudo-science, and anecdotal ‘proof’ cluttering up the emerging evidence for best practices. There are many competing books of varying age, quality, and length.

“I hope this general framework will give the reader the basic tools to guide their training development decisions.” — From the Introduction

In essence, this short book is an introduction to developing and improving a cross-country ski training plan.

One way Kremzner reduced the size and complexity of the book was to filter out all the references and scientific evidence behind the ideas. While this choice greatly improves readability, it leaves the reader with a decision about whether to trust the author. That said, readers without a reasonable background in biochemistry and physics need to trust the author, as research journals are written for academics. As a long time nordic nerd and someone who reads sports physiology journals in his free time, Kremzner passes my test.

The author’s references to training theory are at a high level. If you are interested in how to achieve goals with interval workouts, for example, the fundamentals are fleshed out. If you want the thermodynamic detail of why the ATP cycle is directional, you need to look elsewhere. If you don’t understand how the previous two sentences are connected, this book is a good place to start.

This book has two weaknesses: One of those weaknesses is also the book’s biggest strength.

The book is short, focusing on a high level view of endurance training’s building blocks and how to organize them. Yes, the book will leave you wanting more, but it provides a solid road map to recognizing what is next on your learning journey. In a world where it is so easy to get lost in details and forget the goal, this book is a handy reminder of how to find your way out of the swamp and onto the freeway towards the destination.

The second weakness is one that most of us who have been in the sport multiple decades share. After long experience, it is easy to think that ‘good enough for now’ will always be ‘acceptable’. Very few of us escape blind spots based on ‘we always did it that way and there was never a problem’. While Kremzner is correct in suggesting that roller skiing is a very good way to do lactate testing, this is no longer acceptable as a justification to publish a picture of an athlete roller skiing without a helmet.

The author set a bold goal with the title. Whether you should take him at his word and buy this book depends on where you are on your personal training and coaching journey.

If you are self-coached and new to training theory, this is a clear and simple introduction – this is a recommended read.

If you are self-coached and have known the basics for a decade or more, this is a quick way to check yourself for blind spots. Recommended.

If you are coaching, this will help you design plans for your athletes. The book includes simplified explanations of the ‘whys’ that may help you communicate the theory in your mind, and in turn, allow your athletes to better understand how their training applies to race day speed. That’s a win-win. Recommended.

If you are coaching athletes on the World Cup red group, and this is a small niche, you already know more than this book covers. Not recommended.

“This is in no way a substitute for a well-qualified coach.” — From the Introduction

At the end of the ski day, we can spend hours in the bar arguing tiny details and incremental gains. None of that matters if we don’t get the big things right. This book is a quick read about the big things.

(Note to readers: Kremzner has been a contributor to FasterSkier.)

There are certain precepts that permeate Brave Enough, the new memoir by Jessie Diggins: Teamwork is good. So is glitter. Self-belief is important. Training hard pays off. As for substance, I have nothing snarky to say about these morals; nordic skiing, if not the entire world, would be better off if we all felt these things so fervently, and it is engaging to trace the development of these themes in Diggins’s life.

But as for literary merit, Diggins’s book is a whole lot more interesting when challenging things happen. I still think you should buy this book and read it; it’s written at a sufficiently general level that it will appeal even to non-skiers, but if you’re reading this website you’ll likely purchase it no matter what I say. But just don’t be surprised if you remember the work’s tumultuous middle more than either its adolescent beginning or even its Olympic ending.

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Diggins’s book may be roughly divided into three parts: her childhood; her struggles with an eating disorder; and her professional ski career. The first and the third parts are about what you would expect. The middle part is searing, and by far the most compelling writing in the book.

First things first. Diggins enjoyed a childhood both bucolic and ideal. She grows up in rural Afton, Minnesota, in a house a half-mile from the nearest neighbor. She frolics through the woods unaccompanied, looking for fossils in the summer and building snow forts in the winter. She watches her father, from whom she inherited her race face, compete in Grandma’s Marathon and the Twin Cities Marathon and, of course, the Birkie, and she joins the Minnesota Youth Ski League at age three. Eventually, she joins the ski team at Stillwater High School, an inclusive community where “everyone was welcome, regardless of size, strength, or previous experience.” She gradually progresses from just wanting to make new friends to winning every race, while being welcomed by a team that embodies “the Stillwater way.”

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I am so grateful that I was introduced to skiing as a child. It gave me goals, friends, passion, a healthy lifestyle and an appreciation for the outdoors! I want every kid to have the opportunity to feel the way I do about winter sports, which is why I’m so proud of the work @sharewinterfoundation is doing. As a non-profit they are working to get more kids introduced to snow sports by supporting 1 million dollars in funding to 26 programs across the US that get over 45,000 kids on snow this year alone. That’s amazing! Please give them a follow to see the great work they’re doing to #sharewinter!

A post shared by Jessie Diggins (@jessiediggins) on Feb 27, 2020 at 7:47am PST

This all makes for a wonderful childhood, one that every child should be fortunate enough to have. It also makes for less than compelling reading. As a lived experience, Diggins’s pre-adolescence sounds amazing. As a work of literature, it is not as noteworthy as the sections that follow. “Happy families are all alike,” as Tolstoy famously put it; a memoirist recounting an effectively perfect upbringing faces an uphill battle. Diggins succeeds as well as anyone in making such events memorable, which is to say, imperfectly.

But then – *record scratch* – “I had everything in the world going for me,” Diggins writes of her senior year of high school, “and nothing to complain about. Which is why when I started to struggle with an eating disorder, I felt such shame. Why did I have this problem? I didn’t have any reason to have an eating disorder (so I thought).”

This may not make you remember much about Diggins’s childhood after you put down the book, but it absolutely begins to recuperate this portion of the memoir as a work of literature: Diggins felt so guilty about her eating disorder precisely because she believed that she had had such a perfect life to that point.

In unflinching detail, Diggins describes bulimia, stress, and the compounding pressures of being a high-achieving student as well as an accomplished violinist as well as one of the best junior skiers in the country. There is disordered eating, forced vomiting, lies to her family and friends, and, eventually, throwing up so hard and so often that she bursts a blood vessel in her eye. It is unsettling to read, and Diggins pulls few punches. This section must have taken courage to write.

At one point, Diggins writes, immediately after making herself throw up once more, “Suddenly, I felt nothing. I started to understand why people are alcoholics or addicted to drugs. Because the ability to suddenly feel nothing was amazing.”

This is compelling, if not searing. Whatever your views on Diggins, as a person or an athlete, it is undeniable that she feels things quite strongly. This is someone whose nickname within the U.S. Ski Team is “Sparkle Chipmunk,” who was once described by The Guardian as the team’s “ebullient talisman.” To hear her say that she enjoyed feeling nothing, and “quickly began to search for that numbing feeling again and again,” is chilling.

This portion of the book is superb. Diggins is not afraid to engage with uncomfortable truths, and to use her own experience as a lens through which to examine what it is like to live with, be consumed by, and then work to overcome an eating disorder. Diggins repeatedly emphasizes, to her credit, that eating disorders “don’t discriminate,” that “Skinny teenage girls represent only 10 percent of eating disorder victims.” But she also must recognize that an Olympic gold medal gives her outsize influence when she talks about disordered eating, and she ably uses the platform she has earned to stick up for everyone dealing with these issues who is not a “skinny white teenage girl.”

It would be far too pat to say that, once she learns skills to cope with her eating disorder, Diggins puts this out of the way and moves on to a perfect life as a perfect skier, not the least because she explicitly discusses later in the book the times she had to overcome the temptation to engage in disordered eating once more.

Rather, in the memoir’s third part, Diggins takes the reader on a tour through roughly seven years of her professional ski career, 2011 through 2018, culminating in a certain team sprint Olympic gold medal. If you’ve read this website before, you probably already know the general highlights; they include dominance on the domestic SuperTour, a quick promotion to the World Cup, anchoring nearly every U.S. women’s relay over the past decade, and the general rise of the American women’s team as a global force in nordic skiing. But Diggins makes sure to weave in some lowlights, including disappointing races, injuries, and overtraining that ultimately required two weeks’ complete rest in fall 2014, when she would otherwise have been building intensity to sharpen race fitness for the 2014/2015 World Cup season.

After seven years’ worth of training and racing highlights, the reader is left with a nuanced understanding of not just the results, but also of the process that helped Diggins get there. Process vs. results may be somewhat of a shorthand or buzzword when it comes to thinking about training for endurance sports; it also works.

And it works well for a piece of literature, too. The climactic scenes in PyeongChang have more resonance because of everything that preceded them, not only Diggins’s decade of unstinting striving but also Kikkan Randall’s decade of work before that. Diggins writes, poignantly, of seeing nearly the entire American team at the venue that night; there is a now-famous picture, which you have likely seen, that shows the depth of the Americans’ support on that cold Wednesday evening at the Alpensia cross-country center.

But much as Diggins writes, convincingly, that she couldn’t have done it without the team behind her, the entirety of part three underscores that she also couldn’t have done it without training her ass off for the past decade, either. We all know that nordic skiers train hard; you may read Diggins’s description of a typical training week (replete with heart rate zone data if you really want to nerd out!), then consider living like that for 11 months of the year, and see for yourself. You’ll probably get pretty tired before the year is up.

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As noted, there are some good things that Diggins feels strongly about, such as hard work and teammates and dancing and Taylor Swift. But as a work of literature, the bad things frankly tend to make for more interesting reading. There is a set piece about traveling through middle-of-nowhere Russia in the dead of night, for example, that is finely rendered and darkly hilarious. There are descriptions about Diggins’s experiences in Sochi, both in 2013 and again for the Olympics, that are interesting and insightful. There is an unflinching portrayal of the aftermath of a rollerski crash that is painfully vivid, and a description of training with food poisoning that made me cringe, then laugh out loud. These all make for great reading; Diggins is capable of being a fine storyteller.

At the same time, it is telling to survey some of the things that are bad, in Diggins’s worldview. Doping is bad, but gets only a couple of sentences in a 276-page book. Climate change is also bad, but gets only a few paragraphs, scattered throughout the work. “President number forty-five” – she can’t even say his name – is very bad, but only in passing, and mostly serves to prompt a memorable (and hilarious) story about her experience breaking down in tears upon meeting the Obamas during her post-Sochi White House visit. (This latter episode also provides the memorable phrase, in reference to Diggins’s official White House visit uniform, “Spanx cummerbund.” You’re welcome.)

But the media? Diggins is decidedly not a fan of the media – and, if you’ll forgive the navel-gazing, this seems like a relevant topic for this website to explore in some depth. Diggins variously has harsh words for print media, for television media, and for any of “announcers, writers, or sports commentators [who] try to put words in our mouths and guess what we were thinking at the time we were in a competition.” She calls out a media rep for her own team who betrays an imperfect understanding of race tactics, writing, “It didn’t seem worth it to explain tactics and drafting or even spend energy explaining that how I skied [in the back of the lead pack] was on purpose.” Elsewhere, she writes, “Since I’m not a reporter, I have no idea what it’s like for them, reporting on race after race, trying to make each one stand out somehow with a character story.”

Ultimately, midway through the PyeongChang Olympics, Diggins gamely faces the media following her 3.3-second bronze-medal near-miss in the 10-kilometer freestyle race. Soon after, during the podium ceremony, she retreats to a secluded hallway underneath the stadium, cools down on a spin bike, and, alone in the dark, unleashes “a scream filled with pain and disappointment” into her jacket. “It was a scream that said, ‘I wish that what I had was good enough,’” Diggins writes.

Moments earlier, Diggins had stood in the mixed zone and told reporters for this website (among many other members of the media scrum), “I could not have gone any harder. … That’s a really good feeling to know you gave it everything that you had and more than you thought you could give. I’m really proud of today.”

Now, she writes, “I knew that I had truly given everything that I had. And yet, it still wasn’t good enough to earn a medal. That stung. So, far away from the TV cameras and flashing lights, I let all of my emotions out right then and there. Spinning in the dark, I screamed my frustration and loss into a balled-up jacket.” She adds, “Honestly, the pain of going through the media zone after the race was what did it. Because I had felt good about myself until I went through that zone.”

Obviously Diggins is allowed to tell the media anything she wants. But the episode nonetheless raises interesting questions about the nature of journalism, and the obligations of a professional athlete to speak with the media even after disappointing performances. Or, if she does speak with them (and let me be clear, I have no reason to believe that Diggins has ever blown off the media at any point in her ski career, Bolshunov-after-the-30k-pursuit-style), what, if anything, she “should” say about her frustrations. And also about the responsibilities of the media, and whether or not it is fair to ask a disappointed athlete questions like, “‘Tell me, how does it feel to know your hometown was watching?’” (to take one of Diggins’s unappreciated examples from the PyeongChang mixed zone).

As one contemporary meme put it midway through the Olympics, alongside an image of a man with clothespins stretching his face into an artificial smile, “When you come up short in your races, but your sponsors paid for sparkle, not human emotions.” Or, as Devon Kershaw more recently said (around the 21:00 mark of the linked podcast), “The media is there when you win, but it is a show, and this is entertainment, and I know it feels like a huge deal at the time, I know you’re super disappointed. … But it’s called being a professional. You just pull the glasses up, you look into the camera, or you look into the interviewer’s eye, and you say, ‘Today wasn’t my day. I’m really proud of the Tour I had; today I just fell flat and had a raunchy day, and I’m looking forward to resting and getting on with my season.’ … It’s your livelihood, right, and you have to answer the questions in the media. Of course people want to know how did you feel today, like, How does it feel to lose the Tour de Ski win, Johannes [Klæbo]. He doesn’t want to answer that question, of course not. But like I said, you’ve got to be pro.”

The first comment was undeniably about Diggins; the second clearly was not. But if you like skiing, and are anyone other than a current World Cup athlete and so necessarily follow it through the filter of the media, Diggins’s thoughts on the media, alongside the frankly cruel viewpoint expressed by the meme, should make you think about the interplay between athletes and media, and how it manifests in the information that you hear. I don’t know what the “answer” is, but I think that these questions are worth asking.

(I am pellucidly aware that I’m writing this for FasterSkier, the paper of record for this niche sport (which, by the way, Diggins at one point read, but no longer does, likening it, or maybe the comments section specifically, to “driving past a car crash…you know you shouldn’t look, but everyone somehow can’t help themselves”). My understanding is that Diggins, whom I have never personally interviewed, has at worst a neutral, and I think in fact a positive, relationship with this website. Go ahead and listen to some of her recent post-race interviews with Jason Albert or Rachel Perkins (here, say, or here); it seems hard to characterize this as an antagonistic relationship with the media, or as the media asking unfairly pointed questions. But you, as the reader, really get to be the judge of that.)

So what else is bad? There is a certain former teammate who is (other than Trump) the only true villain in this story. She actively uses Diggins’s eating disorder against her, falsely tells her that the national-team coaches had called to say that they thought her eating disorder made her “hard to handle” and “a burden to the national team,” and outright yells at her, “telling me I was a liar, that I was a fake person who only pretended to be happy, that I was a pathetic, bad person.” Ultimately, Diggins learns the truth only when she privately approaches Matt Whitcomb to ask him if this is true; he is appropriately aghast and tells her that this never happened; she leaves the CXC Team for Stratton soon after.

On a happier note, Diggins concludes, “The power of these old psychological scars scared me and made me realize how far-reaching the effects of bullying could be. I vowed to never, ever let something like that happen to another athlete on the same team as I was.”

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Diggins began work on this book soon after the PyeongChang Olympics, she has outlined in a blog post, with the assistance of a professional author, Todd Smith. The book is, literally, an as-told-to production; she explains in the blog post that Smith came to Stratton for a week, during which time he “recorded something like 20 hours” of Diggins’s thoughts. Smith oversaw transcription of the audio, she writes, “then cleaned up my ‘um’s, ‘ahh’s and way too many ‘like’s, and hammered my stories into more readable chapter formats.” Diggins edited rough drafts of each chapter during spring 2019 before the work went through a final copy-editing process with the publisher, the University of Minnesota Press.

Diggins says of the finished book, “it sounds like one of my blogs that grew up and went to college,” which seems quite apt. Perhaps as an artifact of the work’s oral composition, her voice is superb. (Indeed, as Diggins wrote, “It sounds exactly like me.”) If you want to see for yourself, compare a random portion of the published book, a random blog post, and a random post-race audio interview. You will have no doubt whatsoever that all three come from the same person.

Although bad words do not seem to fall within Diggins’s typical on-the-record linguistic register, they occasionally feature within the book. There are a couple fuckings, a handful of shits, and multiple instances of kickass or badass (often applied to Randall). Some of the profanities come in quotations from others, and certainly none is gratuitous. But I thought twice before handing the book over to my fluent-reader, hero-worshipping seven-year-old ski fan for this reason (okay, also the unflinching descriptions of the realities of an eating disorder); if you’re a parent you’ll know your own kids and can make your own judgment calls, but you may wish to keep that in mind. (As for substance, there is as much sex, drugs, or violence as you would expect from someone with a clean-cut Midwestern persona, viz., none. Save for that one time the police pulled a corpse out of the frozen river across from the team hotel in Rybinsk…)

There are a few other down notes in the book. One chapter turns on a somewhat forced metaphor about what is literally a box of memories, which as a literary device seemed strained. And Diggins’s wistful evocation of all the free time and unstructured schedules enjoyed by non-athletes, in perhaps a grass is always greener moment, falls a little flat. Ask anyone who is a parent, a recreational skier, or a person with a nine-to-five job (let alone all three!) if they really get to be done for the day at 5 o’clock, or stay up late without thinking twice about it. They’ll probably laugh at you, if they’re not too busy squeezing in a quick workout or driving their kids somewhere or helping with homework or making dinner or doing laundry or actually talking to their spouse at 10:30 p.m. before collapsing into bed.

Finally, there are a disappointing number of factual errors. The advance review copy that I received from the publisher referred to Diggins finishing 40th in the distance skate in Sochi and 12th in the sprint; she was in fact 37th and 13th, respectively. It says that Randall was 37 years old in PyeongChang; she was in fact 35. It says that Diggins won 13 races on the SuperTour in fall 2011; she in fact won nine. It said that the “entire team” was on course for the team sprint final in PyeongChang; at least one athlete was not, as witness this memorable live reaction video from an athlete watching the broadcast in the American gym. And it said that Diggins wants to be defined by more than just one Olympic race, and not be “forever falling back on those fourteen minutes on a Thursday night in South Korea.” But the race took just under sixteen minutes, and occurred on a Wednesday. I could go on (and could note that she has misstated even the year of her childhood Olympic-themed birthday party), but this gives a flavor of the type of problems I encountered – maybe not huge, but sloppy, and lots of them, enough to make me wonder what else in the memoir might be revealed as wrong if it were formally fact-checked. And don’t get me started on the outright typos.

None of these misstatements had been corrected in the final version of the book, and while some of the typos were cleaned up, more slipped through than should have. It is disappointing to find such errors in a work published by a university press, which was edited three times and gone through, Diggins writes, “line by line, word by word.” (To be clear, I don’t begrudge an athlete with hundreds of race starts to her name for not remembering all details of each one with eidetic clarity. I do, however, expect her co-author, or her publisher, or someone involved with a well-regarded university press to have fact-checked the thing, as well as to have ensured that there were no typographical errors in the final product.)

On a more amusing note, I should observe that Diggins casually name drops her myriad sponsors at only one point in the entire book, a chapter describing the PyeongChang Olympics. (“I like to put on my Bose headphones … I ate some Pro-Bar sports gummies and drank more Nuun endurance sports drink. … one of the awesome Salomon reps knocked the snow from my boots … I looked down at the palms of the gloves that I’d custom-designed with Swix.”) If this is a wry commentary on the implications of Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter, which effectively muzzles athletes’ ability to thank their personal sponsors at the one time every four years that they actually have a global media spotlight – and Diggins is too smart for this to be anything but – then it is a masterpiece of Midwestern-nice trolling from a universally beloved athlete. Well done.

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It seems worth asking, perhaps more so for this book than for others, why the author took the time to write it. Writing a book isn’t easy, even with an as-told-to co-author, and many athletes training 800 hours a year do not undertake a book-length literary endeavor as a downtime bagatelle.

Indeed, consider that Diggins didn’t really need the fame; she has over 122,000 Instagram followers, who respond to her every pronouncement with reactions somewhere between affirmation and adulation. She likely didn’t need the money; she’s not as wealthy from this sport as she would be if she lived in Norway, where Johaug and Klæbo et al. have a ubiquitous advertising presence and lucrative endorsement deals, but she has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money, and in the acknowledgments she thanks her Chicago-based agent and his team for “years of helping me tell my story to the world with our partners,” which is not something you say if your parents are still funding your ski career. And she didn’t need to bolster her own image; she has a beloved reputation on two continents, and is a hero to skiers young and old.

The conclusion is likely that Diggins wrote this book because she wanted to, or, more specifically, because she felt like she had a story that she wanted to be told. If you care about Diggins, sports, or being yourself, I submit that her story is worth listening to.

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The article has been edited to reflect the fact that it was Leo Tolstoy who wrote that “Happy families are all alike,” not Fyodor Dostoevsky.

For many who read FasterSkier, going uphill remains the name of the game. Although we assume the fidelity to nordic skiing is strong we know many dabble in several outdoor pursuits. Some athletes nordic ski as a means to remain aerobically and anaerobically sharp to parlay their fitness into proud adventures or race efforts far from a PistenBully’s corduroy. In many mountain towns, Crested Butte comes to mind, cross-country skiing becomes a default post-work burn until the weekend’s ski mountaineering epic.

If you are one of those athletes who are more keen on throwing a 30-meter skinny rope and skin wax in your backpack instead of a tin of extra-blue and you’ve been looking for a training guide, there’s a new book in the training-sphere that might be for you. It’s titled “Training for the Uphill Athlete”. The subtitle reveals more about its target audience — “A Manual For Mountain Runners and Ski Mountaineers”.   

The book is penned by Kilian Jornet, Steve House, and Scott Johnston. Jornet remains a cutting edge mountain runner and ski mountaineer, House brings his experience training for and scratching up some of the globe’s most demanding alpine climbs, and Johnston, himself an accomplished alpinist and cross-country ski coach brings much of the training know-how.

“Training for the Uphill Athlete” piggybacks on the template of Johnston’s and House’s book “Training for the New Alpinism”. What that means is this: readers are exposed to the science of endurance training physiology, training methods and how to monitor training effects, and the principles of strength training for those interested in defying gravity.

Like their first “Alpinism” book, “Training for the Uphill Athlete” provides enough information for newcomers to enhance their understanding of training physiology (think metabolic pathways) without feeling as if they are reading a journal article. Conversely, for those well versed in training theory, the book provides a robust collection of sport-specific training stimulus ideas.

Make no mistake, this is no touch-the-surface book. It is a deep dive pushing 400 pages.

Organizationally, the writers and editor are genius in a few categories. First, the pages are liberally peppered with lovely photographs that allow one to daydream about why you might be training in the first place. Presumably, if you are reading their book, that reason would be moving fast or faster in the hills. Just when you might be overloaded by the wordsmithing on capacity versus utilization training, presto, several photos are presented that make the book seem like a sunny big-mountain hiatus. (Or a respite from mentally recreating the pathway of glucose to ATP + Pyruvate and so on.)

Secondly, the book offers countless diagrams, charts, and graphs to help further illustrate the training principles conveyed in text. If you are a visual learner, don’t rule the book out. The visual means by which the authors illustrate information are top-notch and are worth the $35.00 price of admission. The visuals masterfully present dense technical information clearly and allow the reader to glance over at a diagram to reinforce a concept. In that way, it is like an über functional textbook written by Zen masters, not a snore-worthy treatise you might recall from your college days.   

In reviewing the book over the winter in digital format, and now with the physical book in hand, one thing is clear and it is stated in the sub-title: This is a “manual”.

The book remains a one-stop library for answering why we do certain types of training to providing scores of ideas for the highly motivated self-starter to craft a training plan. Sandwiched between the covers are personal anecdotes from numerous athletes that bring a human dimension to the book’s more science-oriented presentations.

With Johnston’s experience in the cross-country ski world (disclaimer, I live in Scott Johnston’s old house but did not purchase it from him), you’ll notice several crossover ideas like moose hoofing, bounding, and striding. In the strength section for ski-mo you’ll feel at home when there’s a mention of rollerskiing and options like a ski-erg workout. So even if you remain a skinny ski devotee — and a 60mm underfoot ski as is typically used in ski-mo races sounds like a powder board — you’ll sense the common training DNA.

This is not a new treatise on training specifically for cross-country skiing. Looking for a tome on the why, how, and when to harness your inner Johannes Høsflot Klæbo or Stina Nilsson? “Training for the Uphill Athlete” may not be your go to. Want to delve into ski-mo racing or mountain trail running, or become a faster stronger version of yourself in those disciplines, or simply diversify your on-snow and off-snow training? Then have a read.

The book’s backstory also offers insight into what you’ll be reading. Johnston was interviewed this past winter in Washington’s Methow Valley where he makes his home. According to Johnston, his first stab at a book, “Training for the New Alpinism”, allowed him an initial go at articulating his thoughts on endurance training.

“I think I am a little more clear in this book because I have had to explain the physiology hundreds of times to so many people that I am better at it,” Johnston said. “I think the presentation is a little more clear this time. The information is essentially the same. Physiology hasn’t changed since I wrote the first book, but my ability to explain it to people has. I tried to use more metaphor in it this time. I think it is easier for people to learn more challenging concepts when they can relate it to other stuff.”

Johnston also explained that in writing the book he had plenty of time to collaborate with Jornet. Pinning down Jornet for anything beyond the hardest-core of any mountain adventure remains a task. As Johnston said, “Kilian is busy being Kilian and doesn’t do much except run around the mountains all the time.”

During the crafting of the book, Jornet suffered a shoulder injury requiring surgery and he then broke his leg in a ski-mo race. Those injuries slowed down Jornet enough for him to discuss uphill training.

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“I had quite a bit of time to spend on the phone with him last year putting these finishing touches on the book,” said Johnston. “One of the things we wanted to be sure we did was that we are not really presenting any real formulaic recipes. Like here is a training plan for X, Y, or Z. It is more here is all the bits and pieces of how to build a training program. Here are the things you have to keep in mind. Here is how to monitor your fatigue. Here is how to monitor your progress — more like how a coach would look at it than just a cookie cutter recipe.”

What that means is the reader must be the filter when determining how to use the book. An independent-minded pro, as in self-coached, could use this resource as much as a neophyte master aged athlete. If your life includes activities like caring for small humans, time-consuming employment, or other priorities, the reader will have to scale back the training and determine for themselves how to optimize their reduced training hours.

By design, the book becomes a stepping off point, like any good how-to book on say climbing, for an athlete to become more self-sufficient. Looking for where to play Lightning Roulette ? Go to the official website of the game https://lightningroulettegame.com/en/

“Training for the Uphill Athlete” is as much a feast for the intellect as it is for the eyes.

Link to mass start skate race photo gallery.

Always a threat in the grinding and longer distance races, APU’s David Norris positioned himself as the primary disruptor in the men’s 30-kilometer freestyle mass start at the U.S. Cross-Country Ski National Championships in Craftsbury, VT.

With the men racing after the women’s 20 k, the 5 k ski loop used for the mass starts had been skied in, with a faster, narrower best-line often making for a single thread of skiers.

“It was kind of single file from the start and then midway through the third lap, I went to the front with a hard push and by the time we were lapping through Kyle [Bratrud], Scott [Patterson], and I were skiing together,” Norris told FasterSkier in Craftsbury.

Behind the three skiers dictating the sharp end of the race that saw 85 athletes finish on Sunday, organized chasers, small packs and solo skiers alike, were unable to gap up to the three who formed the race podium.

Late in the race, at the 29.2 k mark, Norris had a one second lead on Bratrud, and a five second gap on Patterson. Those small time differences grew slightly as Norris pulsed in his move to secure his first U.S. national championship.

“I wasn’t fully committed to the move, but when I saw that I was starting to gap I knew I had to go with it, “ Norris said. “Once I’m committed to it I had to give everything I could to get to where that feed zone was, about 500 meters to the finish line, if I could make it there with the lead I could finish.”

Norris won the race in 1:18:02.4 hours, 6.4 seconds ahead of Bratrud (SMS T2) in second, and 19 seconds ahead of third place Patterson (USST/APU). It was Norris’s sixth U.S. national podium, and his first title. Three of his past podiums have come in the 30 k, one in the 50 k, and a single podium in the 15 k.

For Bratrud, it was his second podium of these U.S. nationals; he won the 15 k classic last Thursday.

“David made a pretty aggressive move around 11 – 12 k that really broke open the field,” Bratrud reflected after the race. “Basically, from then on it was David, Scott and I. Then we were just jockeying for position until the last couple k when we really got after it. … I certainly wanted the pace to be hot. I don’t really like races where there’s a lot of people crowding me, so I was happy to see it. I just sat in behind them and tried to ski smooth and save my energy because I knew that they would be strong in the last k and they were. I was able to hang on for second but David was too strong for me today.”

Patterson’s third place comes after the U.S. Ski Team skier raced Period 1 on the World Cup. The 2018 Olympian has yet to recapture his form that saw hip capture an 11th place in the Game’s 50 k classic.

“It was great having David, I knew he was going to be strong today,” Patterson said after Sunday’s race. “I is always a battle, we are fighting each other for World Champs too, so it’s great to have a teammate, but you always want to win.”

Gus Schumacher (AWS), a U20 skier jumping into the men’s senior race was fourth, Adam Martin (CGRP) fifth, Brian Gregg (Team Gregg) sixth, Patrick Caldwell (SMS T2/USST) seventh, Canada’s Evan Palmer-Charrette (Team R.A.D.) eighth, Eric Packer (APU) ninth, and Akeo Maifeld-Carucci (CGRP) 10th.

Results 

Frozen Thunder is back, but it’s not the same Frozen Thunder you knew before.

Every year, snow is stored all summer at the Canmore Nordic Centre in Canmore, Alberta, and rolled out in October to provide local ski and biathlon teams with on-snow training opportunities. This year, the loop has changed.

“It feels good to be back on the snow after such a long time away,” Biathlon Canada’s Nathan Smith wrote in an email. “The loop has been lengthened and improved. There is a steeper climb now, which means mandatory offset.”

“They’ve set a new track compared to previous years which is much better for training,” Cross Country Canada’s Jesse Cockney agreed.

Biathlon Canada Head Coach Matthias Ahrens explained that the changes were needed to make the loop more comparable to courses used in international competition. National teams for both biathlon and cross-country skiing will be using competitions on Frozen Thunder to pick their World Cup teams, so they wanted the course to be difficult.

“We were doing intensity Monday,” Ahrens wrote in an email. “The athletes started skiing on Saturday and have not really experienced much challenge to adapt from rollerskiing. We are in the last preparation phase before the first World Cup happens in four weeks, and the training volume is reduced now, but the intensity increased to do the final race sharpening.”

Aside from national team athletes and World Cup hopefuls, the loop has been home to high school racers, families and masters teams.

“The reason you will see a lot of athletes wearing bibs is actually that we have training times for elite athletes from 8-noon, Monday–Friday, since the National and Development Teams have a big stake in funding Frozen Thunder as early season training venue,” Ahrens explained. “Only those who have contributed money to Frozen Thunder get bibs and are allowed to ski in the mornings, just a way to control who is on it. On weekends and afternoons it is open to the public.”

“It was a quiet start to Frozen Thunder with a lot of teams away, so that was lovely to enjoy the new track (a fun turn and more climbing) and not play Rush Hour,” wrote Erin Yungblut, a Canmore-based biathlete. “I think it’s really exciting to have so many teams and talented athletes out… I love being able to ski behind others and learn from as many as I can.”

Among that group is the Space Dogs Ski Club masters team.

“For our masters performance group, getting on early snow is probably equal parts technical advantage and motivation/excitement,” wrote Dasha Gaiazova, a Space Dogs coach and former Olympian. “We are grateful that we, and many other skiers of all abilities have an opportunity to train on early snow so close to home. I also believe it makes the Frozen Thunder project more self-sustainable, through sale of general public ski passes, early season ski lessons, and providing great visibility for the sport of cross-country skiing in Canmore.”

Frozen Thunder is getting busier. The Canadian National Ski Team returned from a training camp in Park City, Utah — Cockney had done a shorter camp, thus returning home and getting some extra time on snow. The Canadian biathlon squad already had its first time trial on the course on Thursday. The U.S. biathlon team is also in town now for an on-snow training camp, and the two teams will have joint competitions on Nov. 7-10. Meanwhile, next Wednesday and Friday the cross-country team will hold a classic sprint and skate distance race.

Below, a roundup of some more reactions to getting back on snow before the start of the season:

“It is super fun to be back on snow – rollerskiing is great training, but it simply isn’t the same! I am here in Banff to spend time with my husband before I hit the road for winter racing. I would love to be training with my APU crew in Alaska (there really is no place like Alaska… and yes I am biased as it has and will always be home), but I have been super busy going between Alaska and Banff this summer and I felt it was more important to have this short time with my husband and limit travel these last couple weeks. Not to mention, the Bow Valley is very close to my heart. The terrain in Canmore is great training, lots of transitions and a new stair-stepping climb – they fit a lot into that 2 k loop.”

— Chelsea Holmes, Alaska Pacific University

“Getting on snow the day after returning home from Park City camp was an awesome transition, but I’m quite tired after the time at altitude so I’ll take a couple easy days to get energy back now. I wasn’t so much planning my shorter camp around more time on snow, I was just being careful with energy this late in the training season. As it turns out I may have overdone it anyway in Park City, but it was a really good call to come home and try to recover a bit sooner than the rest of the gang.”

— Jesse Cockney, Canadian National Ski Team

“It’s so amazing to be back on snow again; I still can’t get over how lucky we are to live and train in Canmore with such an epic facility. The transition back to snow has been pretty quick and easy for me as I did a lot of yo-yo camps up at the Haig Glacier this year, so I’m used to icy starts/soft sugar underfoot. Racing definitely feels closer now, and I couldn’t be more excited. I literally have zero pressure or expectations on myself, as I’ve come to realize I’m pursuing biathlon because I love the challenge of it… and the results will be what they are. I don’t think I’ve ever expanded this much [as a person] so quickly. It sounds corny, but I’m finally starting to figure out how to control the controllable and forget the rest of it.”

— Erin Yungblut, Rocky Mountain Racers

— Nathan Smith, Biathlon Canada National Team

“With not getting onto the Haig Glacier because of snow melt, our team hasn’t been on snow since May. The transition was easy for me this year and it feels like second nature to be back on snow. I will admit to the first couple of strides feeling like skis are quite long, but that didn’t last long… It was a bit sad while they were pushing out Frozen Thunder, because we had about three days of rain. So far it is holding up nicely and we just have to hope that colder temps are in the forecast.”

When I heard that there was a new book coming out about heart arrhythmias in endurance athletes, I was interested.

Several years ago, I read some of the research papers that the book’s authors refer to. One was a cohort study on participants in the Vasaloppet, the 90-kilometer ski marathon in Sweden. Those researchers found that skiers who competed in more Vasaloppets had more heart arrhythmias – as did those who finished the race the fastest.

I wrote a piece about the findings at the time. The FasterSkier commenting system has changed, so original comments no longer appear at the bottom of the article, but I remember them clearly. Multiple commenters found the study hard to believe. One commenter was so sure that the findings were impossible that he wrote multiple angry comments arguing that exercise is good for you, so it couldn’t possibly cause heart problems.

As a scientist, I was flabbergasted.

There are a lot of crappy studies out there in sports science — and science in general, but I’m used to reading sports science papers with sample sizes of eight athletes. It’s hard to defend a lot of conclusions made from such studies. But this one? The researchers had following thousands and thousands of individuals and, well, numbers are numbers. An individual is either diagnosed with an arrhythmia or they aren’t. This was pretty straightforward.

Scientists go out and measure a phenomenon, and then we present numbers as an estimation of the world. There are many legitimate reasons to question the data or interpretation, and this is actually built into the scientific process. Before publication, other scientists will rip a a study apart as part of “peer review”, suggesting ways to make it better or even recommending it not be published.

That doesn’t mean that all published research is perfect. After publication, scientists continue to raise important points about whether the data collected represents reality (due to potential flaws like bias or study design), whether the statistical techniques are appropriate and correctly performed, whether alternative mechanisms could explain the patterns shown, and more. The public should absolutely engage in this process — and scientists should do better about engaging with the public. Anyone outside the study itself can ask questions that the researchers might not have seen, illuminating important aspects and leading to new research questions or repeating the study in a different way. In the end, this leads to gradually more and more accuracy in that estimation of the world.

Asking good questions is different than arguing that data is wrong simply because of a gut feeling or belief. The reaction to the Vasaloppet article was a frustrating moment for me but, I would come to realize, not an unusual one. When presented with facts that do not support our worldview, we tend to just discount them. It’s human nature.

All of which is to say that I was very interested to read The Haywire Heart by Chris Case, John Mandrola and Lennard Zinn.

First, I wanted to get more background on the topic, and I wanted it to be explained to me in clear, straightforward language instead of the scientific jargon of research papers.

Second, I wondered if the book would get the same reaction as my old writeup of the Vasaloppet study.

And third, I was interested to see whether, when presented with some scary narratives, I had the same reaction as those few FasterSkier commenters. After all, as much as I tout that I’m a scientist, I, too, have knee-jerk reactions — and I spend a lot of time exercising. I guessed that I might find the conclusions of the book plenty threatening.

The book opens with the story of Zinn, who is a former national team cyclist and a staff writer for VeloNews. Zinn is riding his bike outside of Boulder, Colo. He feels his heart skip a beat, and his heart rate “had jumped from 155 to 218 beats per minute (bpm), and stayed elevated.”

Zinn initially takes some rest and dials his training back, but ultimately he tries to keep riding and training. The incidents become more and more frequent until his heart actually stops at one point.

After that, Zinn radically changes his lifestyle. He does no hard efforts and much less training volume, period. Because of that, he’s still around to write the book today. His life is richer now, he writes (although it sometimes sounds like he is trying to convince himself as much as the reader). He has developed more different hobbies and can spend more time with his family. But it took him a long time to come to that understanding.

It’s a transfixing story about what can happen to a seemingly fit, healthy person. Because Zinn is an author on the book, you know that he will make it out alive. But how far will he go before he stops training? What will happen to him? Could that happen to me?

As we say in research, the plural of anecdote is not data.

While the authors include “case studies” at the end of every chapter (several of which feature cross-country skiers who nearly died on the side of Colorado ski trails), they also bring the data.

The book presents a compelling argument that we should be thinking more about our hearts – and particularly, the heart’s “electrical system,” as the authors call it. Endurance exercise doesn’t seem to increase the prevalence of problems with the “plumbing system,” or how the blood is pumped.

That’s not to say that athletes don’t have heart attacks (or, more accurately, myocardial infarctions). Risk factors are risk factors, and don’t completely disappear with exercise. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, a family history of heart disease, being male rather than female – these increase the risk of a myocardial infarction. In particular, athletes who came to endurance sports later in life and previously smoked or were overweight still carry those risks with them.

But the unique risk associated with long and intense bouts of exercise seems to be in the electrical system. Studies across multiple sports and countries, as well as in animal models like mice, rats and goats, have shown that the electrical impulses that keep the heart in rhythm can be made, well, haywire, by a lifetime of endurance training.

There’s a wealth of observational, epidemiological data suggesting that a long-term habit of endurance exercise can cause atrial fibrilliation, a rapid and irregular heartbeat originating in the atria. (Atrial fibrillation was the type of arrhythmia mentioned in the Vasaloppet study.)

Other arrhythmias seem to occur more frequently in athletes, too, like ventricular fibrillation. Premature ventricular contractions are common in trained athletes and don’t necessarily lead to bad outcomes; complex ventricular arrhythmias are also common, and can lead to cardiac arrest.

Exercise can also make genetic diseases like arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC) more dangerous, and can lead to the disease even in the absence of genetic markers.

Some causes are straightforward. One symptom of “athlete’s heart,” as it is called, is enlarged chambers in the heart. And this is associated with atrial fibrillation: patients with atrial fibrillation tend to have larger left atria than those without.

Exercise also leads to inflammation of muscles. The heart is a muscle; inflammation can lead to scarring, which can then disrupt the transmission of electrical signals across cells.

The logic and evidence go on and on. The authors explain all of this much better than I can, even when paraphrasing. I’ll let you read the book and just say: it’s convincing. And if you haven’t studied human anatomy since high school, don’t worry. It’s clear and well-explained.

As to the second question, the authors tackle that, too. Mandrola, a doctor, notes that when many athletes receive a diagnosis of a heart problem, they go into denial. Many decide not to change their behavior. There’s a sort of cognitive dissonance to being told that something you have always believed is healthy is actually putting you at eventual risk of death.

“It is completely natural to go into denial for a while,” Zinn writes. “I don’t know of any masters athletes diagnosed with non-life-threatening arrhythmias who didn’t go back to pushing it hard in training or racing in hopes that the incident that sent them to a cardiologist was just a fluke.”

If you do have a problem with heart rhythm, the authors provide several chapters as a guide for when to go to the doctor, what to ask and tell them, and what treatment options might be available. Getting a correct diagnosis is key, and as cross-country skiers, that is not a trivial ask.

“Even doctors who run marathons don’t quite get the intensity thing,” Mandrola writes. “Marathons are a different sort of affair. There is no question that they are hard, but they generally have an even pace and don’t involve the competitive crises that flare up repeatedly in a bicycle race or a cross-country ski race or triathlon.”

Women, too, are often misdiagnosed. The authors explain that women are more likely to be assessed as having an anxiety disorder than men, even when suffering from the same underlying heart problems: “Women younger than 55 were seven times more likely to be misdiagnosed and turned away from the ER than their male counterparts.”

But the main advice, when confronted with a heart arrhythmia, is first to go to the doctor, and second to back off of training. It might save your life – and it might also make the problem disappear. That doesn’t necessarily mean stopping completely, but it might mean going slower and for shorter sessions. “Detraining” is a good therapy for several diagnoses.

“In the end, I believe that all that denial and continued racing and training hard with the hopes of retaining some portion of my former life either damaged my heart or trained it so that it now goes into arrhythmia more easily,” Zinn writes of his own situation.

Detraining might seem horrible, like an unacceptable lifestyle adjustment. But as the authors point out, once you know the other options – medications with scary side effects, procedures with non-trivial rates of complications, death – training a bit less might seem like a much better option.

As for me? I definitely reacted to the book, but not by going into denial. Instead, I was scared.

“The day before he died, he had gone for a six-hour run,” the authors wrote of Micah True, a barefoot- and distance-running legend.

I read that the day after I had done a four-hour overdistance running workout. It hit home: none of us are invincible.

That said, the one thing I found missing from the book was a real estimate of the prevalence of these heart problems. I could easily follow why they would develop, based on the physiology of the heart and what we do to it. And I found the research cited credible. But how many people does this happen to? Just what is the risk, statistically?

One reason the answer might be lacking is simply that it’s hard to do comprehensive research on such a topic. As the authors point out, you can’t really do a randomized, controlled, double-blind trial – the gold standard for scientific studies – about the effects of lifelong exercise.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that such health issues are common enough to give one pause.

I’m just 30 years old, and I am probably not going to change my exercise habits after having read this book. But it reinforced a lot of peripheral behaviors that I should know are important anyway.

For instance, in some patients, arrhythmias pop up only when they are stressed. Leading a high-stress life and sleeping too little are major risk factors. Burning the wick at both ends: that’s the sort of life I lead – and the sort of thing I always know I should work to address, but here’s another good reason to do so.

Likewise, making sure to get enough electrolytes when training, to avoid dehydration, to get good rest and recovery, and to listen to your body – these are important.

“You have probably been training for many years, if not most of your life,” Mandrola writes in one chapter. “Those years of training have given you a good sense of what ‘normal’ feels like. What you are looking for is anything that falls outside the boundaries of normal.”

If I do ever feel a flutter in my chest, I’ll now know not to ignore it.