Is it possible that the best movie ever made about cross-country skiing doesn’t have a single scene which was filmed on snow? The answer is a decided yes. Because that movie is “A to B Roller Ski,” and it shatters the ceiling for what a movie about cross-country skiing can be.

Moving, inspiring, authentic, pure, poetic, and beautiful, ‘A to B Roller Ski’ tells the story of Latvian born biathlete Raimonds Dombrovskis who in 1988 decided that after his Olympic biathlon dreams had ended due to a life threatening illness, it would be a good adventure to roller ski from Inuvik, Canada— near the Arctic Circle— to Baja, Mexico— a journey of 4,200 miles which took 90 days. Why? Well, “because everyone goes across the continent” he says in the movie. This incredible and crazy true story is a cinematic marvel which like a well-aged fine wine could only have been accomplished with decades of commitment. The movie has been out for years for viewing at film festivals. But now, it’s available for streaming on Amazon.

The concept behind the movie’s narrative is pure folly. Who in any sane mental state would even consider such a journey? From the baseball-size stone filled roads of the Alaska Highway, to the Rocky Mountains, to the deserts of Arizona, Dombrovskis and his faithful canine companion, Bucis, soldiered on and completed a journey that not only seemed impossible, but also seemed likely to end up with a dead protagonist. Remember, this original journey occurred in the late 1980s, on roller skis which were nothing like the ones we have today. There were no heel brakes or speed reducers. Shafts were either aluminum or wood. I had the exact pair of the skis, boots, and bindings that Dombrovskis used for a large part of his trip, and I can tell you from first hand experience that, even on the paved trail at my local park, they were nerve racking. Going down mountain passes on these is unimaginable.

The photography is remarkable. There is old footage of the journey from 1988, which given the technology of the time, a handheld VHS camera; and the limited budget—almost none— is beautifully crafted and technically well executed. The photography is perfectly mated with an evocative sound track, and the combination works wonders. There are contemporary interviews seamlessly interwoven into the original footage, which is also nicely crafted. Both the old and new photography help move the story along, and in a 1:38 minute movie, there is never a dull spot.

The vintage videos of biathletes racing in the Classic technique are enough to make one hope that the IBU (International Biathlon Union) mandates a couple of Classic races a year; just for aesthetics alone.

The movie is told against the backdrop of Dombrovskis’ emigration from Latvia to America, the end of his Olympic dreams, and the folly of trying to do something so outrageous that you would think it was surely a joke.

One of the more striking things about the journey is Dombrovskis’ obvious interest in the people he met along the way. Many of them may have been skeptical of him at first, but he’s the kind of guy who makes friends easily, which unquestionably helped him complete this odyssey.

The original 1988 epic odyssey would be enough for a full feature film. But the story only gets better and deeper when Dombrovskis decides in 2014 to recreate a scaled down version of his journey 26 years later. Dombrovskis looks like he’s still fit enough to make the national Biathlon team when he retraces his steps from 1988, tracking down people he met along the way two and a half decades earlier, which leads to heartwarming reunion scenes.

‘A to B’ is a testament to one man’s belief that nothing is impossible and that the price of not following your dreams is far greater than the cost of pursuing them.

I’m not certain if non-skiers will gush about it as much as skiers will, but it’s more likely than not that even people with no interest in skiing will find the movie to be at the very least a compelling tale.

So, whatever you’re doing tonight, change your plans, and rent ‘A to B.’ (Depending upon your Amazon setup, if you search for it in Amazon’s catalog you may not find it listed under ‘A to B Roller Ski.’ If you can’t find it, enter “roller ski” in the search bar and the movie will pop up as an option.)

Fortunately, you won’t need one of these to watch the 1988 footage of Dombrovskis’ original journey. (Photo: Wiki Commons)If you don’t want to risk your $2.99 movie rental money on this review’s recommendation, then take a look at IMDB’s (Independent Movie Data Base) reviews. It gets rated 8.6/10. By comparison, ‘The Godfather,’ often judged to be the best movie ever made, is rated 9.2/10. That’s some pretty lofty company. Here’s a link to the IMDB site where you can watch the trailer.

It is rare when a movie conveys a naïve purity which is historically accurate and inspiring. The amazing thing about this film is that if someone had created the script from ideas they made up, viewers would have immediately dismissed it as nice, but ludicrous. What makes ‘A to B’ so special is that when outlandish truth mixes just right with awe and splendor, and it’s captured on film, amazing things happen.

If you’re a kid in Granby or Winter Park, Colo., snow days aren’t a thing—until last Thursday, March 13. According to Mary Ann Degginger, the program director at Snow Mountain Ranch, students in the East Grand School District had their first snow day in 20 years last week.

“[Winter Park] ski resort got 15 or 16 inches, and the roads are closed, so it’s a good day in the mountains,” she said that afternoon.

About 12 miles north of Winter Park Resort and 80 miles east of Denver, Snow Mountain Ranch/YMCA of the Rockies in Granby received about 8 inches of snow, which should help extend their cross-country ski season into April. After what Degginger called a slow start to a “spotty” winter, Grand County had a solid second half of the ski season and currently has above-average snowpack in most areas.

As of Wednesday, March 20, the Snow Mountain Ranch Nordic Center had all 82.5 kilometers of groomed trails open. The ranch recently held its 40th annual Stampede Races, with about 350 participants over two days for the 3-, 12.5-, 25-, and 50-kilometer skate and classic distances.

“It’s kind of a big deal,” Degginger said of the final event in the Grand County Nordic Race Series. “If you do both disciplines at 25 or 50 k, you earn the ranch-boss belt buckle. I gave out about 75 belt buckles to people who did both, and I have mad respect for those people. It’s a lot of skiing.”

She recalled the ideal weather that weekend of March 9-10: “The snow was cold, the weather was warm, it was sunny, and it was beautiful.”

Looking ahead, Degginger said the Snow Mountain Ranch Nordic Center plans to stay open until April 7.

“With this last snow we got, I wouldn’t be surprised if the snow was skiable beyond that,” she noted. “A lot of the north-facing slopes and shadier areas will hold their snow for a couple more weeks even after that. So, spring skiing conditions, but warm and pleasant and really good snow, really good tracks. Our groomers are doing a great job of maintaining our snow.”

At Snow Mountain Ranch, visitors can stay right on the 5,100-acre property, with ski-in, ski-out lodging options and a cafeteria for dining. Vacationers can choose from rustic cabins and hotel-style rooms and, in the summer and fall, yurts, RV sites, and tent campsites.

“At one of our lodges, all the rooms have balconies or porches on the back, and you can ski right out of the lodge,” Degginger explained. “A lot of our cabins are either ski-in, ski-out, or you might have to carry your skis across the street to get into the trail, [but] really close by.”

Those who stay there can expect everything they need and nothing they don’t. The rooms aren’t fancy, but they’re practical. Most don’t have TVs, but they do have WiFi. The idea is to connect with friends, family, and the outdoors while taking a break from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. The YMCA of the Rockies makes a point to offer affordable and family-friendly accommodations along with various on-site activities to keep everyone entertained.

“We have a ton of amenities geared toward families and stuff to do when they’re not skiing,” Degginger said. “They can go rollerskating, play basketball, go to the swimming pool, or go to the craft shop—lots of different options and things to do when you’re not on the trails.”

Snow Mountain Ranch also has an indoor archery range and climbing wall. As a nonprofit, the YMCA can provide a wide range of activities and amenities at a relatively low cost to locals and visitors. When asked how their YMCA differs from other community centers, Degginger said people need to experience the YMCA of the Rockies to understand.

“We have members, just like a normal YMCA, who love to come and ski,” she said. “Some are hardcore skiers who ski every day and Paralympians who come and train here. We [serve] our locals as well as our guests and people who come from far away. If you’re not staying here, you can buy a day pass or trail pass to use the facility for the day, but we’d rather you stay with us.”

For those who stay overnight (Degginger recommends booking in advance, especially for holiday weeks, summers, and weekends), trail passes are included, along with access to many of the facilities, such as the roller rink, gymnasium, and pool.

While winter is still going strong at the ranch, she recommended also visiting in the summer, which is the ranch’s busiest season.

“[We] have a brand-new ropes course opening this year, an aerial challenge course, which will be awesome, and a summer tubing hill, which is like tubing on snow but on a synthetic surface,” she said. “We also have archery, a climbing wall, canoeing, and mini golf—so many activities.”

In addition, the ranch has more than 5,000 acres of mountain terrain to explore, giving guests plenty of space to roam, and an abundance of wildlife.

“We have a lot of moose, and we see more and more of them every year,” she said. “I can’t blame them. If I were a moose, this is where I’d want to hang out.”

“We [also] have some elk that you can hear bugling in the fall, especially up in Rocky Mountain National Park,” she added. “A fun thing to do is go in the evening and listen to the elk bugle during mating season. We have typical mountain predators—mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes, and such—and a lot of cute little foxes running around everywhere, marmots, and all kinds of mountain critters.”

In the summer, the Nordic Center serves as the dining hall for the YMCA’s overnight camp. That camp initially drew Degginger to the ranch 20 years ago when she applied for a job there.

“I’m a Midwestern girl who had never cross-country skied before until I came out for an interview for summer camp,” she recalled. “They said, ‘We’re going to take a tour of camp. Put on these skis.’ ”

That was her first of many times on skis. She got the job and stayed, later becoming the head of programming and the Nordic Center at Snow Mountain Ranch.

“If you love being outdoors and recreating outdoors, you can’t find a better place to be,” she said. “We’re at the Continental Divide, and Rocky Mountain National Park is not very far away. You can do everything, and it’s absolutely gorgeous.”

I grew up playing soccer. Every practice was hard. “No pain, no gain,” and all of that. By tenth grade, I was burned out and quit. 

I started rock climbing. Every day at the crag was about pushing your limits. This was before indoor gyms or any concept of training other than doing as many pull ups as possible. I plateaued, got frustrated, and quit. 

Then I had a go at running. I read some books, but skipped the training methodology parts and cherry picked the workouts. Every run was hard. Every interval was done to exhaustion. I plateaued, got frustrated, and quit. 

Then I got into cycling. I began to hear of “easy” rides. I knew pros who rode around for four or five hours at such a pedestrian pace that they were talking the whole time. ‘How insanely boring!’ I thought. ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ So I went hard every time because it’s more fun. And guess what? I plateaued, got frustrated, and quit.

Fortunately, I didn’t learn my lessons the really hard way – through injury – but I still learned them the really stupid way –  by throwing away any potential I might have had. 

You can’t go hard all of the time. It’s as simple as that (at least on paper).

The Basics of Polarized Training

Make your easy days easy and your hard days hard. 

That is the backbone of a Polarized Training model. I had no problem making my hard days hard–they were all hard days after all. Full gas. Gun to tape. But in hindsight, I realize how depleted and chronically fatigued I was. I thought that was the desired effect, but it meant my training became less and less productive. 

It’s the easy days that are actually the hard part.

First: I hear your inner dialogue. “Who wants to go easy? It’s unproductive. It’s a waste of precious time. It looks lame on Strava.” But the science says everyone should want to go easy. Metabolic efficiency is the name of the game.

If hard workouts train the engine to create more horsepower, then the easy sessions improve the gas mileage. 

Secondly: let’s define easy. Training intensity is commonly split into five zones. (Some systems use three and others use seven, but I’ll be referring to a five zone system.) Zones 1, and especially 2, define the ranges of easy. Heart rate is the typical metric, especially for cross country skiers and runners, while cyclists typically use power. 

Identifying Your Easy Zones

The theoretically simple method for establishing heart rate zones is to work backwards from your maximum heart rate where each zone represents a percentage of the max. The challenge is that there’s very little agreement on how to best calculate one’s max heart rate without actually experiencing it. 

A more accurate method is to undergo a lactate threshold test, where heart rate zones are calculated based on the amount of lactate measured in the bloodstream. More accurate, but more difficult to conduct, and not universally accessible.

So how can we determine what is easy and what is too hard? 

In an effort to keep easy easy, I’m going to define it as conversational pace. You should be able to talk in complete sentences without having to… pause… to take in… more air… to finish your sentence. This is mediocre science and not especially objective, but with some practice, it’s not difficult to find that upper limit of talkability. 

If you’re a numbers person, you can likely conduct your own ramp test where – after a warm up period – you progressively increase speed/effort while reciting poetry or singing along to what’s in your AirPods. Mark the heart rate where you lose the rhythm, and that’s a decent estimate of your upper limit for Zone 2.

Your new goal on easy days will be to keep your heart rate below this threshold, not necessarily at this level. For those accustomed to pushing the pace on every session, slowing down enough to keep your heart rate in the appropriate zones might feel like a big adjustment. There’s no real way around it – you’ll need to buy in, and trust the process/science. Maybe use it as an excuse to get out with a training buddy who is generally slower than you and give the whole “pedestrian pace, talking the whole time” thing a go.

Worst comes to worst, you give it an honest try and decide you prefer to just go hammer, then go back to your old ways. That’s the beauty of being a recreational athlete – at the end of the day, we’re just pursuing hobbies we find rewarding and enjoyable. 

* A note for Strava users: don’t rely too much on the Relative Effort number. As a metric of intensity over time, it seems optimized to capture long, hard efforts like an hour-long tempo run where your heart rate stays high for the entire hour. It doesn’t handle intervals very well since the rest periods sort of cancel out the high intensity efforts. 

For example, Strava gave 60 points to a 55 minute tempo run with an average heart rate of 158; however, an 57 minute interval session (9x600m on the track) with an average heart rate of 147 only got 35 points. To me, both sessions were equally hard, but the tempo run scored 25 points higher. 

Strava does allow you to use your perceived exertion in place of heart rate for calculating Relative Effort. When I enabled this override, the tempo run scored an 87 while the track workout got a 147. (My easy efforts aren’t affected much.) Personally, I’ve found the Relative Effort score, along with the weekly log and Fitness and Freshness, far more useful (and accurate?) with this tweak. Here’s a deeper dive into that black hole.

The Purpose of Polarized Training

Now we can talk about why the easy is important. 

Stress + rest = growth/adaptation/strength/speed. That is the basic formula. Our bodies are designed to adapt to load, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to make those adaptations. Too much volume or intensity and the body will stop absorbing. Not enough recovery and the body will stop adapting. Best case, your performance plateaus. Worst case, you get injured. 

The Krebs Cycle. The stuff of High School nightmares. But the essence of the endurance athlete. The Krebs Cycle is the pathway by which our bodies put gas in the tank. It is the process by which our mitochondria – magical little intracellular thingies – convert carbohydrates, fats, and proteins into the specific energy required by muscles to contract. In oversimplified terms, the more efficient the mitochondria are, the faster and longer we can go. And it appears that the best way to train mitochondrial efficiency is with training in Zone 2. (If you want to seriously nerd out, this podcast with Dr Iñigo San Millán, perhaps the Father of Zone 2,  is a deep dive in a submarine to depths of the ocean.)

The easy/Zone 2 is considered so important that it typically makes up 70-80% of elite athletes’ training volume. The other 20-30% is hard (high Zone 3, Zone 4, and rarely into Zone 5). For the athlete who doesn’t have all day, every day to train, that means you only get a couple of hard sessions per week. Keep the rest easy.

Some that’s hard, lots that’s easy – that’s the essence of putting Polarized Training into practice.

Example Training Plan Template

My training template is based on my work schedule and typical life obligations. I’ve given myself a max of three hard sessions a week with one of them longer (2-3 hrs ride or mountain run–the fun stuff!) and the others around an hour of intervals. My strength/core maintenance sessions typically fall into the easy category and don’t require much recovery (no delayed onset muscle soreness). But my schedule is also very flexible. If I’m tired, I can move a hard session to another day or skip it that week. If I get too busy or stressed, then I can modify the program without too much frustration.

I’m fortunate that I can train/play seven days a week, as long as I’m recovering adequately. However if your schedule only allows for training three days a week, you can still apply the basic formula and have one hard day and two easy days.

For some of you, this may be common sense and describe how you’ve been training for years. For others, this is quite a departure from your norm and will take a concerted effort to implement. But whether your goal is optimal performance or staying healthy for years to come, investing in a polarized plan, and especially leaning into the Zone 2 work, will pay dividends.

Lastly, I think any discussion about training principles/plans needs to have the overriding theme of ‘push yourself, but be kind to yourself’.

Be flexible. Training plans aren’t written in stone. Don’t beat yourself up if work, family, weather, fatigue, or lack of motivation keeps you from your intended workout. Take a walk, play with the kids, lie down on the sofa—whatever it takes to reset and be ready for another day. One workout will not make or break, but constant self-criticism will sink the ship.

 Some of us choose to oppose these trendlines, wrestling with them like tentacles in a roiling sea of errands and bills and fraying cartilage and arthritis. During well more than one rollerski session each year, I think of the “strange resistance” Robert Frost describes in his poem “West Running Brook”:

“It has this throwing backward on itself / So that the fall of most of it is always/ Raising a little, sending up a little.”

This man, whose Vermont cabin touches the Rikert Nordic trail system, continues:

“It is this backwards motion toward the source/ Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,/ The tribute of the current to the source./ It is from this in nature we are from./ It is most us.”

The tribute of the current to the source. It’s as though Frost (who, I’m guessing would be Birkie wave 8 – at best) was tasked to make an inspirational T-shirt that captures the mind of a masters skier. I am proud to be a member of this infinitesimal subset of American society, and if you still think skis with holes in the tips look new, I imagine you are too.  

 After too much running for my large frame and my knees, I began uphill skiing in earnest in my mid-30s, just as I knew these charts were generally tipping downwards. As I was effectively starting from scratch, though, I felt I had an advantage. I did not have to chase the ghost of my 22 year-old self, vaunted by a college program and a systematic knowledge of voluntary suffering. Skiing gave me a second athletic life, and as I opened its invitations to technique, training blocks, intensity sessions, and World Cup fandom, I delighted in every aspect of its complexity.  

 Nearly twenty years into it, the fires still burn, though sometimes it’s hard to tell whether I’ll coax any new flames or just ride along the glimmer of dying embers. Now into the swing of summer as we are, I find myself between an acronym – SAMITS (skiers are made in the summer) – and, a hammock. Can I throw another log onto this fire? Should I? It’s a question of little worldly consequence, and yet it’s the central question of this other world I’ve built for myself. 

 More than anything, the lure of skiing these days is that reliable doorway it opens into another place. I have sat through all-morning “self-care” sessions in hot rooms in masks, and then I have clicked into the Marwes and breathed. I have endured a full Guy Fieri cooking show in the doctor’s waiting room, then I’ve gently climbed through the woods with four points of contact. I just learned the world emitted more C02 than ever last year, and I needed to get out and roll among the innocent trees.   

This otherworldliness has especially come as I’ve lived in, and now just north of, Manhattan all these years. I have approximately one teammate (the great Sproule Love) and I get on snow maybe a dozen days a season. But new wheels roll well on fresh pavement even here, and it’s easy to let the mind return to the familiar grooves. On the rail trail that runs mercifully just out my door and now nearly connects through the entire state of New York, I can lather into a third hour under a canopy of early spring leaves and let the Wendell Berry in: “The health of nature is the primary ground of hope – if we can find the humility and wisdom to accept nature as our teacher.” Yes, skiing can soften the hard edges of the world and give way to the dance of balance and strength. And yet, sometimes I need more than this.  

 Sometimes, I can rouse the fires within to see a completely different world beyond, with its own muses and images. Here’s where I hear the siren song of Devon Kershaw and his allusions of carnage: the “rip their legs off” and “gun to tape annihilate” and the “going down to the basement.” Racing is just instinctual for me. I ran my first 10k back in 1979, when I was nine, and whether up stairs, across bogs and sand dunes, on bikes, on skis or snowshoes, I’ve raced every year since. To this career high school English teacher, it’s the opposite of grading essays.  

 When I’m trying to connect with my limited stores power and speed, I’ll sometimes watch World Cup clips on YouTube. I see Petter Northug gritting his way through the field to take the 50k classic at the 2015 Falun World Championships; I see those last few k’s in the Beijing Olympic 30k when Jessie Diggins finishes on fumes for silver. (Yes, a proud moment in our household when my daughters encouraged me to name our puppy Diggins.) The one I’m thinking of now is the 2019 World Champs 30k skiathlon in Seefeld. It’s Sundy-Bolshunov-Røthe trying to destroy each other up the last few climbs, finding a hop skate after seventy-five minutes of redline racing, then spilling across the line with perfectly emptied tanks. Perhaps you have your own favorite clips.  

As I try to summon a summer interval in the suburbs, after dropping my daughter a sleepover, I can get to thinking about my own highlight tape, which Chad Salmela is definitely not narrating. I think of the 2006 Pepsi Challenge, when at 48k, I gave a nod to my one teammate and we made a decisive surge, dusting the last young buck riding in our train. I think about Bitch Hill, a steep little climb 40k into the Birkie, when several years later, I found the spring to fracture our large, lollygagging pack. I find these memories within, gently flogging me with their flagella. In part because it’s so hard to explain them in my faculty lounge in the Bronx, in part because they are the payouts of so much stoic suffering, and mostly because I just love it, I want to make more.  

This winter was different though. Mysteriously, I started feeling a constriction in my chest. I was often unable to get a full breath, even when reading in bed at night. When I tried to get out of zone three, I just couldn’t find the air. I saw my pulmonologist, my cardiologist, a gastroenterologist. I drew blood, I got tests. I got sucked down the Internet vortex: was it long Covid? Had I even had Covid? It took time and was expensive, and I didn’t learn much.  

With each race I had penciled into the schedule and had to decline, I felt the nip of disappointment. I didn’t want to say good-bye yet. Could I salvage, at least, something?  

One day in February after a good night’s sleep, I decided to enter a low-stakes challenge – the benchmark 10k rollerski time trial in Central Park. It wasn’t awful. In fact, it was an improvement from a few months prior. So, I succumbed to the beast and tried a few late-season races.  

It’s not a great feeling to stand on the starting line with a doubting mindset – “What am I doing here?” “Don’t blow up.” But that’s how things went – I felt like I was wearing someone else’s clothes. It was hard, humbling, and really not that much fun. But my last race of the “season” (four races total) offered a glimmer of hope. It was just a 5k relay leg, in perfect conditions on a rather flat course. Still, I felt relatively strong. I was actually able to pass people up a hill. So that’s the memory I’m choosing to take away. 

But is it enough to justify all the rigamarole? That sixth hill interval when the pain just feels pointless? Those beautifully aimless workouts – where you go a little faster than you should – interrupted by the voice of prudence? The occasional margarita you eschew for some pious purpose? And then, when winter comes, all that fretting over Wunderground and waxes and websites, where you read about volunteers shoveling snow onto corners in dwindling hopes of staving off the coming thaw, toward which your travel no doubt contributes?  

 Ugh – yeah, it’s worth it! We skiers worship a rather demonic god, it seems. And its worth only grows because it’s so fleeting, like surfing through a barrel wave – exhilarating and bound to crash. Like trying to ski uphill forever. If you, reader, have not grappled with this same question, you probably will!  

Here’s the best revelation I’ve come to: I just want to be able to work hard enough so that going out on a long ski feels easy. For a recent New York Times piece about the pleasure of running slowly, one of the most popular comments was, “Running for joy beats running to win anytime.” I’m not quite there yet, but I see the light of this too. For now, I want my strength to be more than my pain. I know my imagination can supply the rest.  

Author Bio:

Tim Donahue teaches high school English at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in The Bronx. He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY and rollerskis year round. You can find his writing on climate change and education in The New York Times, USA Today, and Newsweek.

Part 1 of this story details Eliška’s experience coaching through pregnancy and the birth of her son. Keep reading to learn about the challenges she, like many women, experienced during the postpartum recovery process, and what it took to navigate year one of life on the road with baby Viggo.

Expectation versus reality. 

When preparing to interview Eliška Albrigtsen about her experience pairing NCAA coaching with new motherhood, I expected the challenges she faced during her transition to primarily be focused on the balancing act of managing a demanding job with frequent travel and a new baby. Maybe a few relatable stories of airport meltdowns, sleepless nights in hotels while on the road with the team, and inopportune timing of diaper blowouts. Or any number of other ways societal systems in the US seem to be structured in opposition to new moms in the workplace.  

But Eliška’s passion for her job and dedication to her athletes were abundantly clear throughout the conversation; coaching is where she thrived. Her grit and energy allowed her to problem solve bringing baby Viggo on the road with the team – perhaps paired with the added fortune of a husband whose skill set includes waxing and ski testing and a well placed mother-in-law eager to help care for her grandson. And the team embraced its new member without hesitation.

In reality, the biggest challenges Eliška faced in returning to coaching postpartum were connected to the physiological impacts pregnancy and delivery had on her body. In short, it was a discussion on the shortcomings of our healthcare system and the myriad of ways the current standard of postpartum care falls short of what many women require to restore their body to full function.

Her story highlights a few key takeaways for programs looking to support women coaches surrounding pregnancy; in particular, there’s much more to the return to coaching than navigating who will care for your child while you’re out training with athletes and traveling to races. Respecting the timeline of a slow return, and perhaps offsetting the costs of postpartum physical therapy, may be an essential component of an improved and holistic support system.  

Postpartum Recovery

A theme of Eliška’s narrative of her perinatal experience was the ways in which her “athlete mindset” served and hindered her ability to roll with the punches. 

While women like Kikkan Randall, Marit Bjørgen, Aino-Kaisa Saarinen paved the way for women looking to begin their family before retiring from professional skiing in many ways, Eliška said that the ease with which they outwardly seemed to rebound beyond their previous levels of fitness was, in some ways, a disservice to women like herself who did not experience as smooth a return. In her mind, she had expected a comparable experience given her athleticism and good health, but quickly learned that women might be better served using caution when extrapolating from outliers. 

“You see these professional skiers having babies and then coming back and winning gold medals at [the] Olympics,” she said. “And you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s gonna be me.’ But no one really sees the giant support team they have behind them.

“They have professional doctors, physical therapists, and strength and conditioning [specialists] to go through their pregnancy with them, monitoring everything, having them at the birth, and then jumping right into the recovery. As a coach, you don’t get that. You probably have the same amount of on-ski hours as professional skiers – not the same quality of course, but you can’t do your job without being there. So I think that’s how most of our ski community sees pregnancy – so easy and you are an even better athlete afterwards, because all these women did it…

“For me, it was the opposite. It was hell. I can’t wear the clothes that I wore when I was pregnant because I have extreme PTSD from that… it was such a, not just physically but painfully, impacting experience.” 

Though expectation and reality could not have been more different, her drive to recover from the injuries sustained from pregnancy and birth, and the creativity required to adapt during the recovery process, mirrored her general approach as an athlete more broadly. 

“I think the athlete mindset in me was, ‘Okay, I had this baby. Now I put myself through physical therapy, and I’m gonna recover’… Just like after having a shoulder dislocation or having a torn iliopsoas, all those pretty crazy injuries – I knew that eventually you get better, and you get back to yourself.”

What Eliška identified as the biggest physical challenge she faced after the birth of her son was the repair of a condition called diastasis recti (DR), which is a separation and consequential loss of function and strength of the rectus abdominis muscles. 

During pregnancy, as a woman’s belly expands to accommodate the growing baby, the muscles of the abdomen are forced to stretch. The deeper muscle layers, known as the transverse abdominis, are structured like a corset wrapping around the belly, giving them a greater capacity to expand. However, the rectus abdominis muscles, better known as the “six pack” muscles, run vertically while connected by fascia, and have significantly less ability to adapt to the expansion. 

Instead, the outward pressure and growth of the belly causes the rectus abdominis muscles to separate, thinning and weakening the fascia as it stretches, or in extreme cases, tearing it.

“When I was the most pregnant, my six pack was under my armpits.” 

This connective tissue cannot simply snap back to its original state after delivery. As fascia lacks the blood flow of muscle tissue, it is slow to heal, leaving many women with a gap between muscles known as a diastasis. All women experience some amount of ab separation during pregnancy, but if the gap of two or more finger widths between the muscles persists postpartum, she is diagnosed with DR. 

Because of the combination of her stature, a short torso, and the size of her baby, Eliška found herself with an extreme separation. 

“Basically, you could stick your whole fist into my stomach. That was the biggest problem for me because I basically lost my core. And my core was a big part of me as an athlete – not just as a skier, but as an athlete. So that was really hard.” 

As she hopes for a second child down the road, any surgical repair options were contraindicated, and instead, Eliška dedicated herself to a physical therapy regimen. She felt lucky to have access to a Fairbanks-based Osteopathic medicine expert, Dr. Todd Capistrant, who specializes in the Fascial Distortion Model and was therefore primed to help Eliška improve her diastasis. 

“I saw him basically on a weekly basis.”

She also met regularly with a pelvic floor physical therapist, both to work on the diastasis, and to restore appropriate function to the muscles of her pelvic floor. Her PT identified that her pelvic floor was hypertonic, meaning the muscles carried tension chronically, rather than contracting and relaxing in functional patterns. Like holding a flexed arm hang and then being asked to knock out a set of chin-ups, this chronic low-level tension leads to fatigue in the pelvic floor muscles, preventing them from outputting the strength and tension required to support the organs sitting inside the pelvic girdle and interact appropriately with surrounding musculature when recruited during activity.

With the guidance of the PT and a set of progressive exercises to relax and engage her muscles appropriately, Eliška saw progress, but it took time for her muscles to function in coordination subconsciously.

“It took me probably around eight months to incorporate the mental [and neuromuscular] connections back. I was able to [engage the muscles] when I wanted to, but all the muscles of the pelvic floor, everything that’s sitting in the pelvis, they were not working with the rest of my body.”

She expressed feeling lucky to have access to high level care in Fairbanks, including her therapist who could incorporate a variety of techniques to help her recover, including deep tissue massage, cupping, electrical muscle stimulation, and biofeedback.

“I think biofeedback for athletes just works the best. Because we’re such strong willed people. Like, if we see it happening, we can really focus on making it happen more.” 

An unexpected benefit of time and resources being placed into learning how to strengthen and reintegrate her deeper core musculature trickled down to her athletes. She recognized that several of her athletes, who had complained of back pain surrounding core workouts, were not sufficiently engaging their transverse abdominis muscles, instead relying too heavily on the outer rectus abdominis or other smaller core muscles. Teaching the techniques she learned through PT helped improve the form of her athletes, relieving the back pain they had experienced previously. 

“It definitely deepened my understanding of how the core should work, and how we use it when we ski.”

As she navigated her own challenges, she became aware through talking with friends of how common these experiences are amongst mothers. Describing herself as “someone who says everything”, she felt it was important to both be open regarding the challenges she’s faced, and the resources and options available for women to make progress toward recovery, rather than accept the conditions as permanent. 

Most women only receive one postpartum checkup, approximately six weeks after delivery. As my own pelvic floor PT described it, these visits typically only check to see that the tissues have healed and that there are no visible pelvic organ prolapses, but most midwives and OB/GYN practitioners do not have the depth of knowledge to assess muscle function, hence the need for an evaluation from a pelvic floor PT. However, quality pelvic floor physical therapy is not universally available, and as it is not always covered by insurance, making it cost-prohibitive for many women to continue care long enough to make sufficient progress.  

“I think the most tragic experience post-pregnancy that I had was the realization that women are left being damaged from bringing life to the world.”

As she discussed her own experience with the women in her community, in turn, many of them shared that they continued to suffer from the impacts of ab separation or pelvic floor dysfunction from pregnancies, including friends who were more than ten years postpartum. Some of these women had given up activities they had enjoyed previously, like running, because they felt as though they were “spilling their guts” out of their bellies due to a lack of core function. 

“How is this okay for women to live this way? That was just mind blowing to me.”

Imparting the knowledge she gained in the process, and advocating for women to find their own ways to make it work, she offered up suggestions.

“I was just like, ‘Hey, if you can’t go to physical therapy, this is how you tape your belly, so at least you can start hiking fast.”

At roughly 13 months postpartum at the time of the call, Eliška recognized the improvements she’s made, while still acknowledging she has not fully recovered. 

“It’s [been] more than a year, and I feel functional. I still have pains and I would not go and enter a race, because my brain can push much harder than my body can, so I know I would hurt myself. But I’m so much better than most of my friends that, you know, [had to] just give it up…”

As she worked with athletes through the fall and winter, Eliška found ways to adapt her ski technique to avoid putting unnecessary strain on the musculature she was working to rehab, and work instead with the muscles that already had the necessary strength. In particular, she needed to change her doublepole technique.

By returning to the older style of doublepoling, which involved less of a crunch through the abdomen than modern technique, instead increasing the bend at the waist and relying more heavily on the arm and shoulder muscles. 

“I don’t have the strength there anymore [to crunch]. My muscles are two three packs, they’re not connected. So I go into doublepole and I tighten my  lower belly, but then I pull my butt up kind of like into downward dog instead, and work with my arms again.”

Another lingering problem she has experienced is a result of the endocrinological changes experienced surrounding pregnancy. To allow the body to grow during pregnancy and a widening of the hips for delivery, the body releases an aptly-named hormone called relaxin, which acts on cartilage and other soft tissues to allow expansion and increased joint mobility to occur. The production of relaxin typically declines after delivery, but remains higher than normal for the duration of breastfeeding.

While beneficial for pregnancy, it also puts perinatal women at a higher risk of joint instability and consequently injury. 

Eliška shared that she seems to produce an above average amount of relaxin, which has continued to affect her postpartum as a nursing mom. She experienced joint pain, particularly in her pubic symphysis joint at the front of the pelvis, with unexpected movements – like slipping on ice or mud. “And it’s always slippery here. Like 10 months out of the year.”

“On skis, I don’t have a problem. Because everything’s gliding and I already have the natural anticipation of gliding. But walking and slipping – I try to catch myself and my muscles, my joints, my tendons are just too loose.” 

Reflecting on her journey through the first year postpartum, the lack of care available to most women remained at the forefront of her mind. The impact of these types of conditions, which linger if left untreated, affects more than just the level of activity a woman can enjoy. As those who have experienced it (waves hand) can attest, the emotional toll affects quality of life more broadly. 

“I would absolutely fight for every woman to be able to have a year of free PT [after pregnancy]. You just need your life back.”

Life on the Road

There’s a commonly used phrase when it comes to raising children: “It takes a village.” This resonated as Eliška shared insights into what support was necessary to allow baby Viggo to travel with the team through the competition season.

While children under two-years-old are typically able to fly for free on their parents’ laps, the travel of the person who would care for Viggo while Eliška was working is not. Fortunately, her husband Tobias was already incorporated as a volunteer assistant coach, and had both the skillset and the NCAA certifications to play a variety of roles during travel, which also got him on the payroll to offset travel costs.

“I’m lucky that my husband’s quite good tester and waxer as well. And traveling with a full team this year, six [women] and six [men], I knew that we will need more than two coaches to wax.”

And, conveniently, Tobias’ mother is based in Boulder, CO. “She was able to actually drive to all the races and babysit when we were ski waxing and racing.”

For US Nationals, UAF collaborated with other Alaskan clubs to wax, but it was still useful to have an extra driver to bring athletes back and forth to the venue. Consequently, they paid out of pocket for the flight, but Tobias was able to get a per-diem salary as a driver. “So we got at least the food covered,” she laughed.

For other RMISA and SuperTour races where UAF was only waxing for their own athletes, Tobias could have his travel expenses fully covered in exchange for his work. It’s perhaps a model that’s hard to replicate for other mom-coaches, but still demonstrates that with some creativity and determination, bringing the family along for the ride is possible. 

“We call it the primary. He’s the primary on the baby when we have training days, where me and my assistant go with athletes and train. And then when we were testing and race waxing, grandma was the primary. And oh my God, bless her heart — she paid for all of her gas and her accommodation and food. She would just come to the house where we were staying when we had to leave and just babysat for us… So that’s the way that we made it work, but it’s a very, I think, exceptional situation.”

Was traveling back and forth from Fairbanks to Colorado and Utah challenging with a toddler? Yes. But Eliška knew it was something they would need to navigate as a family regardless of her career. 

“I know living in Alaska, he’s gonna fly anywhere he goes. That’s just what it is. So that was just like one thing that we were like, ‘Yeah, there’s no way around it.’ We did have to travel with more things. Because you have to have the car seat, we have to have the crib, we had to have a bunch of diapers with us.”

The system worked for the first year, but it will need to be modified for next season. The full RMISA calendar has not yet been set, however, the regional championships will be held in Anchorage, which will make at least one competition easier to travel to. 

From there, it will be running the calculus on what makes sense financially. She laughed that Viggo is already a squirmy baby to keep on their laps on the plane and will need his own seat next year, but she is also not sure whether he will still be nursing, which may make it easier for her to leave him behind with Tobias.

In terms of the impact to the team, better worded as the lack thereof, Eliška felt Viggo’s presence on the road improved the atmosphere. Rather than lamenting their littlest teammate, they found humor and joy in his presence. 

“When you’re stressed before the race, and you’re having breakfast and you’re barely putting the oatmeal into your mouth [because of nerves], and the baby in front of you is just like throwing the food and laughing… I think that it helped with the team atmosphere, for sure.”

In addition to helping distribute the weight of ski, wax, and baby gear when navigating through the airport, the athletes also served as an extra set of eyes in the team house. 

“The team, in general, was super helpful as well. When we would be waxing in the garage, they were playing with Viggo, and he believes they’re all his brothers and sisters, I’m pretty sure.”

Reflections on the Experience Thus Far

Praising the community in Fairbanks, Eliška was grateful for the help and support she received through her perinatal journey, which allowed her to not only continue as head coach, but help the team to new heights this season. Rather than holding her back, becoming a mother enhanced her ability to lead the Nanooks program. 

“I also feel like my season was so much more successful this year because I really wanted to go home to my baby. So I was really trying to work smarter and more efficiently, and I think the athletes probably had that push too.”

While some might fault a woman who shares that her priorities have shifted since having a child, Eliška explained the number of ways this desire to optimize practice time served her team. 

“I was always driven for success – I love being successful. But now it’s more like, ‘Yes, I will be successful so then I can spend more time with my child.’”  

As to whether there was anything she would have done differently, Eliška’s answer was more focused on reducing barriers to mom-coaches as a group surrounding pregnancy. 

“I think the side that no one ever talks about is: how fit coaches should actually be able to do their job well.”

Because her insurance cycle was aligned with the school calendar, her deductible reset in July. Having maximized her out of pocket expenses with prenatal care and delivery, this meant the physical therapy treatments she needed were essentially free for the first four months. However, after the plan turned over for the new year, each pelvic floor PT visit cost $60–70, and she was looking to go twice per week to continue to make steady progress. This adds up quickly, particularly for a family relying on one salary, which happens to be a ski coaching salary. 

While nationwide free postpartum PT for all women would be the ideal, Eliška proposed that these costs should, at minimum, be offset by the school or program.

“That is something I would definitely fight for women coaches. Talk to your boss, or whoever, and tell them, ‘If you want me to come back to the same level of coaching, you need to pay for occupational therapy for me to recover.”

At 24-years-old, Hannah Halvorsen recently announced that she is ending the pro-skier chapter of her life, but it’s not the only transition she has on deck. This past weekend, Halvorsen also graduated from Alaska Pacific University (APU) with degrees in cognitive psychology and business administration. As a senior capstone project, focused on the psychology side of her studies, Halvorsen chose to research a topic she has been invested in throughout her time as a student-athlete: eating disorders in sport. 

Given the size and scope of the topic, she began to explore ways to narrow the lens. She chose to focus on cross-country skiing to leverage her extensive experience as an athlete, but was still initially unsure of where to begin. 

“I didn’t want to look at just, ‘how do we get them to go away?’ because I just don’t think that is feasible with the resources and education we have right now,” Halvorsen explained in a call.

Ultimately, she chose to consider the topic from a perspective she had not encountered previously: that of the coach.

“Not every nordic athlete has access to a dietician or to a counselor, depending on their insurance, depending on their family culture, their family support… But the majority of athletes have a coach and that’s a frequent person that they’re interfacing with. So I thought, ‘This is a really unique link that a lot of people have. How do we utilize that?’”

Rather than trying to identify a “solution” to a nuanced and multifaceted mental health condition, Halvorsen looked to collect a “broad perspective on what coaches think, what coaches feel, [and] what coaches see… I wondered what it looks like for them because they see athletes come and go all the time, and they see all different types of athletes.” Utilizing connections in the sport both internationally and domestically, she contacted coaches from the junior level through the World Cup.

Looking to avoid factual answers that may just be regurgitated onto a survey from a basic Google search, Halvorsen sent coaches a list of four prompts, and asked them to submit their response as a video. “I wanted to see their mannerisms and their body language and the inflection in their voice when they were responding. Essentially, where they were at with [the topic].”

Specifically, the questions were as follows:

1. How do you see issues with eating disorders manifest in athletes who may or may not be struggling? What types of behaviors do you see that you associate with this problem? 
2. What are some of the pressures or contributing factors that you either notice or athletes tell you are the reasons that an athlete starts down the path of an eating disorder?
3. What do you see as the challenges with reducing the amount of eating disorders in sport? What types of obstacles make it hard for an athlete with an eating disorder to recover?
4. Do you see a difference with eating disorders between male and female skiers? Such as prevalence, the root cause, how it manifests, or anything else.

Setting her expectations low on what she would receive in return, Halvorsen was amazed as videos rolled in, and suddenly found herself with over three hours of thoughtful and in-depth responses. Some of the participants included: US National Team coaches Matt Whitcomb, Kate Barton, and Jason Cork; the Italian and Finish National Team coaches and Norwegian Women’s Team coach; current and former NCAA coaches like Cami Thompson Graves (Dartmouth), Maria Stuber (College of St. Scholastica), Marine Dusser (Univ. of AK Anchorage); elite post-graduate coaches Erik Flora (APU) and Andy Newell (BSF Pro); and junior level coaches Anna Schultz (Craftsbury), Molly Susla (Crested Butte), and Kris Hanson (Stillwater, MN).  

The challenge then became condensing this footage into a concise and effective 15-minute montage, fit to a “script” that would connect the perspectives without redundancy or losing the attention of viewers. “I wanted to have this artistic effect of being [shorter] sound bites, so people would stay engaged.”

The final project: Hannah Halvorsen’s senior project video.

As she reflected on what she heard from coaches, Halvorsen identified some of the important themes that resonated with her and aligned with what she had learned through her studies on the subject.

“There were some very noticeable overlaps. A lot of [coaches] said, ‘I’m not a medical professional, I’m not qualified in eating disorder rehab or therapy or treatment. I am not the person for that. It’s not appropriate for me, it’s not something I have the skills to do, and it’s unethical for me to be doing it.’ And it was honestly really nice to hear that at all different levels, coaches do know that this isn’t their job or role…

“I also noticed that a lot of them talked about how eating disorders weren’t just about sports performance, or wanting to perform in sport. A lot of the coaches pointed out how it often came at a time where the athlete has a lot of other stress in their life, and this is just something that they have found control over, which is also something that I’ve researched and learned about in preparing for this video.”

Halvorsen pointed out that this is a key distinction. While negative body image and a preoccupation with one’s physical appearance can be symptoms of eating disorders, the root cause is typically much deeper. In the endurance sport realm, an unhealthy need for control can run parallel to the type-A, perfectionistic mindset that may also contribute to athletic development and progress in sport.

In her advocacy work in the eating disorder space, Jessie Diggins has often used the phrase “Genetics loads the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger.” Or, as Andy Newell put it in Halvorsen’s video, eating disorders are “stressful habits that manifest themselves as eating habits.”

“Another big takeaway that I would describe more as a tangible lesson from this,” Halvorsen continued. “And the coaches kind of led to it – is that the right role for a coach is to be in touch with athletes and be aware and there for them, so that if they do notice a change in behavior, they can be that link that helps the athlete get connected with the help that they need as soon as possible. They’re not the one to fix that problem, but they might be the first person who sees it. The first person who checks in with [the athlete] and says, ‘Hey, you should see someone about this.’ That, I think, is where I stand on the issue right now.”   

Reflecting on her experience as a World Cup athlete and the responses of international coaches she received, Halvorsen indicated that she did not notice any significant differences in trends compared to the US, though this was an aspect she was looking to investigate. 

“‘Does it vary culturally in how we see it, how it manifests, how we talk about it?’ Overall, I would say, the problems seem to come from the same issues. They seem to be similar in the way that athletes want to hide it. It’s kind of taboo to talk about it. It’s largely more taboo to talk about an eating disorder if you’re a male athlete. Those trends seem to hold very similar.”

While the pervasiveness of eating disorders and disordered eating across genders in sport is a challenging project to take on, Halvorsen indicated that she left feeling positive about the direction progress is heading.   

“Something that surprised me is that I didn’t give coaches enough credit for how in tune they are and how much they care and their capacity to communicate about this. There’s so much talk about how eating disorders are uncomfortable, they’re very secretive, no one wants to talk about them. And that was why I thought, ‘I’m gonna have to send this to 200 coaches because I’m going to maybe get five who are willing to talk.’ And that wasn’t the case at all. They talked in depth about it and I think that surprised me, and made me feel really optimistic, too, because coaches are willing to have this conversation and to be very authentic and real about it. And I left feeling a little bit more optimistic that people can get in touch with the help that they need, if they’re ready or wanting that help.”  

Another aspect that Halvorsen pointed out was the development that has happened surrounding eating disorder research over the last decade. She noted a shift away from pigeon-holing the disease as a women’s issue – for example, the change from Female Athlete Triad to Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) – and stated that there are notable differences in studies that were conducted within the last two years, in comparison to those published five or ten years ago.

“It needs to be acknowledged that there has been progress. There’s a lot more conversation about it. There’s a lot more training, there’s a lot more education and understanding of it. That needs to continually be part [of the solution].

“We need people, particularly coaches and older teammates and people in the nordic community, to identify as lifelong learners… because it’s gonna keep changing and we’re gonna get better and better at knowing how to support athletes and how to make the environment better. And so I think committing to having an open mind and staying that way is really important.”

While it was not a focus of the questions posed to coaches, Halvorsen discussed her perspective from her experiences and research on what still needs to change in cross country skiing. 

“I think that there is a subconscious cultural emphasis put on being lightweight, and that was being affirmed and validated and encouraged in subtle ways. Even if we’re saying the right things, athletes and kids and everyone is still aware of what is validated and when is affirmed and when is celebrated.”

She discussed the overt messages a coach could give to athletes, such as an instruction to lose weight for performance or complementing a leaner aesthetic, however, she felt that more covert messaging is pervasive and perhaps more harmful. In particular, she identified aspects of traditional ski training that may skew focus and praise toward athletes with smaller body-types.

“Every time I went to a summer training camp growing up, there was an uphill run test that, I think, held a lot of weight.”

Halvorsen called the test “iconic” and expressed how the test felt like a measuring stick, both for one’s merit as a skier and as a basis for a social hierarchy among the athletes attending the camp. “There’s just a lot of, ‘That’s the cool athlete who can run uphill.’ And it holds for men and women.”

Simultaneously, there are the challenges of a sport whose athletes race in lycra body suits throughout the winter, put in the most training hours during the heat of the summer.

“That means a lot of shirtless time, a lot of shirtless social media, and a lot of emphasis put on doing things uphill. Uphill rollerski time trials, bounding intervals, uphill running time trials, mountain running races. I think all of that plays [into developing good fitness for ski racing], and I’m not saying ‘let’s get rid of it all, don’t do it.’ It just gets validated in a way that a doublepole time trial does not… There’s never quite as much emphasis being put on someone who’s really good on their skis, or really powerful, or really tactically gifted.”

This leaves coaches in a catch-22; should they abandon a measuring stick that has served programs at all levels, both in the US and internationally, or are there alternatives?

“[The uphill run test] is a good marker of fitness, and if there was a way that you only compared to yourself and didn’t use weight loss as a way of improving your times, you would be able to track your fitness. But there’s just no comparison. You could be a better skier than someone and if they’re a lot smaller than you, they probably are going to beat you in that. And no matter what your age is, it’s hard to not see that.”

Denying the inextricable connection between size and uphill performance is not the answer in Halvorsen’s mind, as athletes will “see right through it.” Rather, she believes that an intentional shift in culture toward placing equal value on the myriad of athletic qualities that are less correlated with body size. 

“How do you shift the weight to ‘it can still be valued, it should just be valued the right amount’? Like, ‘It’s one marker that we use, but we also want to see you improving on the doublepole tests. And if you lose a bunch of weight, you’re not going to. We also want to see you improving in speeds, and if you lose weight, you’re not going to improve in speeds.’ I think just giving it a little more balance is the only realistic, well-rounded solution that I see.” 

Halvorsen described herself as “a little bit blunt” and “pessimistic” as she continued to discuss systemic changes she’d like to see in the future, namely, whether athletes at U16 and U18 training camps should be allowed to go shirtless. 

“The kids who go to [U16 and U18] camp are the kids who are really cool and fast on their local teams. So every kid who’s on the local team is looking up to them, and looking at the pictures that they post, and I think that they help set the trend for their local teams. They bring home that culture.” 

She proposed that instead organizers ensure that tee shirts and tanks that athletes receive at those camps be made of light weight, breathable material that remains comfortable even when training in heat and humidity. 

These ideas are rooted in her own experiences as a junior. Attending her first U18 camp was Halvorsen’s first exposure to the unhealthy culture permeating sport, which interrupted the otherwise healthy and unencumbered relationship she had with food and her body, developed through her family culture. Diggins has also acknowledged the disordered eating she witnessed at junior camps as a triggering example she later followed once her eating disorder took hold.

For Halvorsen, this led to a year of fixation on shrinking her body, with an aftermath of self-image and body dissatisfaction highs and lows that have persisted to the present.

“People were talking about what they eat and their weight, and I put it all together and kind of became obsessed with it… I just spent all my energy and time obsessing over what I could eat and when, that I couldn’t see anything else. Making sure to time it so that people would see me eating so that they would hopefully not know that I was doing this. It made me so miserable. It wasn’t sustainable.”

While plenty of change and education remains necessary to improve the climate surrounding athlete health, eating disorders, and RED-S, Halvorsen expressed optimism in the trends across sport culture and the outlook for future generations of athletes.

“It’s such a difficult issue and I don’t know that it’s ever going to totally go away… We’re at a point right now where it’s becoming common knowledge this is an issue and a lot of people are open to having that conversation and learning about it and it’s not as secretive. And that’s huge, because now we have enough people on board that we can start to think, ‘So what are we gonna do about it? I don’t think that we only know. I think we’re flailing a little bit. I think we’re looking, we’re asking the right people, we are trying to figure it out, and we care and we want to make this better. But I don’t think that we’ve figured out exactly what to do and put that into action yet… 

“But I feel optimistic because I think I see a lot of energy being put into, ‘We can’t just ignore this. This issue is huge. And we’re willing to spend the money and the time and energy even if it makes us uncomfortable to figure out what what that is that we need to be doing.'”

Halvorsen is soon headed back to her home state of California for an internship in Berkeley that she described as “more on the business side” of her academic experience. However, she remains passionate about advocating for better education, support, and resources for coaches and athletes, and hopes to return to this type of work in the future. 

“I just think there’s something so central about it, because it’s your body. It’s you. It’s so important. And I think everyone deserves the right to feel good in who they are. I don’t really care if people are good, medium, or slow at skiing, I just want them to feel good in their bodies. Skiing should be a way to feel good, not something that makes you feel bad about your body.”

This article was submitted by a reader. To pitch a story or article to FasterSkier, reach out to info@fasterskier.com.

In 2010, FasterSkier published an article titled “Analysis: Performance and Age”, written by Joran Elias, or as he is otherwise known, “The Statistical Skier.”  The piece attempted to parse the relationship between age and performance by comparing the ages of some of the world’s top skiers to their FIS points in a given year.  Elias was quick to acknowledge the limitations of the analysis, primarily that the data appeared to exhibit selection bias.  The oldest skiers on the World Cup, still racing well into their 30s, were likely still racing precisely because they were the best of the best, while those who were not performing as well retired sooner, and weren’t reflected in the data.  These data appeared to show a trend of improvement associated with getting older, but to what degree was this apparent trend a result of the selection bias?

In the now hallowed annals of the FasterSkier comments section, a commenter with a name none other than Dakota Blackhorse-von Jess, a veritable force in U.S. skiing for over a decade, posed a potential solution.  He asked, “Can you filter the dataset so that only athletes that are still competing at some reasonable later stage (say 30 or 32) are represented?” 

It was a great question.  What would happen if we were able to look at careers that spanned a longer period of time and plotted the trajectories of those careers as the athletes aged?  This would mitigate the effects of attrition on the data and hopefully give us a clearer picture.

The question of what happens to the performance of cross country skiers as they age has personal significance to the authors of this article.  Both of us are solidly into our 20s and deeply invested in the project of being competitive at the highest levels of ski racing.  At the University of Wyoming, we are both involved in furthering the development of a growing program which serves college graduates, many of whom are pursuing graduate studies alongside elite ski racing. 

Athletes at this age often have the unenviable experience of watching as some members of their age cohort find success on the world stage while others do not.  It leaves us to wonder what is possible and what is likely for us to achieve as we move from teens to twenty-somethings to thirty-somethings.

The recent success of Rosie Brennan on the World Cup and at the Olympics has contributed to reigniting a decades old conversation about age, skier development, and team selection.  One has to imagine that this “conversation,” at times less than cordial (as evidenced by archived comment threads on this website), has ended friendships, and who knows, maybe even a few marriages.  Brennan, who has seen striking improvement in her 30s, skied in college despite the U.S. Ski Team’s erstwhile insistence that promising young skiers should “strike while the iron is hot,” eschewing school and taking on international ski careers full time.  After Brennan’s 4th place in the 30km at the Beijing Olympics, U.S. Ski Team Head Coach Matt Whitcomb acknowledged that the previous development strategy may have been short sighted.  At this point, many of America’s most standout skiers have chosen to ski in college, adding renewed urgency to the question of age and development.  At the risk of adding fodder to an already crowded debate, let’s get into the data. 

***

In hopes of combatting the potential selection bias of slower skiers retiring earlier, we focused on skiers that stayed in the game for at least 20 years, or at least held a FIS license and skied in 5+ FIS races per year for that long. To put that in perspective, the FIS points system has only been around since 1994, or 28 total seasons. As you can see in the figure below, the vast majority of skiers who ever hold a FIS license only hold one for a few years.  Those that continue to ski seriously enough to buy a FIS license for 20 years are a tiny, tiny fraction of the skiers. On average, these “20-season skiers” get their first FIS license around the age of 19 and continue past 40.  Additionally, every member of this group happens to fall loosely into the category of “professional skier,” having received at least one World Cup, World Championship, or Olympic start at some point in their career.

We used FIS distance points from the last period of each season from 1994 to 2022.  While it would have been interesting to track sprint points as well, the more recent arrival of sprinting makes a long term analysis less feasible.  In the graph below, each black line represents the career trajectory of a “20-season skier.”  There are 40 athletes represented, 23 of whom are men and 17 of whom are women.  Interestingly, the ratio of men to women who hold FIS licenses for at least 20 years is more or less consistent with the ratio of men to women who have ever held one, suggesting that one gender does not have significantly more “staying power” than another in the highest levels of the sport.  The blue lines represent the overall trend.

Whereas Elias’ 2010 analysis shows a continuing downward points trend even as skiers reach their 40s, ours shows more of a u-shaped trend.  Skiers improve in their teens and 20s, reaching a peak around 30, then begin to experience an increase in points in their late 30s and 40s. This seems to suggest that athletes improve until they hit some peak age and then stop performing as well when they get older.

We can, in fact, fit a trendline and calculate that peak age at which the average skier (or at least the average skier who skied seriously for 20+ years) hits their lowest points. That magic age based on these data happens to be 31.5 for men and 32.0 for women. However, the striking story shown by the mess of black lines is that no one is “the average.” There are clearly many other factors at play in determining a skier’s performance. Some athletes have their worst seasons in their late 20s while others have stellar seasons in their late 30s and even early 40s.  At nearly 41 years old, Italian Giorgio Di Centa stood at 2.9 FIS points, notching multiple top tens on the World Cup.  At 38, Marit Bjørgen stood at 0.9, never leaving the podium at the PyeongChang Olympics in 2018.  There is valuable information to be gleaned from both the aggregate and the individual. 

These results were surprising given the disparity between the 2010 analysis and our own. Why did Elias find a continuing downward trend where we found an upward slope after 30? Was it possible that his results were driven strongly by attrition and selection bias as he suggested?  We went back to the data, this time including everyone with a FIS license, regardless of how many years they held one. We saw the same u-shaped trend as before.  Skiers continued to improve until their late 20s to early 30s before an upward slope in points as they reached their 40s. This was not just the case for elite world cup skiers, but more casual racers as well.  A similar trend is present whether exclusively analyzing skiers with points under 50 or over 500.  Additionally, the age of peak performance stays in the range of 29-32 regardless of the chosen points tier.

Instead of analyzing within point tiers, what if we returned to our “20-season skiers” and segmented each athlete’s career into two pieces–one before their last World Cup, World Champs, or Olympic race–and one after?  This way we would be able to see the difference in performance between skiers at the height of their professional careers in comparison to the years that followed.

The results of this breakdown make sense intuitively. When we separate the careers into “World Cup” and “post-World Cup” segments, the upward trend coincides with retirement and is much steeper for those athletes who have stepped away from World Cup racing.  People don’t ski as fast after their last season on the World Cup as they did before.  One possible explanation for this is that many athletes retire from the highest levels of international competition, stop training as seriously, and begin to perform worse as a result.  Another explanation is that athletes continue to ski on the World Cup until their performance stops improving, and then retire (or are forced to retire) as a result. 

While our results alone can’t distinguish between these possibilities, it seems likely that some combination of them are responsible. Regardless, we believe including serious post-World Cup racing in our analysis allows us to gain valuable insight into the effects of age on performance and supports our conclusion of a peak age around 32. It is also important to reiterate that there are athletes for whom the trend is not representative in the first place.  Nothing about our analysis suggests the inevitability of career decline by the age of 32.

These results do seem to partially explain the discrepancy between our analysis and Elias’, but isolating the World Cup portion of their careers does not fully eliminate the trend of skiers eventually slowing down.  The graph is still “u-shaped.”  It appears that a reason for this is that the landscape of professional skiing has changed since the initial 2010 analysis.  Additional comparison of data before and after 2010 indicates that the phenomenon of points swinging upward with age is a relatively recent one, in part the result of a growing number of skiers continuing to race very seriously at older ages.  In other words, the effects of attrition have become less prominent since 2010 because there is simply less attrition. 

Perhaps the more interesting question here is, what circumstances and structures have allowed this subset of skiers to race at such a high level for so long, while the majority of elite skiers have far, far shorter careers?  It may be worth asking how many people are forced to quit before their potential has been reached because they lack opportunities and support.  Prior to 2010, individuals over the age of 40 only made up 0.4% of total FIS license holders.  In the period since then, that proportion has more than doubled and there are over five times the total number of license holders over 40.  Athletes who are deemed too old to present the shimmering possibility of medals and crystal globes may not be getting as many resources, but they are showing up to train and race in increasingly high numbers anyway.  There are, after all, reasons to race besides winning medals.

Ella DeWolf graduated from the University of Wyoming with her BS in molecular and microbiology and MS in botany. She continues to coach and race while working as a data analyst for an environmental consulting firm.

Andrew Siegel graduated from the University of Vermont in 2021 and is now at the University of Wyoming–coaching, racing, and pursuing an MFA in creative writing. 

This research was made possible by the generous support of the non-profit SNOW (Skiers Nordic of Wyoming).  

If there’s a generalization that can be made about cross country skiers, it might be that we like to “know before [we] go.” As the ski season waxes and wanes, or mid-season storms roll through, we relentlessly check the weather forecast and our local grooming report as we fantasize hungrily about the fresh corduroy or classic tracks we hope to enjoy that day.

But we can’t always know before we go. Timely grooming reporting asks those cultivating the trails to go a step further after a middle-of-the-night shift, when sitting at a computer to update the website in a timely manner might be less appealing than crawling into a warm bed or sipping a hot cup of coffee. This creates friction between the hard-working groomers and skiers who are chomping at the bit and weighing the potential disappointment of making the drive to the ski area without knowing what to expect.

Luckily for both parties, there’s a new system growing which allows faster and more efficient communication, Nordic Pulse. 

Former Canadian national team member Julien Locke has been working as a web-developer for several years to support his ski career. Locke raced regularly on the World Cup from 2017 to 2019, before sustaining a severe concussion, which removed him from training and competition. His career best result arrived in Dresden, Germany where he popped a 15th place finish in the freestyle sprint in 2018. Though he still trains as a professional skier, subsequent health issues have prevented him from returning to his former performance level, but the fire still burns, and he aspires to make it back to the World Cup.

Roughly six years ago, one of Locke’s projects was a website overhaul for Sovereign Lake in Vernon, BC, including integrating a better method for sharing grooming information with skiers.

“Their grooming team was quite frustrated with not having a slick system for them to use to update the report, and their skiers were feeling like they didn’t have enough information,” Locke explained in a call. “So we made a little web based system and it worked okay, but it really opened my eyes to a real need that Sovereign Lake had, and other ski areas that I was working with also had, to promote the groomers perspective and skiers perspective. And it really inspired me to start thinking, ‘How can we make this better?’ And it took quite a few years for this project to really get going. It wasn’t until a year and half ago that I started developing it full time.” 

During the interim, Locke continued to work with Sovereign Lake and other ski clubs, all the while listening to the interests, needs, and frustrations of groomers, skiers, and club organizers. Eventually, this evolved into the development and launch of Nordic Pulse, a GPS-based live grooming system that allows for simple, efficient, and automated communication on grooming operations for ski areas of all sizes and capacities. 

“The goal in the beginning was to make it easier for groomers and ski areas to share what they’re doing, their trail conditions and their grooming reports. And then for skiers to have a central platform so that in November when you don’t know where to go skiing, or mid season when you have two different options of places near you, you can easily and conveniently see what conditions will be like.”

In particular, a need Locke identified and aimed to solve was creating efficiency for the grooming team.

“Oftentimes, they start grooming at midnight, and are grooming until the early, early hours in the morning. They finish their shift, and you know, they’ve been up all night, they’re tired, and the last thing that they want to do is go fiddle around with the website or call somebody to tell them an elaborate description of where they went.”

Locke looked to automate the reporting process and make it seamless. 

“Our solution is using GPS, so the groomers click ‘start’ when they start recording and they click ‘stop’ and when they’re done, and then, in that time, all the grooming reports are done automatically. So it really saves them quite a bit of time every day at the end of their shift not having to report or go through the trails list and try to remember what was groomed at what time.” 

Acknowledging that it is common for a groomer to only hit part of a particular trail within a route, the traditional system of listing off what was completed can fall short. With Nordic Pulse, a color-coded map shows specifically what was groomed each day, including options to differentiate between skate and classic if track has not been reset on all trails that day. If needed, groomers can also select from a materials list to indicate what machinery was used, from snowmobile to PistonBully, depending on what the ski area has available. Additional notes can be added as needed. 

“Being able to get the grooming information onto a map so that the skiers have a really quick visual of what’s been done, I think, was a real need from the people I had talked to. I know from the feedback we’ve gotten, people really appreciate being able to see visually what’s been done.”

When a new ski area comes on board, Nordic Pulse handles the mapping to create a pre-set base on which the system will run. While the app is running in the groomer’s pocket, GPS data points are collected every 20 to 30 meters, keeping precision high even for trails with frequent intersections or overlapping segments. This data is synced to the Nordic Pulse server and processed by its algorithm to determine which trails on the predetermined map were completed, with time stamps.

No cell service at your local trails, or perhaps your groomers don’t want to burn cell data? No problem. 

Groomers can run the app without having cell reception or consuming data. The GPS information will be stored locally on the device until the phone enters WiFi, then the groomer would only need to click sync to push the data to the NordicPulse server. Time stamps will be preserved to accurately reflect the work that was done, should there be delays.

Locke added that some of the earliest users of the system were ski areas based in the Kananaskis Provincial Park near Canmore, Alberta, well outside the reach of cell reception.

In terms of the cost of adopting Nordic Pulse, pricing is adjusted on a sliding scale system depending on the number of kilometers groomed by the ski area, the number of skiers, and the amount of GPS data that needs to be processed with daily grooming. Clubs are billed annually and prices currently range between $600 and $2000 per year. 

Having grown up in the small town of Nelson, BC, it was important to Locke to keep the costs reasonable. 

“When I started developing Nordic Pulse, I was looking at options. One strategy I could have taken was creating an enterprise level product for just large ski areas who have the budget to afford that. But I grew up in a really small club, and I really wanted Nordic Pulse to be accessible to everybody. So we’ve done our best to really keep the cost as affordable as we can by having a sliding scale.” 

For ski areas with limited budgets, Nordic Pulse offers a “community edition” with no yearly fee. 

Rather than using GPS to track grooming and automatically update the live-grooming maps and trail reports, the community edition uses the in-app trail editor to manually update the maps or trail lists instead. While Nordic Pulse “would love to be able to offer the community edition completely free”, there is a small one-time setup fee to cover their costs in getting the  but there’s no yearly costs after that.

Year one has gone “incredibly well”, surpassing Lockes original goals and expectations. 

“I started developing this year and a half ago and I was optimistic we’d get maybe a dozen clubs on board in the first year. I really thought we’d start small and grow. And then, we started doing a beta testing phase, and all of the sudden, clubs were reaching out every day, it seemed. And by the time we officially launched, I think we had over almost 20 areas on board, and then by the end of the year, we had 35, and now we have around 80 ski areas total after year one. So it’s growing really fast, which has really been exciting for us. And also, I think, really great for skiers because the more ski areas that are on board, the more useful the information is for skiers, as in, skiers can go to any area and be able to check the reports on the same platform.”

The goal for next year: “Just keep growing.”

“We’re always looking are excited to have new ski areas come on, and are looking to grow more in the States and more in Canada, and potentially elsewhere in the world as well.”

Currently, the app is only designed for us by groomers, while skiers check either the Nordic Pulse site or an embedded applet on their local trail system’s website directly. The website is mobile optimized, but Locke said that a skier specific app is in the works to improve the user’s experience, and should be on line by next season. 

“I’m really motivated to make the system as interesting as possible for everybody, and as useful as possible, and just continually roll out new features for both skiers and also groomers.”

So far, the feedback Nordic Pulse has received from clubs who have integrated the system this year has been “incredibly positive,” improving the experience for a growing population across all abilities within the cross country ski community. 

“I think in the last few years, especially with the numbers of skiers increasing from COVID, a lot of ski areas have been feeling the need to have better ways to report their grooming and show that information. And a lot of ski areas come to us saying, ‘Hey, we’ve been thinking of doing something like this, but on our own, we can’t afford it because it’s expensive to build a system like this.’ And  they really appreciate being able to use our service and tap into all those features. Already this year, we’ve had over 160,000 skiers using our platform and almost a million views, so it’s growing really fast and it’s meant a lot to me. It’s been very rewarding, and humbling to be able to make a difference in the ski world.”

What are users saying about Nordic Pulse?

According to Nordic Pulse, Ethan Meginnes of the Black Jack Ski Club in Rossland, BC, the system is a “game changer” for its members. 

“As a groomer and avid skier, I am relieved to be able to relay and receive reliable information. Nordic Pulse is easy to use with multiple platforms,” Meginees said. “I would love to see every cross country ski center ultimately utilize this app.”

Methow Valley resident and regular trail user Alex Hall called the system “exceptionally good.” 

“I love the live grooming report,” he wrote to FasterSkier. “Though I find that I question its accuracy at times… There do seem to be occasional misalignments, but the thing I love about the live timing is it will show you instantly, completely and comprehensively where the cats are and what they’ve done, and it’s all on a picture, so it’s really handy. It’s definitely my favored system because it’s really quick and gives that overview. It updates automatically, it’s live, it’s got color graphics. Every now and then, there is something goofy about the live map. It’s definitely [an improvement from the last system].” 

Like Pokorny, Phinney is a 2016 graduate of Middlebury College, before continuing with her ski career, first with the SVSEF Gold Team and then the SMS T2 team until 2020. The 2019-2019 season was perhaps her peak year from a performance perspective; spending ample time in Europe racing World Cups, Phinney popped a top-20 during a skate sprint in Lahti, after having taken third at U.S. Nationals a month prior, behind Julia Kern and Hannah Halvorsen. At the end of the season, a crash during Spring Series left Phinney with a torn labrum in her shoulder, for which she underwent surgery later that year and rehabbed, before eventually stepping away from professional skiing. 

Phinney is currently in her final semester of graduate school where she’d pursuing a Master’s Degree in Health Systems, Management, and Policy through the Colorado School of Public Health. She now lives in her hometown of Boulder, CO with her partner, fellow retired SMS T2 skier Kyle Bratrud. 

FasterSkier (FS): When did you begin the process of becoming certified as a TD? What was your experience like with the certification process? Were you able to “fast-track” given your experience as an athlete and has your experience as a high level racer been an asset?

Kelsey Phinney (KP): I began the process of becoming a TD this past fall after a conversation with Annie Pokorny about ways to stay involved with the sport. My experience as a former racer has certainly been an asset. While I have learned much more about the specific rules than I knew when I was racing, I hope my ability to bring a racer’s perspective to decisions – like where to start and end turning zones in a classic race –  helps make races safer and more fair.

FS: You mentioned Annie helped get you involved. Can you say more about what those conversations were like? What/who were some of the other factors/people that motivated you to become a TD? 

KP: The primary reason I looked into becoming a TD was to give back to the sport within my current time constraints as a full-time graduate student. There is also a shortage of TDs in Colorado, which motivated me to follow through with the training and certification process following my conversation with Annie. 

Since I’m currently living in Boulder, the races hosted in Colorado are all within driving distance for me. This year, I was the assistant TD at a junior race in Aspen the weekend after my fall semester wrapped up, as well as at a college race in Steamboat a couple of weeks ago.

FS: There is an overall need for TDs in the U.S., and while there are some noteworthy female TDs who have or will be jury members at the World Cup, World Championship, and Olympic level, there are few women in the role domestically. We ran an article about the need for TDs in 2017 and at the time, there were only 10 women listed in the U.S. Is this something that you considered prior to becoming a TD? 

KP: To be honest, I didn’t think much about the lack of female representation of officials when I decided to work towards becoming a TD, but I do think representation matters and it is important to have diverse voices and perspectives included in the decision-making process. I’m happy to contribute to increased representation of women among the officials domestically. I think my racing experience and age are other important qualities I bring to the table.

While the American women’s team has put together an ever-growing highlight reel on the race course, cross country skiing, like most sports, remains male dominated when it comes to leadership, coaching, and technical roles.

That is not to say women are eternally trapped under a glass ceiling in the sport. Organizations like the Women Ski Coaches Association have already taken significant strides forward in connecting, empowering, and supporting women in leadership roles nationwide. Simultaneously, U.S. Ski & Snowboard has created working groups to discuss ways to develop and promote women, included presentations from Dr. Nicole LaVoi of the Tucker Center for Research on Women & Girls in Sport into annual meetings, and more recently supported developing coach Kristen Bourne through an opportunity to shadow, coach, and tech at the World Cup level.

Today, we are excited to share an interview with retired athlete Annie Pokorny, who has recently transitioned into the role of technical delegate (TD). At the 2022 U.S. Cross Country Championships in Soldier Hollow, Pokorny worked alongside long-time TD Lin Hinderman as the first ever all-female TD/TDA (assistant technical delegate) team in the event’s history.

A Sun Valley, ID native, Pokorny raced professionally until 2017, after graduating from Middlebury College and training with the SMS T2 and SVSEF Gold Team programs. After retirement, Pokorny returned home to the Sun Valley area, where she works full time in addition to her contributions to the ski community as a TD.

FasterSkier (FS): When did you begin the process of becoming certified as a TD? What was your experience like with the certification process? Were you able to “fast-track” given your experience as an athlete and has your experience as a high level racer been an asset?

Annie Pokorny (AP): This is my fourth season as a TD. I attended my first TD training at West Yellowstone in 2018, where I earned my level 1 certification by attending seminars on rules and procedures and passing an exam. Level one means that you can work as an assistant in any US Ski and Snowboard  or FIS sanctioned race. After working a certain amount of races under evaluation by your TD, you can be promoted to a level 2 TD, which means that you can be the head TD at US Ski and Snowboard sanctioned races and be an assistant at FIS sanctioned races. In order to earn your level 3, you have to work a certain number of races as assistant under evaluation of the head TD and attend the regional FIS conference where you are evaluated by FIS TDs in the U.S. and Canada and graded on a set of qualifiers to become a FIS TD. (See Assessment Part B here.)

I say all this to illustrate that there is quite the process to becoming a TD! This process usually takes about six years to become a level 3 TD. I earned my level three in the fall, and was fast tracked through the process by getting the opportunity to work twice as many races every year than are required. Not all candidates are (or want to be) fast tracked, but US Ski and Snowboard gave me the support and opportunity to get to the higher levels and pull on my experience as a racer while it was still fresh. Through the experience I have really enjoyed opportunities to be mentored by long-time TDs, and to add my voice and experience as a racer to the decision making process on the jury.

FS: Your dad is also a TD and has been involved in TD education over the years. Did his position/experience influence your decision to become a TD also? What/who were some of the other factors/people that motivated you to become a TD?

AP: My dad is the ultimate TD! He got into it while I was in high school as a way to stay involved while I was racing. When I decided to leave full-time racing, he was whispering in my ear that I should consider being a TD. I wasn’t ready for it right out of the gate, I needed some space from the sport to decide how I wanted to participate in the future. It wasn’t until I was on a bus in St. Louis with a client from work who is involved in skiing on the Alpine side. We were talking about skiing and he asked how I was giving back to the sport that raised me. Without thinking I said I was going to be a TD. I guess that kind of sealed the deal. 

FS: Has there been anything about the role, or a situation that you’ve faced, that surprised or challenged you?

AP:There have been plenty of challenges in becoming a TD, most of which were fun challenges. First, there are so many rules, far more than I had an appreciation for when I was racing. There are plenty of athletes that know the rules (shoutout to you, Tyler Kornfield) I just wasn’t one of them. When I first started, I had the benefit of racing to know generally how things should be, but had to study the International Competition Rules (ICR) to support the organizing committee (OC) on the finer details. For example, do you know how many meters should be between each track into a finishing lane of a mass start classic race? I do!

The next thing that surprised me was how much work goes into putting on a ski race. Whether it’s a regional Junior National Qualifier or a national-level race, hundreds of hours go into grooming, preparation, planning, regrooming, replanning (especially in the era of COVID), training on new ICRs, coordination and fundraising – almost all of which is on a volunteer basis. My teammates, coaches, and I were always courteous and said thank you to volunteers, but it wasn’t until I was on the other side that I understood how much heart goes into every race day. The racers aren’t the only passionate ones out there, which is pretty cool. 

The most challenging thing is making tough decisions when the answer isn’t clear. There’s a bad side to everyone feeling so passionate about the sport, too, because sometimes the decisions the Jury makes when trying to be fair feel personal to athletes (or their support systems). Even worse is making the wrong call, which I’ve done. Like all things, you have to own up to your mistakes and learn from them. The thing about being a TD is that if you do your job perfectly, and make all of the right calls, the race participants shouldn’t even know you’re there. If you make a mistake, folks get pretty fired up, pretty fast. I know what that’s like. I had a handful of reprimands as an athlete (the most severe of which was delivered to me by my dad), but it never gets easy to deliver bad news.

FS: There is an overall need for TDs in the U.S., and while there are some noteworthy female TDs who have or will be jury members at the World Cup, World Championship, and Olympic level, there are few women in the role domestically. We ran an article about the need for TDs in 2017 and at the time, there were only 10 women listed in the U.S. Is this something that you considered prior to becoming a TD? How do you see yourself contributing to the increased presence of women in leadership roles in our sport domestically?

AP: My decision to become a TD mostly had to do with wanting to make use of a decade of racing experience – the idea that I would increase representation for women in leadership positions in the sport was just an added bonus. There is certainly an intentionality across the sport to increase representation, whether through the work of the Women Ski Coaches Association or the working groups within U.S. Ski & Snowboard. FIS and U.S. Ski & Snowboard are both increasing opportunities for different voices in leadership and I’ve been a beneficiary of that. I feel lucky to have felt support from all angles. I’ve heard some horror stories of what it feels like to be a woman TD in Europe, and have always felt respected in my roles here in the States. I attribute that respect in part to my racing background and, more hopefully, to a changing culture.

At the end of the day, representation matters most if you do a really good job. I’ve benefited from the mentorship of several TDs, men and women, and want to be a contributor to the sport. Being part of the the first all-female TD leadership team at U.S. Nationals came with a little bit of pressure, but we were supported by a fantastic jury and OC to put on world class racing. It never comes without its challenges, but I’m proud of every race I’ve gotten to work.

FS: What was it like being back at U.S. Nationals, this time in the role of TD versus athlete?

AP: Being back at Nationals was two parts inspiring, one part heartbreaking, especially in an Olympic year. An important part of being a good TD is putting yourself into the shoes of the racers and support teams to build a safe and fair event. In addition to knowing the rules and having an analytical mind, you also have to empathize with the people actually doing the thing! I think I take that empathy to the next level on race day. I know what it’s like to have the race of your life, and I also know what it’s like to merely be trying to get to the finish line. I’m watching these athletes very closely all day, and I absorb all of the different emotions, good and bad, as they pass by. 

FS: Are there any specific goals you’d like to achieve or future roles you’d like to play that are connected to this role?

AP: I’m grateful for this year’s opportunity to work at U.S. Nationals, and would like to continue to improve and grow to work on the national level in Canada and abroad. Any way I can support the growth of the sport in U.S. will work for me, whether getting to be on a OC for a larger race, or having the opportunity to be on the jury. But my most important future role will be continuing to participate in smaller, local races. Without quality racing at the local and regional level, we don’t create high level athletes that compete on the world level.

FS: In your post-ski racing career, how has your relationship to the sport shifted? I.e., have you always wanted to stay engaged in cross country skiing and contribute to the ski community, or has there been an ebb and flow in the involvement you’d wanted to have?

Remaining involved in skiing has been important for me at this time in my life.

Leaving skiing is hard. It can be really hard to figure out where skiing fits into your life after you stop putting on race bibs. It took time for me to figure out who I was without skiing, let the wounds from racing heal, let the good memories begin to flourish, and decide that I wanted to rejoin the community. I quit racing earlier than planned in order to preserve my relationship with the sport. I knew I would be involved for life but I just didn’t know exactly how.

For me, the first year out of racing was about finding my balance and health. After a while I realized that although I liked being a casual weekend skier, I really missed being around racing. The problem was that coaching or racing wasn’t the right path for me. Being a TD has been the perfect opportunity for me to continue to learn in the sport and contribute. I’ve had the benefit of getting to step back into the high energy world of racing. I get to enjoy the music, sunshine, and excitement of race day, but without the lung burn. 

***

Hi Ned,

I have been dealing with bilateral Achilles tendon soreness (midsubstance, several cm proximal to insertion) since an over-zealous hill bounding session in October.  When ski season arrived in December, and the soreness persisted, I made the assumption that skate skiing would cause less irritation to the Achilles than classic skiing.  However, after recently reading about the importance of plantarflexion force during the push-off phase in skate skiing, I have been reconsidering my assumption.  Additionally, my experience over the past month has demonstrated more aggravation from skate skiing than classic skiing, even at low intensity.  Does this make sense to you?  How would you guide a skier with Achilles tendinopathy regarding selection between skate and classic skiing?

FYI, I am under the treatment of a local PT, working on stretching and eccentric ankle work

Skate skiing is more leg and balance intensive, so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s more irritating than classic. It’s a simple matter of the body being overwhelmed by the load being placed on it. Classic skiing is exhibiting less load on the Achilles, so it doesn’t elicit a pain response. The load with skating exceeds your Achilles’ threshold or comfort level so it starts yelling. Your brain interprets this as pain, which is a pretty good defense mechanism for getting us to stop doing whatever it is that’s being perceived as a threat to our survival.

The follow up question is a matter of load management. Since load is the culprit, we don’t want too much of it. However, it doesn’t need to be avoided altogether. (And from an exercise/rehab perspective, we very much want load, just in the right amount.) 

As long as the pain is 4/10 or less and subsides within a couple of hours, you are ok to proceed. This is green light territory. Yellow light is a bit more challenging to navigate. Here in Utah, a yellow light means speed up and a red light really isn’t red for the first 4-5 seconds… but it should mean proceed with caution. So if pain is 5-6/10 or is less but doesn’t subside quickly, I wouldn’t push it any further. You were ok with that activity, but I’d probably want to back it off a little. Pain that exceeds 6/10 is definitely a red light and should be an indication that you need to pack it up and go home. (Admittedly, this guidance becomes much more foggy when the pain presents after, not during, the activity.)

So balancing the volume and intensity of skating would first be a matter of fitting into the stoplight paradigm. But you can also make a lot of your outings into skiathlons: skate until the pain begins to escalate then switch to classic. Or ski most of the time on classic then switch to skate for the last few kilometers. If you’re able to skate for a full session within the green light zone, it is a good idea to have a day or two of relative recovery before your next day of skating. This recovery could be classic skiing, cycling, or strength training, as long as pain levels remain quite low. You just don’t want to be constantly irritating the tendon.

Though not specifically addressed in your query, there is the greater question of what caused the overloading of the tendons in the first place? I know the pain began after a bounding session, but was it an issue of volume or intensity, weakness, compensatory patterning, range of motion deficits, or a culmination of your training up to that point?

In diagnosing musculoskeletal issues, we deal very little in known causation and almost exclusively in correlations. We know that large and sudden increases in training volume tend to cause injury. If the quads or glutes are not doing their share of the work during forward propulsion with bounding or skate skiing, then the gastroc and soleus (and thus Achilles) will have to do more. If ankle joint mobility is restricted, the Achilles might see higher loads. If you recently switched to a running shoe with less heel drop, the Achilles will see more load.

Hopefully, you and your PT have gained some insight into the potential underlying causes. Eccentric exercises are a very valid way to address tendon irritability, but I would highly encourage an exploration of the root cause, if that hasn’t been teased out – or at least hypothesized – already.

Happy skiing,

Ned Dowling, PT

Related Reading: Building a Better Skier Part 3: Single-Limb Stability

Author’s Disclaimer: The advice given in this article is the sole opinion of the author except where other media is cited. FasterSkier and the author’s employer (University of Utah) should not be considered accountable. As with any medical advice acquired on the internet, information presented in this article should not take the place of proper examination and treatment from a licensed Physical Therapist or Physician. If symptoms are severe or worsening, please do yourself a favor and seek appropriate medical attention.

“In a sport that has so many women with massive shoulders and thighs, Diggins looks like a sprite in her racing suit, and it’s not clear exactly where she gets her power. But the power is there, as she flies up hills, and comes off climactic turns with a burst. On the downhills, she tucks low and cuts through the air,” writes Matt Futterman in his February 8th New York Times coverage of Nordic skier Jessie Diggins’s historic bronze medal win at the Beijing Olympic Games.

A former college teammate of mine sent me a screenshot of this excerpt with an outraged, “We are past commenting on women’s bodies in sports!!” 

In a response to Futterman, sportswriter Lori Nickels wrote a piece in USA Today documenting such reactions from female athletes and wondering at their intensity, when men’s bodies are so frequently fodder for sports analysis. 

As a female athlete and a former collegiate nordic skier, I would like to offer an explanation to Nickels and Futterman and anyone else who may be wondering why this seemingly commonplace commentary is such a big deal.

Athletics can be an amazing tool for teaching women how to use their bodies effectively and powerfully; knowing how to become healthier, faster, and stronger is information that our society has historically neglected to teach women, to our great detriment. On the other hand, we are simultaneously receiving programming from nearly every direction that smaller is better, that women with muscles are ugly, they look too much like men, that men won’t find our shapes attractive. And in an appearance-oriented society where women seem to be valued especially for their ability to fit into an idealized category, that is no small thing. Growing up, even as they powered activities that brought me joy and self-worth, my pronounced muscles (“massive shoulders and thighs,” if you will) felt like blemishes. Some days they still do. 

And that is only half of it. Nordic skiing is a sport in which strength to weight ratios play a role, albeit a small one. However, when so many other factors feel out of their control, that single, tiny factor can loom large in the minds of both male and female competitors. I know all of us have fielded comments from performance-obsessed coaches, our own parents, and often other parents concerning our body types, weights, and emphasizing the advantage of a low body mass. This adds up to a complex of emotions and ideas surrounding food. Endurance athletes are particularly susceptible to disordered eating given their tendency towards self-discipline and performance.  

I am not saying men and male athletes don’t suffer from similar or analogous notions and prejudices – in fact I would love to open that conversation – but they do display a different level of intensity and contain fewer contradictions. Female athletes really sit at the nexus of a particularly overwhelming complex of ideas and judgments surrounding our bodies. And that is even before mentioning the pressures of sex and the constant threat of sexual assault that every woman feels. It makes us unsure who our bodies really belong to. 

I am lucky that this dissociation with and antipathy towards my body was relatively mild, and never developed into an eating disorder like it has for many. Regardless, years out of adolescence and competitive racing, I am still trying and often failing to inhabit my own body and trust that it is beautiful no matter the form it takes, that it is my own by right, and that I can’t let others decide how I feel about it or what I do with it. And I am finally learning how hard my teammates, role models, and competitors have also had to fight to avoid this disassociation, to preserve the vital relationships to their bodies that is at the heart of their love for athletics. 

Ironically, Jessie Diggins herself has been one of the fiercest supporters and advocates for those suffering from eating disorders and has been a key player in raising awareness of the issue. In her memoir, Brave Enough, she writes about her struggle to overcome an eating disorder, which threatened her health and prevented her from competing, culminating in outpatient treatment. She is hardly alone in the work. My high school teammate Julia Burnham, also an eating disorder survivor, is the co-creator of a podcast called Bodies in Motion, chronicling the stories of those – especially female athletes like Jessie – who have experienced eating disorders. A clear and consistent take-away from her discussions is that we need to stop commenting on each other’s bodies. No matter how positive or negative, direct or indirect, these comments generate the feeling that how our bodies look is more important than what we do with them or that what we do with them is more important that the relationship we have with them. 

This is not meant to be an attack on Futterman. His words were poorly chosen, but we have all made similar comments regarding fellow bodies. I know I have, and I regret them all, for I have felt acutely so many times the detrimental effect of such words. Comments like Futterman’s may have sent my ninth grade self into a well of negative feelings about my body and a bout of obsessive eating. It is sensitive terrain, which means we are all responsible for being aware and careful. 

So to everyone who may be reading this – and I really mean everyone – if you are ever tempted to make a comment about someone’s body, consider keeping it to yourself. Please. 

About the Author:

Ivy Spiegel Ostrom grew up skiing in the mountains of Leavenworth, Washington. She went on to ski for Williams College where she majored in English and Environmental Studies. Since graduating in 2020, she has been living in her hometown, indulging in her other favorite sport of rock climbing while learning how to farm and live sustainably.

Then, she crashed.

Just speed bumps on her way to history.

Brennan’s fourth place in Tuesday’s sprint, in the skating technique, was overshadowed by her teammate Jessie Diggins’ bronze — only the third Olympic cross-country skiing medal in U.S. history, and the first individual medal for women.

But Brennan’s result is arguably just as big of an achievement. It’s also the best-ever American women’s Olympic result in her sport by someone who isn’t named Diggins or Kikkan Randall.

Brennan, a 33-year-old Utah native and Anchorage resident was cut not once but twice from the U.S. Ski Team. She’s fought through a car crash, other injuries, mononucleosis and nearly walked away from the sport.

And on Tuesday, she was a couple of ski lengths away from an Olympic medal — a result that was simultaneously exhilarating and agonizing.

“Fourth place is hard. You feel really happy and also frustrated at the same time, so I have a lot of mixed emotions about it,” she told reporters after the race. “But I did everything I could today.”

Brennan has long excelled at distance racing, but her world-class talent in sprinting has only emerged in the past few years.

Tuesday’s result was not a surprise, however: She’d been a podium contender in sprints on the top-level European World Cup circuit earlier this season.

The grinding sprint course also favored Brennan. It’s at altitude, a setting where she’s produced good results in the past, and the snow was cold and slow — a tough combination some of pure sprinters competing who lack Brennan’s endurance capacity.

But Brennan’s day in Zhangjiakou, a resort town outside Beijing that’s hosting the Olympic cross-country ski events, began inauspiciously, when she arrived with the two left boots.

The U.S. men’s team bailed her out, grabbing the right one for Brennan on their way to the skiing venue.

Then, in her quarterfinal heat — the first of a series of head-to-head knockout races —  she tripped as soon as the starter’s gun went off. A closer look at her ski revealed she had poled directly onto it, punching through the top sheet.

Immediately, Brennan found herself 10 yards behind her five other competitors, a near-eternity in a race that lasts three minutes. The U.S. Ski Team’s cross-country director, Chris Grover, was watching from the side of the trail.

“I was like, ‘Okay, that was one of our best shots, and her day’s over,’” he said.

Ironically, Brennan said she’d been practicing her sprint starts for the past six weeks with help from her boyfriend Tyler Kornfield, a former national champion sprinter.

“The first thing on my mind was, ‘Tyler’s going to kill me, I just messed that up so badly,’” she said. “But then I had to be like, ‘Well, the start can be his thing, the uphill’s my thing. So let’s go.’”

She did. Brennan picked herself up and went in such fierce pursuit that she’d reeled in the pack on the first hill, then managed to place second in the heat — a performance Grover described as “nothing short of miraculous.”

In her next heat, a semifinal, Brennan was stuck racing against Jonna Sundling and Maja Dahlqvist, the two Swedes who went on to win gold and silver medals. The heat was scorching fast, but Brennan skied well enough to advance.

That put her in the final with Diggins, where Brennan didn’t quite have the speed to match her teammate and the two Swedish women. Grover, the coach, said Brennan was likely paying the price for the two big efforts she’d made in the previous heats.

“She had to really lay it out so much in the quarterfinal. She didn’t have the best semifinal,” he said.

“For her to regroup and still be fourth in the final,” he added, “is really amazing testament to what her fitness is.”

While it was tantalizing to be so close to an Olympic medal, both Grover and Brennan said her result gives her a shot of confidence for upcoming races where she could also contend for hardware: two more distance events, a relay and a team sprint where Brennan and Diggins form a formidable pair.

That mental boost is especially welcome, Brennan said, given what she described as a disappointing 14th-place result in Saturday’s Olympic opening event, the skiathlon.

“I feel like I’m back on track now, and this is where I want to be,” she said. “So, I have a lot of hopes for the rest of the week, too.”

And while Brennan may have to grapple with the mixed emotions of an Olympic fourth place, her teammates were free to offer some unrestrained enthusiasm.

“This quote is your reminder to never sleep on Rosie Brennan. Never sleep on Rosie Brennan,” said Luke Jager, one of her teammates at the Alaska Pacific University club who also raced Tuesday. “She persevered and grinded. She had some tough years there, I know. But she made it happen, and it’s really amazing.”

In the fall of 2018, on the heels of a season that included representing Australia at the PyeongChang Olympics, Jessica Yeaton applied to physical therapy programs. What she did not expect as she focused her lens on a new goal is that the 2018-2019 season would include some of the top results of her career, which reinforced the vision that she was not quite ready to fully hang up her skis. 

During that season, Yeaton secured her first podiums at U.S. Nationals with a second place finish in the 10-kilometer classic behind Caitlin Patterson, followed a few days later by a 3rd place finish in the 20k freestyle, which was also won by Patterson. (Yeaton’s APU teammate Rosie Frankowski took second.) Later in the season, she earned her first SuperTour win in a 5k skate, and achieved a career best finish at the FIS World Ski Championships in Seefeld, AUT with a 22nd place finish in the 15k skiathlon. 

Despite the upward trajectory of her skiing, Yeaton enrolled full time in the physical therapy program at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Six months later, she won the 2020 American Birkie as a relative dark horse considering infrequent racing and significantly less time on snow than her previous training cycles. Yeaton explained in her post-race interview that she was only able to get on snow a few times a week in her Birkie build up, and that she had been listening to recordings of the lectures and her own notes while driving or training to ensure her training was not cutting into the study hours she needed to log. 

Then the pandemic hit, making traveling to races more complex — increasing her risk of exposure not only threatened her own health, but the health of the patients she saw during clinical rotations. The university imposed its own set of quarantine rules, and as parts of New Mexico were severely impacted by COVID outbreaks, Yeaton was primarily restricted to the Albuquerque area. Out of state racing was out of the question.

Between the Birkie in February 2020 and the beginning of the 2021-22 season, she competed in only one FIS race in December 2020 — a 10k skate at Kincaid Park in Anchorage, which happened to coincide with an extended winter break from school. Yeaton took third in this event behind Sadie Maubet Bjornsen and Rosie Frankowski.

Flashforward to fall 2021, Yeaton is on a leave of absence from PT school, delaying her completion of the program by roughly five months, to chase down a spot on the Australian Team in Beijing. She’ll still walk with her cohort in the spring, but is putting off her final three clinical rotations to put on a bib and some skinny skis.

FasterSkier connected with Yeaton on a call in early November shortly after she had returned to Anchorage and plugged back in with her APU Teammates. At the time, Yeaton was making the trek from Anchorage to Hatcher Pass almost daily to take advantage of early-season snow in preparation for the upcoming season. 

While Albuquerque may not immediately incite mental imagery of pristine corduroy and crisp classic tracks, Yeaton explained the area has been an excellent place for her to train. The city’s elevation is roughly a mile high, but thanks to a geological anomaly, the nearby Sandia Nordic Center sits atop the “rim of a massive uplifted fault block” at an elevation of over 10,600 feet. While this makes breathing all the more difficult, Yeaton applauded the local ski community’s dedication to keeping these trails well-maintained and was grateful to have access to the venue during her time at UNM. 

A silver lining of the pandemic for Yeaton was online classes, which allowed her to make the 45-minute drive from town to the trails four to five times a week, nearly doubling her time on snow the previous season. 

“I was able to train super well,” Yeaton explained. “And in the back of my head, I was always focused on this [upcoming] season. I had asked for the time off last winter, so I knew I was going to be taking the leave of absence and could focus on qualifying for the Olympics this year. So I think having that goal just made me better able to not worry about last season, but just stay focused on building base fitness and putting in quality training. Just focusing on the Olympic goal.”

As previously mentioned, Yeaton’s success in the season before she began full-time school included many of her career highlights. She explained that knowing her potential helped her stay hungry, even when she was busy with schoolwork and watching races from afar.

“In the back of my head, I’m like, ‘Man, I want to have a shot at that 30k skate at the Olympics.’ And there are other goals that I still have. So that has made it hard for me to just sit back and be like, ‘Oh, I’m okay not doing the ski season,’ because I do really want to race and I want to see how fast I can ski this year. So that’s played a really big role. I think without some of those results that last season, and without the Birkie, maybe I wouldn’t be so motivated, but it’s been pretty easy to stay motivated to train just because of some of those results.”

Yeaton said that it was easy to stay motivated to take a break from school to rollerski, and she enjoyed getting more into mountain biking on the plentiful trails in the area. She also enjoyed the contrast of the high desert climate compared to what she had grown accustomed to in Anchorage. 

“I don’t even check the weather anymore,” she laughed. “I worry about thunderstorms in the afternoon, but you’re never like ‘Oh man. It’s  raining out, I don’t really want to go do this workout.’ It’s always a beautiful day, so you’re just like, ‘Of course I want to get out there and train today.’”

Yeaton also enjoyed getting to know the small but very supportive local ski community surrounding Sandia Nordic. 

“There’s so many people in Albuquerque that are stoked on cross country skiing, and it was really cool getting to know some of them. They’ve been really welcoming and supportive of me as a skier. I did the virtual Birkie last year [with some other local skiers], and there were people out cheering and one guy brought a bunch of food for us and set up a feed station and things like that. I’ve met a few people that will train for the Birkie [or other marathon races], so I’ve had people to ski with up there… It’s been cool just to see that there is this great community in New Mexico, and it’s sort of hidden.”

Though the training has been good, it can be hard without races to keep a finger on the pulse with fitness relative to your competition. Yeaton had hoped to enter some mountain bike races this summer, but this was prevented by a significant setback in April. While on a mountain biking and camping trip in the Utah desert with her partner, David Norris, Yeaton slipped while navigating her way down an embankment to a creek in crocs. She fractured her pelvis and had to significantly modify her usual training. 

“It took a really long time to get back to full training and I didn’t want to rush or risk anything.”

Instead of races, Yeaton tracked her progress using times on Strava segments. 

“Which was a little dangerous at first, because if you’re not meeting those segments, you can just be really hard on yourself. But I would use that, really just to see how I’m measuring up against myself.”

She explained that there were only a couple of options for rollerski venues, and she would typically do intervals at the same location. This made it easy to directly compare her results from similar sets of intervals.

Yeaton also found it encouraging and invigorating to rejoin her APU teammates upon her return to Alaska, as she knows these women have been working hard and are in excellent shape. 

“I think one thing people on teams forget is that it’s so valuable — even if the point isn’t to measure yourself against each other, you do have that feedback from teammates. I’ve really valued just being here and doing intervals [with the team].”

On one hand, she recognizes that, compared to doing level four on her own, she can tap into a different gear when chasing another skier down. Even if it meant “getting [her] butt totally kicked”, Yeaton recognized her teammates would help elevate her fitness and sharpness before the season began. On the other hand, having respect for the talent and strength of her teammates, she also gained confidence from being able to complete these workouts alongside them. 

“All these girls are so fast. And I’m like, ‘Man, if I can keep up with these girls, then that’s a good sign.’”

At the moment, Australia’s quota for the Beijing Olympics is limited to three men and two women. To earn a spot, Yeaton will need to perform well in early-season races that fall during the qualification period, roughly the month of December. 

In terms of outlook, Yeaton expressed that she believes she has “a decent shot”; however, she recognizes that a lot can change during the 18 months she has been away from racing. 

“I’m hoping it goes well, but I’m definitely nervous, just not having really raced last season.” 

She explained that she trusts the quality of the training she has been putting in, but even pros experience self-doubt. 

In preparation for the season ahead, she headed to Davos, SUI in late November to begin training with the Australian national team. World Cup support was not available to the team until the third race weekend in Davos, beginning December 11th, but she will be able to use results from nearby Alpen Cup races toward qualification instead.

Yeaton kicked off her season last weekend in Goms, SUI  and also plans to race in St. Ulrich am Pillersee, AUT December 18-19th. After that, she will head back to the World Cup to start in the Tour de Ski. 

In the opening 10k classic in Goms on December 3rd, Yeaton skied to 8th place. The next day, she took 10th in the 1.3k freestyle sprint, which she followed with a 14th place finish in the 10k skate the following day. In each of these days, Yeaton was the top Australian skier.

From the outside, it looks like Yeaton is well on her way from Albuquerque to Beijing.

CONTENT WARNING: This article includes stories of an individual experience with an eating disorder, including numerical values of weight. If you’re struggling, you can contact the NEDA Helpline, which has options for text, chat, or phone support. 

INTRODUCTION: This opinion piece is a response to some recently publicized experiences of women of the University of Oregon track and field program who were routinely scrutinized for their body composition, underwent DEXA scans to measure body fat percentage multiple times per year, and were assigned additional training if their body fat was above the threshold set by their coach, Robert Johnson, and other staff. They were given the message that their performance and potential were directly tied to these metrics, which led to rampant disordered eating, body dysmorphia, and anxiety among the team. Meanwhile, their coach claimed these tests and individualized training regimens were backed by science, saying: “The health and safety of all our student-athletes is extremely important and at the forefront at all times.”

It required time to work up the courage to post this narrative. I chose not to use photos of myself from the time period discussed, instead including recent photos that remind me of the rewards that come from being nourished, strong, healthy, and whole. 

To submit an op-ed or personal essay, email info@fasterskier.com. We fully support open dialogue and feedback.

***

In August of 2011, I got Giardia. I had spent the better part of the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college backpacking, canoeing, and swimming in small ponds throughout the Adirondack Park in northeastern New York, and must have picked it up along the way. While most experience “beaver fever” as a rapid-onset and violent gastrointestinal nightmare, mine was a slow burn: feeling full as soon as I started eating, sharp stomach pains and cramping, a chronic headache, and a few cross country running practices where I was questioning the food from the dining hall. 

Meanwhile, the unchecked pathogenic colony was slowly festering in my gut, stealing the nutrients from my food, leaving me little to absorb. Consequently, I lost weight. Stepping on the scale at the annual “health check” put on by the athletic department, I saw that I weighed 119 pounds, which was roughly 5-10 pounds lighter than my normal set point. I was being complimented by my peers for how fit I looked, and my times were steadily improving. This germinated dormant seeds in my perfectionist mind that being “good” at running was directly tied to the number on the scale, and the seeds began to grow like a weed. 

It wasn’t that I had put in a solid summer of training, it was the weight. 119 pounds was good, but I’d look more like a runner if I weighed 115 pounds.

Midway through the season, I had bloody diarrhea just before a race, and called my parents freaking out. A few days later, a stool test confirmed that I had Giardia and I was given antibiotics to get rid of it. 

I panicked. If being sick was causing the weight loss, would killing the parasites in my gut mean I would undo all of the “progress” I had made toward being a good athlete? I became obsessed with exerting control over what I was eating. I went gluten free and vegan, making it nearly impossible for me to eat with others. I continued to PR through the end of the season, then I all but disappeared. 

To be clear, I was blessed with supportive parents who put zero pressure on my siblings and me when it came to sports. At both the high school and collegiate level, I had wonderful coaches who fostered a healthy and supportive team environment with no discussion or pressure surrounding how we ate or what our bodies looked like. My only memory of my college coach commenting on someone’s body was to say he was concerned about a male athlete on the team whose eyes, he felt, appeared “gaunt and a little bit haunted” at that point in the season. 

This was all at a Division III school with no track program, and USCSA-level skiing — not the pressure cooker of Division I programs that were more centered on competition and results. The coaches embodied a healthy lifestyle that was built around a love for endurance sports, and I still admire them. 

But as Jessie Diggins said when discussing her own experience with an eating disorder, “Genetics loads the gun, and the environment pulls the trigger.” Even without being told outright that leaner is faster, or being instructed to lose weight for performance, athletes can fall into these lonely and unhealthy traps. 

In my case, I was feeling mounting pressure to know the answer to the question: “What are your plans for after college?” The end of undergrad was looming, I had no answer, and I didn’t know how to cope. Meanwhile, I was topping out the levels of rigor and challenge offered at the undergraduate level with an applied math course load, and constant focus on maintaining my GPA heightened my anxiety. My friends were getting internships and applying to jobs, and I just wanted to run and ski and have everything stay the same. 

It was also the early days of social media and blogging, which were feeding me indirect but clear messages about what other athletes looked like, what they ate on Wednesdays, and how to make any dessert I used to enjoy “healthier” to reduce the number of calories I was consuming. A decade later, almost everyone has a smartphone and these influences have become even more toxic. 

When I reached 115 pounds, it wasn’t enough. Surprise, surprise. 

I was switching over to ski season and building training volume, all while meticulously counting calories and restricting my caloric intake. I bought a scale, which might as well have been a set of shackles. On Thanksgiving, my concerned older brother tried to pile extra turkey and stuffing onto my carefully portioned plate, and I melted down. 

My relationships with friends and family were strained. Everyone was worried and I just wanted them to stay the f**k out of my way. I was depressed, I cried myself to sleep most nights, and I couldn’t convince myself to stop starving my body, simultaneously finding comfort in the emptiness and hating the shell of myself that I had become. This is what being trapped inside an eating disorder is like.

During the nordic season, I was so fatigued that I avoided skiing with others. I couldn’t keep my body warm, regardless of how many layers I was wearing. I was slowly slipping backward in race results. I was constantly getting sick. One day, at my self-imposed morning weigh-in, my five foot six inch skeletal frame weighed 98 pounds, and I felt desperately frail. I broke down crying. I had lost 30 pounds within five months. What was I doing to myself? Maybe I’d just try to hover here rather than continuing to strive for a smaller body. I didn’t want to die.

At USCSA Nationals in 2012, on the opening day of racing, I didn’t qualify for the heats for the classic sprint. I was devastated. My body had no muscle for double poling. I was on empty. 

Over the next eight months, I began to see a counselor. I met with doctors, and I managed to improve my physical health, but I lacked sufficient holistic support to truly overcome the disease. I was on a rollercoaster of binge–purge cycles, feeling like my body was taking over and forcing me to eat manically. I would then try to starve myself through extra training in the subsequent days to “balance it out”, perpetuating the cycle. It was scary and embarrassing and incredibly uncomfortable. 

The next fall, I was training harder than ever for cross country running and finally making progress again. The night before the regional meet, our team went to Applebee’s for dinner, which listed the calorie content of meals on its menu. I picked whatever had the fewest: a small portion of rice, some broiled white fish, and some steamed veggies. I “treated” myself to a Luna Bar before bed as dessert. The next day, it was like someone had filled my legs with cement, and I ran my worst time of the season. 

***

Ten years later, I feel healthy, whole, and empowered, and my primary goal in life has become ensuring my daughter does not go through the same hell that I did. There are years missing from this story. Getting to this point has taken work, and it has been far from a linear progression of recovery. It’s ongoing, and it’s messy, and it’s all too common. 

Simultaneously, by learning about female athlete physiology and working with my body instead of attempting to squeeze it into an extra small, I am far stronger, faster, and more durable than I was when I weighed less. My mind is well enough to care far more about what my body can do than whether it looks like a magazine cover, and I’m happier because of it. I get to explore my potential as an athlete who is supporting her training with plenty of fuel. And my body is healthy and durable enough to support countless long and burly adventures in the mountains on skis and on foot that I could not have dreamed of at 21.

Most importantly, after healing from five years of amenorrhea, my body grew a small-but-mighty human being, who inspires more joy and love than I can put into words. 

As women in sport, we’ve come a long way, thanks to the strong women who have spoken out and taken action to support the physical and mental wellbeing of their successors. Reading the stories from the women of the Oregon who were subjected to direct messages from the coaching and support staff that they could not achieve their potential without attaining unrealistic, unhealthy, and unsustainable body composition goals feels like a giant step backward; it is a disheartening reminder of how unhealthy cancerous appendages of sport systems remain.

One woman shared that the metric she was recommended to attain was 13% body fat. It is estimated that 10-12% of fat on a woman’s body is “essential fat”, which cushions organs (like the heart), serves in nerve tissue, and performs other functions vital to physiological function. Most women require at least 22-25% body fat for fertility, i.e., optimal physical and hormonal health to support a pregnancy. 13% body fat is dangerous to an athlete’s immediate and long term health. 

Amenorrhea, or the loss of menstruation, is dubbed the canary in the coal mine for a host of ailments associated with RED-S, including low bone density, impaired immune and cognitive function, and risk of cardiovascular disease. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.

My story may not seem similar to those the women of Oregon shared; I had only positive experiences with coaches who ultimately didn’t care how fast I was. My point is that athletes — of any gender — don’t need coaches or systems to tip the scales. Endurance athletes often already exhibit Type-A tendencies; we like to track hours, watts, mileage, heart rate, and to nerd out on technique. We always want more from ourselves, to explore the limits of our potential. 

These problems are pervasive, and they are certainly not limited to the top tiers of sport. Indeed, one recent study found no difference in the prevalence of restrictive eating, menstrual dysfunction, primary amenorrhea, or injuries between elite and recreational female athletes across a sample set of over 800 athletes. 

Think this isn’t relevant in the ski world? Widespread disordered eating behavior among Norwegian skiers of all levels has been documented over the last two decades, and the Swedish news outlet Expressen recently quoted Russian coach Yuri Borodavko expressing his dissatisfaction with Natalia Nepryeava’s weight heading into the season.

“She should weigh 62-63 kilos to perform optimally, but right now her weight stands in the way of her development,” he reportedly told Match TV. “She has to fight to lose weight to be able to perform well in the Olympics.”

Coaches at any level have a responsibility to guard their athletes from the deleterious effects of RED-S, not to set the stage for them.

Especially at an age where bodies are changing rapidly (aka puberty), flush with hormones, and transitioning into an adult state, coaches should not be steering athletes toward interrupting these processes with fat loss. There should not be regular weigh-ins, or extra unproductive training to lean out. 

According to Johnson, athletes are simply part of a numbers game. “A good mathematician probably could be a good track coach,” he told The Oregonian. 

I’ve got a math degree, and I call bullshit. What about all of the intangible elements that lead to individual and team success? The women and men in his program deserve so much more than this treatment. 

Chronic low energy availability, i.e., not eating enough to match the energy output of training, has been proven to decrease training response, muscle strength, and endurance. In the long term, essentially all metabolic, musculoskeletal, and endocrinological systems are affected. This equates to a brief spike in performance coinciding with the initial weight loss, followed by at best a plateau, and at worse injury, low bone density, and being so depressed and broken that the athlete leaves the sport altogether. The equation does not check out. How do the numbers support athletes starving themselves to achieve a body composition goal? How does this support athletes in a sport where professionals are peaking a decade or more after college? Is the real goal to see how fast an athlete can get before shit hits the fan?

What if instead of running athletes through a physical and mental gauntlet to see who could achieve the best results in college without breaking, coaches fostered the fire and love of sport in their athletes? What if they helped athletes focus on their long-term goals and to see the bigger picture?

So many already have the wiring for anxiety and disordered eating. The coach or program should not be pulling the trigger.

Athletes need support. They need positive role models. They need access to information from a registered dietitian who can help them fuel their body for performance and health. They need a well-rounded team culture that cares about each athlete as an individual who matters more than the number on the scale or the time on the results page. This needs to happen at all ages and levels, no matter the stakes of the competition. 

They need to be told that short term gains are never worth risking long term physical or mental health. 

Coaches: Discuss the importance of maintaining a regular period with your athletes. Show examples of women who have achieved their best after seeking help and returning to health, like Elise Cranny and Katie Rainsberger. Show Jessie Diggins and Molly Seidel holding Olympic medals as well-fueled athletes in recovery from eating disorders. Show Nell Rojas as the top American at the 2021 Boston Marathon despite being told she does not look like a distance runner.

I hope the world of endurance sports collectively shifts toward supporting the athlete as a whole person. And I hope adding my voice to the many women speaking out helps nudge the boulder a little further up the hill.

Related Listening and Reading:

• Trail Society Podast: Episode 7 with professional trail runners Corrinne Malcolm, Hillary Allen, and Keely Henninger
• Nordic Nation Podcast: Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) and the Climate in High Performance Skiing
• Nordic Nation Podcast: Challenges of the Pro-Athlete Journey with Hannah Halvorsen, Hailey Swirbul, and Kate Barton
• Finding Your Sweet Spot: How to Avoid RED-S by Optimizing Your Energy Balance by Rebecca McConville, MS RD
• Athletes Aren’t Numbers: The Negative Health and Performance Impacts of Program-Wide Body Composition Monitoring by David Roche, Trail Runner Magazine
• I Don’t Have a Six Pack, But a Car Hit Me and I Survived by Hannah Halvorsen
• Brave Enough by Jessie Diggins (Reviewed on FS here, with more on her recovery and advocacy here.)
• Reflecting on the Tour de Ski and How I Got There by Katharine Ogden

This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and their A Hall Mark of Excellence Award. To learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award or to learn how you can support FasterSkier’s coverage please contact info@fasterskier.com.

In just two days, the World Cup season will be kicking off in Ruka, Finland. For the American squad, this means they have left behind the final throes of preparation and made the big trip across the Atlantic for the winter. Of the twenty-one athletes just announced to the Davis U.S. Cross Country team, the majority of the members competing in Ruka at the end of this month are expecting to be away from home until the end of the season in March.

This may include staying and racing in as many as nine different countries with a range of living arrangements. Unlike their European competitors who are able to return home between race weekends or at least over the holidays, the North Americans spend the whole winter on the road. 

While there are evidently many important items to pack for such a long duration (ski boots, laundry supplies, toothbrushes, etc.), there are also those that help ease the long months away from home. After reaching out to several members of the U.S. team who spent at least this past winter away, if not many of the seasons before also, they graciously responded with a unique item that somehow makes life on the road easier in some way. 

The first category of items could be classified under “comfort” or “familiarity”. For Jessie Diggins, this comes in the form of pictures.

Diggins wrote, “I bring pictures to hang up on the hotel room walls to make it feel just a little more like home everywhere I go!”

For Gus Schumacher it’s a pillowcase that has the picture of his dog on it, though he says it doesn’t fit that many of the big hotel pillows, it still makes a room feel more like home. Hailey Swirbul brings her stuffed manatee but added that she also is looking forward to bringing a Catan board game for some good team bonding. 

Thus ushers in the second category of items, which could be called “stimulation” or “engagement.”

Like Swirbul, Kevin Bolger’s item was a game to pull teammates away from Netflix or homework and to hang out as a group. He likes to bring along a deck of cards and a cribbage board saying, “It’s a game I’ve always enjoyed playing with my family back home!”

Katharine Ogden has been teaching herself a new skill over the past few years and brings yarn and a crochet hook to make little animals to give to teammates. Ogden wrote, “It’s a fun way to feel kind of productive in a pretty mindless way, and the little creatures are pretty cute.”

The engineer, Scott Patterson, shared that each year he tries to bring along something that is “portable, self-contained and keeps me mentally stimulated.” This year, that item is an OpenCV AI kit, which is a stereoscopic camera system with powerful resources for computer vision and AI/machine learning.

Patterson wrote, “I backed the project on kickstarter last winter and haven’t had much time to play around with it while I’ve been busy training and working over the non-racing season. Usually I have a little more time in the winter for hobby projects and metal exploration.  I’m not sure what the projects will be, but I’m looking forward to playing around with my coding skills and seeing if I can come up with something even slightly useful.”

For Rosie Brennan, it’s about what she can’t find in Europe. Brennan wrote, “I love muffins and use them as training food all year, but muffins are not a common thing in Europe.” To solve this scarcity, she found silicone muffin tin liners and silicone measuring cups that she travels with. Brennan added, “We don’t always have access to an oven but it’s often enough that [bringing them] has been so worth it and it brings me happiness to be able to bake and eat muffins for snacks and post training/racing food. It allows me to use American recipes for a small taste of home and use fuel I’m accustomed to. Someday Europeans will learn just how versatile and delicious a muffin is!”

The item(s) that Julia Kern brings may fall under their own category of “exploration” or “appreciation-of-place”. Kern is an avid photographer who brings her camera and drone along each winter.

She wrote, “I love to go on walks/hikes/jogs and capture all the different places we travel. It’s a way for me to step outside of ski racing and explore and see all of the amazing places we get to travel to. Often it is easy to get sucked into the monotony of traveling on Monday to the next venue, inspecting the course, testing skis during the week, and racing on weekends without stopping to experience the places we travel.” 

The World Cup racing begins Friday November 26th with a classic sprint in Ruka and concludes with World Cup finals March 18-20th in Tyumen, Russia. Stay tuned for race reports from FasterSkier on these, an analysis from the colorful Devon Kershaw, and plenty of other articles throughout the season.

As a cross country skier, you have likely heard of Canmore and it’s fabulous nordic center. Whether it be because of the 1988 Winter Olympics, the FIS World Cup in 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2016, the annual Frozen Thunder race hosted in early November, or simply the 60+ kilometers of beautiful trails, the Canmore Nordic Centre Provincial Park is well known in North America. 

In March 2022, Canmore  will be host to the annual Masters World Cup of Cross Country Skiing. Skiers from around the world will meet in Canmore for ten days of fun racing and camaraderie. But Canmore and the greater Kananaskis area has much more to offer than just great ski trails. For those looking to fully experience Canmore, the opportunities are numerous and varying in physicality. With a mix of culture and outdoor adventure, there is something for everyone. 

For off-ski outdoor recreation that keeps the energy output to a minimum, a dog-sledding adventure is one way to experience more of the area through a unique form of transport. Snowy Owl Sled Dog Tours was started in 1983 by Connie and Charles Arsenault with one team of ten dogs. The operation has since grown into a thriving business with sixteen teams of sled dogs. They offer a range of outings and experiences that are sure to give you a taste for both the community and scenery in the Canmore area. 

A caving tour or evening ice walk could also be a great way to pass time spent away from the ski trails. Canmore Cave Tours offers tours to Rat’s Nest cave under Grotto Mountain. These excursions are more pleasant than the cave name suggests and feature 7,000-year-old animal bones and pictographs in a cave that is completely untouched by development. Similarly, an evening walk down Grotto Canyon will take you away from town and towards the amazing ice formations of the canyon’s frozen waterfalls. 

When you’ve had your fill of the outdoors for the day, downtown is ready to welcome you because, as Sinclair says, “Canmore is home to a little bit of everything.” With five breweries and distilleries in town, taking a trip through town with the Canmore Brewery and Distillery Tours would be a great way to learn more about the local craft beverage scene. The guides from this locally-owned business are professional, experienced, and well-versed in just about everything in the area has to offer, plus they will transport you to and from stops while keeping you entertained with stories. 

For morning, midday, or anytime pick-me-up beverages, the award-winning Eclipse Coffee Roasters is a sure bet. Not only do they have a diverse selection of over ten freshly roasted bean varieties available, but they are also well-stocked with delectable baked goods to fuel you out on the ski trails. 

After a fortifying cup of coffee, you’ll be ready to dive into the arts and culture scene that flourishes in Canmore. Home to world renowned sculptures, painters, and photographers, Canmore has a multitude of art galleries that are worth visiting. Stroll down main street and enjoy the beautiful collections on display. Then, if you find yourself inspired and in a creative mood, head to Crock A Doodle where you can paint your own pottery.  

After a hard day out on the ski trails, visiting one of Canmore’s spa or wellness centers would be the perfect place to recover. Back At It Sports & Wellness caters specifically to sports, therapeutic massage, and acupuncture. Maybe you’re too sore to even leave the hotel room? Not a problem because Mobile Massage Canmore will come to you. They offer in-home and hotel massage therapy and will bring their table, lotion, music and highly skilled RMTs directly to your doorstep. 

Speaking of hotels, it is worth stopping by the Paintbox Lodge, even if you don’t end up staying there. Owned and operated by Olympic silver-medalist, Sara Renner and her husband, former World Cup Champion in alpine skiing, Thomas Grandi, the Paintbox Lodge is an award-winning boutique hotel located downtown. They offer five unique and comfortable suites and rooms with complimentary breakfast featuring a legendary sourdough bread. Additionally, you and your party can sign up for a kitchen party, harvest table dinner or tapas party at “the BOX.”

Whether you’re there to race at World Masters, on a ski vacation, or simply to enjoy the mountains in winter, there are plenty of activity options in Canmore and the greater Kananaskis area to keep you interested and engaged during your stay. For assistance with planning your trip or any other questions about Canmore, the staff at the Visitor Information Centre are ready and eager to help. The Centre is staffed daily and can respond to emails sent to: canmore.vic@gmail.com.

While no one would wish for the circumstances, a fall running of the Boston Marathon is perhaps a skier’s dream. The iconic foot race is on many a bucket list; however, the third Monday in April is early for those who spend the winter strapped to skinny skis rather than pounding pavement. 

After cancelling the April, 2020, running in light of the descending COVID-19 pandemic, and deciding against an April date for the 2021 event, the Boston Athletics Association (BAA) set its sights on October 11th, 2021, for a return to racing. 30 months without the Boston Marathon; it was go-time in Boston on Monday morning. The Red Sox even put on a show to celebrate, beating the Tampa Bay Rays 6-5 to win the ALDS in dramatic fashion later that evening.  

Among the 15,716 individuals making their way from Hopkinton to the finish line on Boylston Street in Boston were three familiar faces: former teammates, U.S. Ski Team members, and Olympians Kikkan Randall, Ida Sargent, and Liz Stephen. The threesome ran on behalf of Aktiv Against Cancer, which promotes physical activity as an integral part of cancer treatment. 

According to Aktiv’s mission statement, “Recent research indicates the benefits of physical activity extend beyond controlling symptoms and side-effects of cancer therapy; it is shown to reduce cancer progression and improve a patient’s response to anticancer therapy.”

Nearly two years ago in November, 2019, these women lined up together for the NYC Marathon, each achieving their goal of finishing under three hours. At the time, Randall was only one year beyond her own cancer treatment journey. After receiving the diagnosis of Stage 2 breast cancer in June of 2018, Randall underwent six rounds of chemotherapy, infusions of the drug Herceptin, and a lumpectomy. All the while, she remained active, sharing her journey openly through daily video updates and social media. 

Randall shared her Boston Marathon race experience via email.

“We’re all hobbling around today but also basking in the glow after a hard race and fun experience!! After meeting up for the NYC marathon two years ago, when the opportunity to run Boston in October came up (versus April) we jumped at the chance to get together and once again shine the spotlight on an organization near and dear to our hearts, AKTIV Against Cancer. 

“All of us have had close contacts with cancer in our personal lives and as athletes recognize how important physical activity is for tackling the treatment. So to be able to raise funds for important research and outreach, we jumped at the chance. We were able to raise over $17,000 collectively toward the cause!”

In 2019, Randall checked the box on her sub-3 goal with a time of 2:55:12. This year, she was just shy with a net time of 3:00:27.

“When we decided to do this back in April/May, I think all of us had ambitions to prepare for this race more seriously. But as we’re all finding post-racing, life is busy and I think we all came in a little under prepared. Regardless, it was going to be a great excuse to meet up with best friends.”

Two minutes behind Randall, Sargent crossed the line in 3:02:26. Sargent also remarked that she felt under-trained at the start line, but the experience and opportunity outweighed the feeling of the final 10k. 

“We plan to do these races as a little reunion and an opportunity to see and run with each other and support Aktiv,” wrote Sargent. “Today was so much fun but also a beast. The energy out on course of these big races is also so incredible. I hadn’t trained or run much at all leading up to the race so I really wasn’t sure what to expect but I was very excited that my legs felt great for so long. The last four or five miles were tough but I just told myself that I couldn’t walk and that kept me going through to the finish line.”

Despite being veterans when it comes to endurance racing, Randall shared that the women were perhaps lured out too quickly, leaving them a little too dinged up when they faced the Newton hills late in the race. Runners face the infamous “Hearbreak Hill” at mile 20, steadily climbing for half a mile on tired legs. 

Though all three women positive-split the race, Stephen bled the least amount of time in the second half; she clocked 1:25 through the first half, losing five minutes over the second to finish in 2:55:48.

“The downhill start was really fun for the first 10km,” wrote Randall. “At points we were on-pace for a sub-2:45.  But being Boston rookies, and light on the running mileage, that early fast pace took its toll on all of us at different points.  Liz made it under 3-hours, I was just a smidge over and Ida had a great day at 3:02.  The last 10km was incredibly tough and I think we were all missing those gliding sections you get in ski races to recover and recharge.”

The fun didn’t stop when they reached the painted yellow and blue finish line emblazoned with the Boston Athletics Association unicorn.  

“Liz’s partner Jeff [Bland] also ran the race and fundraised for AKTIV with us,” Randall explained. “So after the three girls finished, we went back out to cheer him on. (Bland finished in 4:19:59.) We figured we ended up walking another 7 miles, which was painful — but also maybe a little helpful to keep from tightening up.”

What’s the next race-reunion? According to Randall, they’re looking for ideas!

“I think we’re all looking forward to not running for a while and yet we can’t help but wonder, what should we do next?!”

Boston Marathon Results

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — An autumnal survey of who’s got early snow is somewhere between a trope and a cliché in these pages. Consider, for example, “Early Season at Hatcher Pass: A Photo Essay,” “Early-Season Snow: A Photo Roundup,” or “Alaskans Revel in October Skiing at Hatcher Pass, Birch Hill” (with photos). You may sense a theme here.

But the earliest on-snow dates in these articles are October 6, October 14, and October 15. How would you like to read that same article, but set in – *record scratch* – September?

All of which is to say, it snowed in Anchorage over the weekend. A lot. Like, up 16 to 20 inches a lot. Like, knee-deep on Reese Hanneman a lot. As the local National Weather Service office explained, “moisture from [Cook Inlet and the] Gulf of Alaska was pushed against the Chugach Mountains in what is called upslope flow. The cooling of the air as it moves up the terrain, combined with a steady influx of moisture and upper level support, created the large spread in snow totals over the eastern side of town and into the Chugach Front Range.”

Local skiers, from Olympians to weekend warriors, knew what to do with the results of ample moisture plus cool air. Friday morning’s practice for the APU Elite Team became a 2-hour on-snow classic ski. Saturday afternoon, Scott Patterson and David Norris logged a 3.5-hour classic ski OD over the Hillside trail system. For their second workout of the day. Many athletes went nordic skiing on Friday then alpine skiing on Saturday, skinning up the slopes at Arctic Valley before bombing down through nearly two feet of fresh snow. As former FasterSkier reporter Nat Herz captioned a Saturday Instagram story from Arctic Valley, in a nod to less salubrious real-world concerns, “Alaska: Highest Covid counts in the country. Best damn September skiing anywhere.”

If race-ski skiing in September while all Alaska hospitals are rationing care and patients die for want of ventilator space was surreal – and it was – then so was looking down from the Hillside ski trails, on the eastern edge of Anchorage, and seeing nothing but bare ground on the west side of town. Due to some meteorological quirks in an area with mountains and ocean in close proximity and the potential for remarkable microclimates, it snowed literally zero inches anywhere west of the Seward Highway, which roughly bisects Anchorage. The views of snow-covered mountains from Kincaid Park, the city’s other main nordic area, were world-class, but none of that snow reached sea-level Kincaid.

Geographically speaking, the distance from “Trace” of snow on this map to “16.5 inches” is around eight miles as the crow flies, with each endpoint on that line readily visible from the other. Practically speaking, you could ski in the morning beneath snow-encrusted trees, then run, or mountain bike, or even rollerski in the afternoon, on dry trails beneath gorgeous full colors. (Most of the leaves are still on the trees, save those that recently collapsed under the heavy snow load. Because it’s still September.) It was like Bend in the spring, but without the altitude or sunscreen.

Finally, a brief history lesson. On September 24, 2000, an aspiring pro nordic skier named Cory Smith reveled in a fall snowstorm that let him ski in loops on a Park City golf course before it melted away on a 60° day. “A three hour OD on snow in September! Unheard of,” Smith raved on his proto-nordic blog.

In the intervening two decades, Smith would come close to but not ultimately make the 2002 U.S. Olympic team, found an obscure website called FasterSkier.com, retire from pro skiing, and move to Anchorage, where he would code a simple but effective and widely used website for user-generated ski trail reports. On September 24, 2021, he would write on snowio.com, “Hillside is very skiable. It’s slushy, so waxless rock skis are the way to go. But if you want a true September WTF (winter’s truly fantastic) experience, head up a little higher. There is about 2 feet of snow and a nice skied-in track from Upper O’Malley trailhead to Glen Alps.”

Please enjoy this selection of recent photos from a truly fantastic winter experience in Anchorage (plus two bonus on-snow photos from Fairbanks at the end). All images are screenshots from their respective Instagram photos or stories, posted at some point between Friday and Sunday.

Related reading:

“A Summer Without Snow: Athletes and Coaches on a Year with No Summer Skiing,” FasterSkier, October 2020

“Summer Ski Odyssey Reveals Decaying Dreams in Italy,” FasterSkier, August 2013

Most FasterSkier readers will be familiar with the name Peter Graves, also referred to as the voice of cross country skiing (and incidentally, the author’s uncle). This summer, Graves lent his voice to the cycling venues near Tokyo for the 2020-turned-2021 Olympic Games. For Graves, this marks his twelfth time announcing at the Games, including summer and winter appearances. Needless to say, he has a wealth of experience.

FasterSkier connected with Graves on a recent call to understand how the coronavirus pandemic may have affected this year’s games, and what insights the Tokyo Games might provide for the upcoming Winter Games in Beijing in February 2022. 

Graves was quick to highlight the great announcing and production team he worked with and the graciousness of the host country, Japan. “They ran great events,” he said, “I think they did a truly remarkable job under a very difficult set of circumstances.” For context, the Tokyo Games drew roughly 11,091 athletes from 206 participating countries, and over 770,000 COVID tests were conducted from July 1st onward. Of those tests, the cumulative total of positive COVID cases (including airport tests for Games participants and Tokyo 2020 screening tests) came to 567, with three additional positives coming fourteen days after leaving Japan. Graves called this, “a very admirable record,” all things considered. 

Graves was in Japan for ten days, announcing at the road and time-trial cycling events. To fans watching from home, a stark difference this year was the lack of spectators at most events. However, cycling was one of the three venues that allowed socially distanced spectating and particularly during the road race, Graves noted that there were lots of spectators along the road where he “saw a lot of joy of free people sharing the Olympic spirit.”

For Graves, this year’s games were a very different experience than past years, particularly socially. His first Olympic announcing appearance came in 1980 during the Lake Placid Winter Olympics, at the cross country skiing venue, which Graves describes as “the last of the smaller, more intimate games.” (Lake Placid at the time had a population of just 2,490.)

Reminiscing about the “joie de vivre” of the main street, which was turned into a pedestrian zone for the Games, Graves described the tradition of trading Olympic pins, another strong memory from Lake Placid and other games. “I have a collection of probably 3,000 pins from over the years and I love trading but I just didn’t see any of that [in Tokyo]” said Graves. “I brought a lot of pins to Tokyo and didn’t trade a single one because there was nobody to trade with!”

Being “in the bubble” meant that Graves and his team were tested for COVID everyday. Before departing the US, he needed two negative test results within 72 hours of departure and was tested again upon his arrival in Japan. The initial COVID testing procedures alone took six hours. 

Graves was stationed at the Fuji International Speedway, about two hours from Tokyo, where the road race and time-trial events finished. Everyday the same car took the announcing team from the hotel to the venue, and everybody was masked. Their temperatures were taken daily as they entered, and they left the venue at the end of the day in the same car, with the same crew. Graves and his announcing crew were allowed approximately fifteen minutes to get their dinners to bring back to their hotel rooms. In contrast to other Olympics, there weren’t any nights of eating with friends or colleagues for Graves this time around. “The story of life in a bubble,” he said. There was virtually nobody out on the streets and while Graves said he can’t vouch for Tokyo, he thought it was the same sort of scene there. 

“The Olympics are first and foremost about the athletes and their performances,” stated Graves, “[this year] gave me more respect for the athletes, most were in the Olympic village and that was quite secure as well, in terms of COVID.” 

Usually, he is able to meet and interact with the athletes a bit but there was none of that this year, “I didn’t get the chance to speak to them personally or to take photos,” Graves explained. Nevertheless, he shared some personal highlights, including very tactical road races which were “fascinating.” “I enjoyed watching and commenting on them,” said Graves, “there was a vast amount of tactics, as there always is. The Tour de France had just ended the Sunday before and many of the same athletes were competing in Tokyo.” 

Graves also emphasized the important messages about mental health that athletes such as Simone Biles shared. “I left with a great appreciation for people like Simone Biles who made, I think, a really important case to speak about mental health,” said Graves, “to make it okay to be truthful, to make it okay to say ‘I’m not feeling well, mentally or physically.’ I think those messages are really important cautionary tales to everyone. Those were the things I was impressed with by the athletes.” 

Graves voiced his support for the Olympics going ahead, in spite of the arguments against them happening. 

“I’m glad they did the Games,” he said, “I’m well aware there were plenty of nay-sayers. It robs the athletes of an opportunity that may never come again. My hope is that the athletes found joy taking part in the Games, because the spirit is embodied by their humanity and enthusiasm. On TV, I saw countless examples of really great sportsmanship. I think the athletes should really be praised for how they managed themselves over there.” 

Given the delay to the 2020 Games, we are now less than six months away from the Winter Olympics, scheduled to take place in Beijing starting February 4th, 2022. While Graves was clear that he can’t speak about Beijing per say, his experience in Tokyo may shed some light on what the upcoming Winter Games may look like. “One wonders, with the Beijing Games just six months away and the resurgence of the Delta variant globally,” pondered Graves, “I have to believe priority number one for Beijing will be keeping a good and tight bubble for those Games too.”