From the FasterSkier archive — posts syndicated from athletes’ and coaches’ own blogs between 2004 and 2012, kept online as published. Current coverage is at fasterskier.com.
Paul Smith’s College is hiring a Nordic Center Manager to run the ski operation at its Visitor Interpretive Center, the 25 miles of ski, snowshoe and hiking trails on the college’s campus in the northern Adirondacks of New York.
The job is full time and covers nearly everything that happens on snow at the VIC: races and events, lessons and youth programs, passes and partnerships, trail and course readiness, and the student staff and volunteers who keep the place running. The college sees the VIC/Outdoor Center as a regional ski destination, an event venue, a classroom and an earned-revenue business all at once, and it wants a hands-on manager who can grow how much the center gets used in every one of those roles.
The trails are also home to one of the strongest programs in the U.S. Collegiate Ski and Snowboard Association. Head coach Matt Dougherty’s Paul Smith’s men won the 2026 USCSA national title and the women finished second, a run FasterSkier wrote about this month. The new manager will work alongside the VIC Director, the Trails & Facilities Manager and Athletics to balance what the team needs with public access, programs and events.
Skiers gathered on the Paul Smith’s College trails, with the Adirondacks beyond. (Photo: Paul Smith’s College)
The Position
Nordic Center Manager, regular, full time, exempt
Department: Paul Smith’s College Outdoor Center / Visitor Interpretive Center (VIC)
Reports to the Director of the Outdoor Center / VIC
Salary: $62,353.20 to $68,000
Health, dental and vision insurance, paid time off, and a 403(b) to which the college contributes 5 percent of salary
Tuition remission for employees and their dependents, plus free use of the college’s gym, athletic facilities and the VIC trails
Early mornings, evenings, weekends and holidays come with the job in winter
The start of the 2020 Paul Smith’s College Bobcat Invitational. (Photo: Pat Hendrick)
Events, Programs and Partners
The first half of the job is getting more people onto the trails. The manager will:
Keep developing the Nordic Center as a welcoming, high quality regional destination for students, teams, visitors and the local community
Find, plan, promote and support races, training opportunities, clinics, youth programs, community events and group outings
Build public programming, including learn-to-ski sessions, skills clinics, school and youth programs, camps, guided outings and community races
Build relationships with Nordic clubs, race directors, coaches, schools, collegiate programs, tourism partners, outdoor recreation organizations and local businesses
Grow visits and earned revenue through passes, programs, events, facility use, partnerships and sponsorships
A skier in the hardwoods at the Paul Smith’s College Visitor Interpretive Center. (Photo: Paul Smith’s College)
Running the Venue
The second half is the daily operation. The manager will:
Coordinate the day-to-day Nordic Center experience, from public access and trail and course readiness to user communications, scheduling, safety procedures and service standards
Recommend trail, course, facility, equipment, signage and visitor service improvements that make the venue more reliable, more accessible and better prepared for events
Recruit, train, schedule, supervise and mentor student employees, seasonal staff and volunteers
Serve as Manager on Duty
Depending on the experience and strengths of the person hired, the role can also lead, oversee or share the work in one or more of these areas:
Winter grooming, including grooming schedules, trail condition updates, and operating and maintaining the grooming equipment
Supervising staff and students on sustainable trail construction and maintenance
Race recruitment and operations, including regional, high school, collegiate and club relationships and course planning for specific competitions
Clinics, camps, youth programming, school partnerships and inclusive community recreation
Pass sales, rentals, retail, sponsorships, marketing, tourism partnerships and social media
Long-range planning for trails, courses, facilities, amenities and capital improvements
The 2019 working map of the competition and recreational ski trails Morton Trails laid out on the Paul Smith’s College campus. (Map courtesy of Paul Smith’s College)
Qualifications
Required:
Experience in outdoor recreation, event management, hospitality, community programming, destination development, customer service, Nordic skiing or a related field
A track record of helping develop and deliver events, programs, services, partnerships or customer experiences, with strong planning, communication, relationship building and problem solving skills
Ability to supervise and mentor student employees, seasonal staff, volunteers or crews, and to work across campus and with outside partners
Ability to work outdoors in variable winter conditions, on early mornings, evenings, weekends, holidays and changing hours
Strong computer and administrative skills, including email, spreadsheets, scheduling and digital recordkeeping, and the ability to learn point-of-sale, rental and reservation, equipment inventory and trail condition systems
Preferred:
Experience managing a Nordic center, winter recreation venue, trail system, outdoor recreation business, event operation or comparable public-facing operation
Experience with pass or membership programs, registration, earned-revenue services, marketing, sponsorships, tourism partnerships, Nordic events or cross country ski racing
Experience with or strong knowledge of Nordic grooming, snowmobile operation, grooming equipment, trail maintenance or winter trail operations
Physical requirements: The manager must be able to move safely on foot over icy, snow-covered and steep trails, lift and move equipment weighing up to 50 pounds, operate or learn to operate winter utility vehicles including snowmobiles and tracked UTVs, and have the endurance to respond quickly in deep snow.
How to Apply
Paul Smith’s College is accepting submissions through November 20, 2026. Apply through the college’s careers site:
Questions about careers at the college can go to Paul Smith’s College human resources at 518-327-6179. Paul Smith’s College is an equal opportunity employer.
Lars Dewall leads a small group through Berlin on September 27. He finished the BMW Berlin Marathon in 2:12:13, third among the Americans. (Photo: Sportograf)
The summer before he started college, Lars Dewall ran his easy miles at a nine-minute pace.
He had run 4:26 for the mile in high school. He had been an all-state skier at Stillwater Area High School in Minnesota, the same school Jessie Diggins skied for. And the coach waiting for him at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth had given him one rule for his easy days: keep his heart rate under 140 beats per minute.
For a runner like Dewall, on the road, that was a jog.
“That’s how slow I was going,” he said. “It just doesn’t feel fun, and it takes a long, long time.”
People tell him now that he runs his easy days fast.
“I’m like, yeah, five years ago I was running nine-minute pace, though,” he said. “I had to be so disciplined about that for so long.”
On September 27 he ran 2:12:13 at the BMW Berlin Marathon, 31st overall and third among the Americans, behind Charlie Sweeney and Will Nation. It was his fourth marathon and his fourth personal best. He debuted with 2:22:57 at Grandma’s in June 2025, ran 2:14:15 at the California International Marathon that December, comfortably under the 2:16 standard for the 2028 Olympic Marathon Trials, and then ran 2:12:30 at Boston in April. In between, back in Duluth, he won the Park Point 5-Miler and broke a race record that had stood since 1975. It belonged to Steve Hoag, who finished second at Boston that spring.
Earlier this month his college coach, Chad Salmela, made the case in these pages for what American distance runners could learn from cross-country skiers, and called Dewall “my living thesis.” Salmela, who also calls cross-country skiing for NBC, describes his role these days as a sounding board on broad direction.
Dewall teaches sixth, seventh and eighth graders in San Diego and trains with a group called Lane Zero Athletics. When we spoke on a Sunday in October he had already done his long run with the team, slept for about an hour, and was getting the coffee going at one in the afternoon.
“It’s kind of like the day’s actually starting,” he said.
He talked for most of an hour and needed very few questions to do it. Nearly every answer came back around to the same place. The hardest thing a distance runner has to learn is how to go slowly, and skiers worked that out a long time ago.
St. Scholastica’s skiers after the men’s team won the NCAA Central Region team title in 2023, a first for the program. Dewall raced for the Saints on snow as well as on the track and the cross-country course. (Courtesy photo)
Lying down in the tracks
Skiing came first, in a way, and he did not care for it.
His father was a serious skier, good enough to have raced against Salmela at some point, though Dewall is not sure exactly when. He took his son out on snow when the boy was small.
“I just didn’t really like it that much, and it was kind of painful,” Dewall said and continued in his father’s voice. “He always describes it. He’s like, yeah, I’d take you out and you’d just go a little bit and lay down in the tracks or in the snow and just kind of goof around.”
Football was the thing. He ran cross-country and track in middle school, but he cared more about football than any of it. In seventh grade he took track seriously and ran somewhere around 5:15 for the mile. In eighth grade, still a middle schooler, he trained with the high school team.
“I look back on that and I’m like, that was a pretty big turning point, because you’re putting yourself in a situation with older guys,” he said. “I remember learning a lot more, and that, looking back on it, I feel like was more important than how I performed at that age. Although I performed well.”
He planned to play football as a sophomore. That fell through, which he calls “a whole nother story,” and he abandoned ship for cross-country after the season was already underway. He was “aerobically pretty naturally talented,” he said, but there was not enough time left to get fit.
Nordic skiing started around eighth or ninth grade, and it humbled him.
“You can be really fit, but that doesn’t make you good at skiing,” he said. “It’s very, very different.”
The technique took a couple of years. By his senior winter he was all-state, and he remembers finishing 22nd or 23rd at the state meet, which was enough to make him consider skiing in college. The trouble was that he had already committed to run at Western Washington University in Bellingham.
After that ski season he toured St. Scholastica and met Salmela, who had been the school’s first nordic head coach for ten years before taking over cross-country running in 2016. Dewall would not have to choose.
“I was really into the idea of being able to both nordic ski and run,” he said. “Especially at that age, I think it was really good for me to continue to do both for some years, because I didn’t know which one I really wanted to do at that point. And looking back on it now, they both really complemented each other for a really long time.”
Dewall (190), center, racing cross country for St. Scholastica. Under the 140-beat rule, his easy runs on Duluth’s trails went as slow as 10- and 11-minute pace. (Courtesy photo)
The ‘Under 140’ Rule
The running in high school was built for the mile and the two-mile. His coach at Stillwater was Scott Christensen, whose program produced four sub-four-minute milers by 2012, the most of any American high school at the time. Dewall puts the number at four or five.
“My training was very VO2 max centered,” he said. “We’re running the mile and two-mile. There was no 5K.”
Most of the rest of his running, he said, sat in “that level two zone, which at the time I didn’t even really know what that meant.”
His best times were good and, he will tell you himself, not extraordinary: 4:26 for the mile, around 9:40 for two miles, 15:55 for 5,000 meters. He graduated in 2019 and doubts those marks would get him in the door at Western Washington now.
“I guarantee those times would not,” he said. “They’d be like, nah, sorry.”
What he remembers from those years is not a time.
“I was running faster on my recovery or easy days in high school than I am now,” he said.
The easy runs went at 6:30 to 7:15 a mile, with his heart rate at 150 to 160.
“You’re in that zone where you’re just burning glycogen,” he said. “You can’t call it recovery, because you’re not recovering. You’re just burning through your tank every day, and you might get fit pretty quickly.”
He has nothing against that kind of training. He just thinks it answers a different question.
“If you gave me an athlete and were like, okay, we need to get this athlete as fit as possible in two to three months, you’re gonna do a lot of that zone two, because it’s gonna have the most bang for your buck,” he said. “But if you were to give me an athlete and say, we need to make this athlete the best version of themselves, and we have eight years to do it, well, you’re gonna do things a lot differently in terms of the intensity on your easy days.”
Zone two sits well below threshold but above the genuinely easy work of zone one. On the Olympiatoppen scale most skiers know, the Norwegian system, it runs from roughly 72 to 82 percent of maximum heart rate. It builds fitness quickly. Plenty of coaches believe it also costs more recovery than easier efforts without giving much more back, and that is the trade Dewall is describing.
He also thinks, looking back, that he was never really a miler.
“I think I was a true distance runner who had the ability to run well at the mile and two-mile still, just by default almost,” he said.
In Duluth, Salmela made it simple. Keep the heart rate around 140 or below on easy days. Dewall did not buy in right away.
“It took me a little while to buy into it, and I was kind of half in, half out for a while,” he said. “But eventually I started taking it very seriously.”
His first college cross-country season started well and ended with an illness and a disappointing finish. The principle held anyway. The nine-minute miles on the road were the hard part. Duluth had trails, and the trails helped.
“The trails made it easy to really soak up, let’s just say, two hours at 135 BPM, but we were running maybe 10-, 11-minute pace on technical trails,” he said. “It made it mentally easy to let your ego go and just accept that it’s going to be a slow run and low heart rate, and that’s okay.”
The return took years. When he is fit now he can run 6:45 a mile with his heart rate close to 130. He measures that against the high schooler who ran his easy days at about the same pace and 25 beats higher.
“It’s huge,” he said. “It’s everything.”
By the time he carried that discipline onto snow, the skiers around him already had it.
“The skiers have a much better concept and notion of easy training than runners,” he said. “I would say it’s not even close. I feel like I’ve done more running than I have skiing, but I’ve done enough skiing to confidently say that the skiers are much more on top of their intensities, and cognizant about what they’re doing every day.”
He has a theory about why.
“Maybe it’s just the simple idea that you’re skiing, the terrain is varying,” he said. “Skiing feels a little bit more social to me than running does, because you’re out there and it’s different all the time. But running, I think people just get way too caught up in the pace per mile and all of that.”
St. Scholastica runners, Dewall among them, under the finish banner at the 2023 NCAA Division III Cross Country Championships in Newville, Pennsylvania. (Courtesy photo)
Eight hundred hours
In college he stopped counting miles and counted hours: run, ski, bike, lift. Some years, he said, came out between 800 and 900.
“I was pushing it pretty heavy,” he said. “And again, obviously a lot of that is cross-training and not running.”
Not all of it paid right away, even in a college career that included All-America honors in cross-country in 2023. The 5,000 and 10,000 meter results did not match the workload, and the skiing never got where he wanted it. He still turns that over.
“I felt like I was decent at skiing, but I don’t know what it was, and I still think about it sometimes. I felt like it just couldn’t push to that top level,” he said. “I felt like I maybe didn’t start early enough, or maybe naturally just didn’t have it in that sport, and that’s okay. But I still really enjoyed it, and I think there was a huge payout later on in the running world with all the skiing.”
The year had a rhythm. Winter was mostly skiing, with a little running. Cross-country season was a mix. In the spring he let the volume slide so he could sharpen for track.
“You’re not going to run well in track if you’ve got heavy ski legs,” he said.
What he and Salmela watched was the line from one year to the next, not any single season. It has only gone one way.
“There hasn’t been a year since I started working with Chad where I haven’t gotten better, like PR’d in something or seen improvement in some way or another,” he said. “There were some years where maybe a nordic ski season or a track season or even a cross-country season didn’t go perfectly, and that’s sport. But across the board, since 2019, I can confidently say there hasn’t been a year where I haven’t gotten better.”
He plans to do this for a lot more years and sees no reason for the line to bend. “I haven’t dramatically changed anything,” he said.
The volume is lower now, because a runner cannot absorb hours the way a skier can.
“You can try, but something’s gonna give at some point,” he said. “You’re gonna get hurt, essentially.”
What crossed over intact was the mindset.
“I’m really good about training like a skier, in the mindset of, I go out there and I know exactly what intensities I need to hit every day,” he said. “And I’ve done a really good job of letting the ego side of running go.”
That means running alone, often. If the group heads out on a recovery day at 6:45 pace and his heart rate says no, he lets them go.
“I have no issue going out and letting people go too fast, and I won’t go with them,” he said. “I’ll run alone. But that takes a lot of discipline.”
He is not perfect at it. Where he still slips is in workouts, when somebody wants one more fast rep.
“I can look back even at my block going into Berlin, and look at a couple workouts and be like, did I really need to do that?” he said. “Did that really help me more than it hurt me? But I think just being critical about all that helps you prepare for the future too.”
The culture of the sport pulls the other way, he thinks, and social media has made it worse, especially for younger endurance athletes.
“I feel like there’s also a side of them that’s chasing likes on Strava, or a fast run, or an Instagram post,” he said. “All that stuff is great, but if you’re skewing your training around social media, that’s no good.”
His advice to the younger ones is short.
“Wait for the race to do that,” he said. “Put the race down. The training is just the building blocks.”
Every day should have a reason, a purpose.
“Look at every day and be like, what am I going to do to get better today?” he said. “Instead of just kind of hither and yon, like, oh, let’s show up and run.”
Dewall at the 130th Boston Marathon on April 20, where he ran 2:12:30 off a build with no double threshold sessions in it. (Courtesy photo)
Boring on purpose
Ask what a skier’s background gives a marathoner that most marathoners do not have, and his first answer is something he does less of.
“I’ve always found that I do a lot less VO2 max than most people, and I’ve been asked why,” he said. “The answer is always, VO2 max has a place. You have to touch VO2 max to be able to race well. But it’s less of a factor in the marathon.”
When he leaned on it in high school and college, he would string together a couple of great weeks and then slide.
“I felt like the engine would get flat,” he said. “And it’s so much harder to recover from a hard VO2 max session than a threshold session that’s done very well.”
So he replaced some of it with threshold and what he calls efficiency work. He is sure he does more threshold than the average marathoner. The gap can look small on paper, maybe one session in fourteen days, and he thinks it compounds.
“It’s hard to weigh how much even one workout every 14 days makes over the course of an eight to 12 week training period,” he said. “It adds up.”
The second answer is strength, and with it the ability to carry mileage. He has gone from about 100 miles a week to about 135.
“I don’t want to say that for sure, but I definitely think that the skiing background, the strength, the amount of volume that I was doing all those years has helped me being able to go from, okay, I was running 100 miles a week, that’s a lot. But to be able to jump from that to 135 and still feel pretty dang good,” he said. “To be able to make jumps like that, I feel like the ski background definitely is a part. Someone will go, oh, it’s just 35 more miles. But that jump in your nervous system and fatigue and all of that, it’s an exponential number. It’s hard to even measure.”
The odd part is that in college he barely lifted for running at all.
“I really did none,” he said. “I just didn’t really want to. I was just kind of lazy, and I didn’t believe that it would make me better at running.”
What he did in the weight room was for skiing: upper body, core, pull-ups. For about a year now he has followed a running strength program built to take 20 minutes. Heavy half squats. Step-ups holding about 60 pounds. A Bulgarian split squat done as a jump, with no weight. Romanian deadlifts. Two sets of eight of each, three minutes between, and he spends the three minutes stretching, on core, or on whatever is sore. He lifts two or three times a week, soon after a workout or a long run once he has refueled, and never on a recovery day.
“It comes at a cost, and strength is strength,” he said. “You’re still adding fatigue.”
Then there is the session everybody in marathoning is arguing about. He ran 2:12:30 at Boston with no double threshold days in his build. He ran 2:12:13 in Berlin after a lot of them.
“It’s hard to weigh,” he said. “If I would’ve ran 2:10 in Berlin, would I answer that question differently? Maybe. I just need more races to be able to answer that question. I think they’re both good.”
His complaint is with how a lot of people do it.
“You want fatigue to be the thing that’s stopping you, not lactate being too high,” he said. “People are like, oh, I’m done, my lactate’s high. And most people aren’t even monitoring that. I just like to let time be the thing that makes you tired. Time on feet.”
Going into Berlin, where the goal was to break 2:10, the pace for it, around 4:57 a mile, felt easier than it ever had in his career. He gives double threshold some of the credit and plans to keep it, perhaps every other week instead of every week.
“It’s taxing,” he said.
After the first story ran, Salmela wrote that Dewall was basing most of his current training on cutting-edge running technology. Dewall found the phrase funny.
“I would say that a lot of my training looks pretty boring, because it’s a lot of the same stuff over and over and over,” he said. “But the consistency is there, and the focus and discipline and being a mature runner is there.”
Lactate testing and heart rate data matter, he said. But he thinks what Salmela meant is simpler than any of the gadgets.
“In the running world specifically, people aren’t out there constantly monitoring heart rate and all that data, and getting useful information from it,” he said. “Even in the pro world in running, there are people who are doing a really good job of it, but there’s people out there who are just showing up, like, let’s go run.”
Dewall on the road in Berlin, his first race in Europe. He called it the most organized and efficient race he has been to. (Photo: Sportograf/courtesy photo)
The road to St. Louis
The Olympic Marathon Trials are in St. Louis on March 25, 2028. Dewall has had the qualifying time since CIM, and he is not alone at home. Three or four of the Lane Zero runners, Dewall included, have met the 2:16 standard.
“Although San Diego’s a big city, that’s a lot of qualifiers for even a big city,” he said. “Those are the guys that can push me in workouts and really make me better in workouts.”
Puma backed him through Berlin under its PROJECT 3 program for sub-elite marathoners, and after the race the company told some of those athletes it would support them through the Trials. He does not yet know what that will look like. He doubts it will be money.
“But free gear and travel and stuff like that, and that’s pretty huge,” he said. “So I’m stoked about that.”
He knows where the next line is.
“Two-ten is the number that most of these companies are looking at to be like, okay, let’s get you on an actual contract,” he said.
For now he is letting his body decide what comes next. Berlin was three weeks old when we spoke, and the job was to recover without giving back fitness. There might be a race before the end of the year. He expected to know soon.
Early 2027 is for going shorter: road 5Ks and 10Ks, maybe a 3,000 or a mile, even a time trial. His 5,000 best is 14:37, and he thinks 14:10 is there at the least. He would like to get under 29 minutes for 10K. His mile best is 4:10 from college, and before Berlin he ran 4:22 at the end of a workout without trying very hard.
“I was like, to my buddies, I think I could have PR’d in the mile right now at the end of this workout if I would’ve went for it,” he said. “Who doesn’t want to have a faster mile PB, even if you’re a marathoner?”
The bigger target is the half marathon standard for the Trials, 1:03:00. The window for half marathon qualifiers opens January 1, 2027. His best is 1:04:06, from the Garry Bjorklund Half Marathon at Grandma’s in June, in conditions he called humid-ish. He is already qualified for St. Louis, so the half would change nothing about his place there. He wants it anyway, and he is looking at a half in March.
“It’s a nice accolade to have,” he said. “It’s no gimme. That’s gonna take some really specific prep.”
He expects to run one marathon in 2027. Boston again, maybe London, maybe Chicago, nothing later in the year than that. He would think about Berlin again if teammates were going, because of how well the race took care of its elite field.
“That was the most organized and efficient race I’ve ever been to,” he said. “And that’s worth a lot.”
He wonders whether getting there three or four days earlier would have bought him something. He does not know. He also admits he remembers very little of the course.
“I always laugh when people ask me about the course in those races, and I’m like, I don’t even know,” he said. “You’re going pretty fast, but you’re also in a group like that, and the only thing you’re looking at is just the person in front of you.”
On Monday mornings he is back in front of his middle schoolers. He is not a morning person, which makes running before school a grind in the long weeks.
“I wish I could start my teaching day at 9 or 10 a.m., but that’s not how the real world works,” he said.
He would not trade it.
“When you don’t have that job, it’s easy to get almost obsessed with the training and the running,” he said. “As much as that’s great and it’s exciting, I think it’s good to have something to force me to not think about running.”
The classroom gives some of it back.
“It’s fun teaching kids and making a difference in their life,” he said. “I feel like they take interest in the marathon stuff too, and ask questions, and always want updates.”
He wants to coach someday, probably once his own career is over, and he knows which sport.
“I think I’d like coaching running more,” he said. “A little more straightforward. Less variables, less factors.”
No wax, no kick, no temperatures, as he put it.
The 2:10 is still out there, and he knows how close 2:12 is.
“I’m scratching,” he said. “I just gotta connect on the right day.”
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Skiers head under the arch at the Rendezvous Ski Trails, where a November pass is required for festival week. (Courtesy photo)
Hello, XC skiers!
Excitement is building in West Yellowstone after our first snow. It won’t be long before we’re back out on the trails, enjoying the fresh air, great skiing and the start of another season. Now is the time to make your plans for the 2026 Yellowstone Ski Festival, Nov. 21 through 28 on the Rendezvous Ski Trails.
Our trail crew has been working hard to get the trails ready, and we look forward to welcoming everyone back to regular grooming and miles of outstanding skiing. From first tracks in the morning to an easy ski with friends in the afternoon, there’s nothing better than getting out on the snow and enjoying everything West Yellowstone has to offer.
A skier strides through fresh classic tracks on the Rendezvous Ski Trails during the 2014 festival. (Photo: Lander Karath)
Eight Days on Early Snow
Thanksgiving week in West Yellowstone has belonged to skiers for a long time. Competitive athletes, first-timers and whole families come from all over to get on snow while most of the country is still waiting for winter. There is skiing every day of the festival, clinics for every level, biathlon on the range and a race to close out the week.
The tradition reaches back to 1979, when the U.S. Ski Team began bringing coaches to West Yellowstone each November to train them. FasterSkier told that story last fall in a look inside the festival and its clinics, and it is worth a read before you come.
A November trail pass is required for all of November and during the festival, and it is good through Nov. 30. From Dec. 1 through March 31, season and day passes are sold by the U.S. Forest Service at the Hebgen Lake Ranger Station, at Freeheel and Wheel, and at the Rendezvous Trailhead.
Clinic skiers sort into ability groups with coaches in red jackets at the Rendezvous Ski Trails. (Courtesy photo)
Clinics With Top Coaches
Looking to improve your skiing this season? Our clinics feature top coaches who can help you build skills, clean up your technique and get even more enjoyment out of your time on skis.
Jack Hart will be leading this year’s coaching staff. We place every skier in a group of similar ability, six to eight skiers per coach, and the coaches rotate through the groups each half day so you hear more than one voice over the week. Advanced groups also work on speed, endurance, strength, agility and race tactics.
The three-day Skate and Classic XC Fundamentals for Performance and the two-day Skate and Classic Tune Up both begin Tuesday, Nov. 24, with classic in the morning and skate in the afternoon. One-day technique clinics follow later in the week: skate on Thursday, Nov. 26 or Saturday, Nov. 28, and classic on Friday, Nov. 27.
Don’t wait to sign up. Any clinic with fewer than six skiers registered by Nov. 19 will be canceled. Find clinic details here and register here.
The stadium and biathlon range at the Rendezvous Ski Trails, seen from above. (Photo: WYSEF)
Biathlon, a Race and Après-Ski
Biathlon newcomers get a proper start. A Try-It clinic on Tuesday runs two sessions of up to 50 skiers each, and anyone planning to race the novice biathlon for the first time needs to attend it. The biathlon sprint and novice races follow on Wednesday, Nov. 25, at the stadium and range.
Friday afternoon brings après-ski at the Rendezvous Trailhead. On Saturday, Nov. 28, the week wraps up with a fun 5 km and 10 km freestyle mass start, open to all ages and abilities and capped at 200 skiers. Watch for race registration to open in the coming weeks.
Wax clinics, a mindful movement class and an evening speaker round out the week. Everything depends on snow: low snow means modified courses, and no snow means races and clinics are canceled, with clinic fees refunded less a small administrative fee. The full festival schedule is online and will be updated as November gets closer.
Young skiers warm up together in the sun at the Rendezvous Ski Trails. (Photo: WYSEF)
Places to Stay and Visit
When booking your stay, please consider our festival sponsors. They support our ski community, and we appreciate your support of their businesses.
While you’re in town, stop by Freeheel and Wheel for the latest ski gear, great coffee and a chance to catch up with fellow skiers before heading out on the trails.
If the snow is slow to arrive, there are still great ways to get outside: roller ski or bike the road into Yellowstone National Park, or head out on the nine miles of paved Shortline Trail. Destination Yellowstone has more on what to do around town.
Racers push off the start in the stadium at the Rendezvous Ski Trails. (Courtesy photo)
Back in March for the Rendezvous
The season in West Yellowstone ends the way it starts, with a crowd on the trails. The Yellowstone Rendezvous Race, part of the American Ski Marathon Series, brings more than 600 skiers to town and is set for Saturday, March 6, 2027. Registration opens in November.
Festival skiers raise their poles on the Rendezvous Ski Trails during Thanksgiving week in 2018. (Courtesy photo)
See You on the Trails
The Yellowstone Ski Festival is a great way to kick off winter, catch up with old friends, meet new ones and get some real Nordic skiing in before December. Whether you’re joining a clinic, taking first tracks on fresh corduroy or just heading out for a relaxing ski, we can’t wait to see you. Start planning your trip, book your room and get ready for another great season in West Yellowstone.
For the latest festival information, visit skirunbikemt.com. Follow @RendezvousSkiTrails on Facebook and @Rendezvousskitrails1 on Instagram for updates and trail news.
Think snow, get excited, and we’ll see you in November!
The Yellowstone Ski Festival Committee
Clinic coaches line up on skis at the Rendezvous Ski Trails. (Courtesy photo)
Johannes Høsflot Klæbo and his father, Haakon, during a water break on a rollerski workout in Park City, Utah, in September 2023. (Photo: Nathaniel Herz)
After more than 50 years in endurance sports as an athlete and coach, I recognize many of today’s training debates. We were asking versions of the same questions decades ago: How much training is enough? How hard should it be? When should we increase the load, and when should we allow more recovery? My answers have changed. The biggest change has been how much authority I give the training plan compared with the athlete’s response to it. I still believe in consistent work, appropriate volume, controlled intensity, and patience. But I have become much more willing to change the prescription as I learn how the athlete responds.
I believe it is important for coaches and athletes to build the training process on their own experience. Too many follow current trends, which in the last decade or two have shifted more than they did in the previous 30 years. That deserves recognition and some thought. Modifying what an athlete has done successfully over a few years is a fine and reasonable way to go. Wholesale changes create unknowns that make it impossible to assess what has worked.
What we know to be true, and what experience has demonstrated, should remain the foundation of how athletes train. Consistency is key, training at an appropriate volume load is critical, good control of training intensity should be a primary focus, and being patient and allowing the athlete time and room to adapt is most important.
Coach Bryan Fish, in the yellow jacket, works with American athletes at the International Junior Camp in Sjusjøen, Norway, in 2018. How an athlete arrives on a given day can matter more than what the plan says. (Photo: Maria Stuber)
Twenty Years of HRV
Perhaps the most important change I have considered and implemented for anyone I coach is not being a slave to the training plan. I was one of the early adopters of heart rate variability (HRV), some 20 years ago. HRV is a tool I find most valuable in guiding training and in giving athletes the time and space to recover and adapt to it. Of course, following experience and science, I have modified how I analyze HRV over two decades, but the core value is still there. In my experience, HRV helps us refine training so we can give athletes what they need on a given day or week.
Maybe in another decade something better will come along to help with this assessment, and we should be open to that. But we should not throw out something that has demonstrable value.
U.S. biathlete Campbell Wright climbs the Stelvio Pass during a summer training block based in Livigno, Italy, in July 2025, with fresh snow along the road. (Photo: NordicFocus)
A Flatter Ramp
Another big change I have made over the past 10 to 15 years is to the periodized training models we follow. When I was competing, we started the year in May at, say, 50 hours, and we progressively built that load month over month to 100 to 120 hours in November. During the later years of my career and into my early coaching years, I remember talking with coaches, physiologists and other athletes about this process. I simply did not see how 50 hours created adaptation that allowed for 60 hours, and how that training load allowed for 70 hours, and so on. It just did not make sense to me. Of course, it took some years to break out of that cultural mode and truly shift how we plan and implement training.
Now I fully believe in a far less aggressive ramp rate: starting the year at higher volume and staying consistent week to week and month to month. Over the course of the year, we can actually do more training with less shock and stress to the system, and with more consistent development. The theory that we need to increase the load week to week and month to month to add stress so we can adapt is, frankly, BS as I see it now. Training compounds week to week, month to month and year to year with consistency.
Simply put, under any model we should strive for consistent implementation, and we should not increase the load until, and only until, we have plateaued and fully adapted to the current load. Being consistent at the correct loads will let us do more training over a year, or over multiple years, than striving for a month-over-month increase.
It is easy to admire a big week or block of training and be impressed. But one big week or block tells us little more than what the athlete did. It does not tell us whether that training was sustainable, consistent, or actually created beneficial adaptation. The athlete who trains consistently day after day, week after week, month over month and year over year receives far less attention, but is the one building a sustainable base of fitness and performance.
Coach Caitlin Gregg times Loppet Nordic Racing junior Sarah Olsen during a track time trial in the spring of 2018. (Courtesy photo)
The Questions I Ask
So both how I assess training load and recovery with HRV, and how I plan training around consistent loads, have completely changed how I evaluate training decisions. Sometimes the right decision is to add more training load. Often it is not. Other times it is to repeat a sustainable load so the athlete can stay consistent and adapt to it.
I always ask the question: If we do workout X today, or load X this week, how will it affect the athlete next week or next month? We also need to ask what we are trying to improve, what dose we need to improve it, and how we will know if it improved.
Ian Torchia leads L3 intervals with the Stratton Mountain School team in June 2018, with U.S. Ski Team head coach, Matt Whitcomb, following on a bike. (Photo: Pat O’Brien)
Old Becomes New Again
Then we must address the recent trends, and perhaps not so recent, in high-intensity training. In the mid-to-late ’80s and into the ’90s, high doses of threshold training were the “thing.” Then, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, VO2max blocks became the next “thing,” and after that it was back to VO2max workouts in a somewhat more controlled fashion. Now, over the last five or so years, based on the training of a speed skater and some Norwegian triathletes, we are back to so-called threshold and subthreshold training.
In essence, all things old become new again. What is missing from the trends is not the actual training; for some athletes it may well be the correct pathway. What is missing is an assessment of what limits the athlete’s performance. Without judging the merits of either high-intensity methodology, some athletes may need more focus on VO2max work, and others may well benefit from threshold-type workouts. In the simplest terms, an athlete with a very high fractional utilization may benefit more from a higher volume of threshold work, while those who do not have a well-developed aerobic capacity may benefit more from VO2max-type work. For elite athletes with a very high fractional utilization, threshold-type training probably also creates a signal to improve VO2max, or the speed at VO2max, because the intensity is relatively in the same zone.
Regardless of the type of high-intensity training an athlete is doing, we should be most focused on assessing and measuring how efficiently they are moving, their speed, and their durability to sustain that speed. Because no matter what the training methodology is, if you are not consistently improving performance, the training is not working.
U.S. Ski Team coaches Jason Cork and Chris Grover go over the details for a distance time trial at Soldier Hollow in Midway, Utah, in 2017. (Photo: Pat O’Brien)
The Plan Is a Snapshot
The most basic element, and the one most coaches spend hours and hours on, is the training plan. We plan periodized models of increasing training volume, and when and how to implement high-intensity training. We plan when to do races or time trials, when to focus on speed training, and how to fit in strength training and other aspects of performance. Yeah, that is all well and good, but it is mostly an exercise in futility. In my opinion, the training plan was valuable on the day it was written, based on where the athlete was at that snapshot in time. Once a plan is in place, there is a temptation, if not a certainty, that the athlete will do everything in their control to carry it out regardless of how they are feeling or what they need right now.
I did this for years. I spent hours developing an individual plan and expected the athlete to carry it out as some kind of infallible document. That is not how the body works. Nowadays I still write year plans, but with far less detail on hours and specifics, and more explanation of what we want to accomplish in each period rather than details of volume and periodization. I want the plan to create an environment with flexibility, where we use the data, and how the athletes are feeling and adapting, to adjust the day-to-day training.
After more than 50 years, I still believe in the value of consistent training, appropriate volume, controlled intensity, and patience. What has changed is how I decide what an athlete needs and how willing I am to revise that decision.
I once spent more time asking whether the athlete had completed the plan. Today, I spend more time asking whether the training is producing the response we intended, whether the athlete is absorbing it, and what that tells us about the next step.
I expect some of my thinking will continue to change. Experience gives me a foundation, but it also gives me reasons to keep asking questions. The responsibility I have as a coach is to pay attention, assess honestly, and act on what I learn, even when that means changing a plan I believed in when I wrote it.
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Morning fog fills the valley below the von Trapp Family Lodge & Resort in Stowe, Vt. (Photo: Chadwick Estey)
The von Trapp Family Lodge & Resort has received the Historic Hotels of America® Legendary Family Historic Hoteliers of the Year Award, announced October 15 at the 2026 Historic Hotels Annual Awards of Excellence Ceremony and Gala. The honor was conferred on the von Trapp family by Historic Hotels of America, an official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The lodge is one of more than 300 hotels and resorts in the United States recognized by Historic Hotels of America for preserving and maintaining its historic integrity, architecture, and ambiance.
“This recognition is especially meaningful to our family because it honors not only our history, but the generations of dedication that have kept our family’s legacy alive,” said Kristina von Trapp Frame, granddaughter of Maria and Georg von Trapp.
The Trapp Family Singers, who performed in more than 30 countries before and after making their home in Vermont. (Photo: von Trapp Family Lodge & Resort archive)
From Austria to Stowe
The family left Austria in 1938, months after its annexation by Nazi Germany, and spent the years that followed on the road as the Trapp Family Singers. The choir would eventually perform in more than 30 countries, and the family’s story became The Sound of Music.
In 1942 they settled in Stowe. They named their home Cor Unum, Latin for “one heart,” on a hillside looking across to the Worcester Range, and from 1945 to 1955 they ran the Trapp Family Music Camp nearby.
“What began with my grandparents’ dream of creating a home in the Vermont mountains has grown into a place where we have welcomed guests from around the world for more than 75 years,” Frame said.
Building the family’s new lodge in Stowe, 1943. (Photo: von Trapp Family Lodge & Resort archive)
Opening the Doors in 1950
In 1950 the family opened their expanded home to guests as the Trapp Family Lodge. Maria ran it first. Her youngest son, Johannes, took over from her and turned a ski lodge into a year-round destination.
Three generations on, it is still family operated. The property covers 2,600 acres and pairs Austrian-inspired hospitality with outdoor recreation, a craft brewery that began making lager in 2010, farm-to-table dining, and wide-open mountain views.
Maria von Trapp out on skis. (Photo: von Trapp Family Lodge & Resort archive)
Where American Cross-Country Skiing Got Its Start
Skiers know the place for something else. In 1968 Johannes opened a cross-country ski center at the lodge, the first in America.
The trails have stayed close to the sport ever since. Johannes helped revive the Stowe Derby in 1972, and in 2014 the lodge hosted U.S. Junior Nationals, with Johannes himself handing out the medals.
The main lodge, rebuilt in the Austrian style the family brought with them to Stowe. (Photo: Chadwick Estey)
Honored in Williamsburg
Through its Annual Awards of Excellence, Historic Hotels of America recognizes the historic hotels, hoteliers, and leadership practices that do the most to further the recognition, preservation, and celebration of these hotels and their histories. Eleven historic hotels and seven individuals were honored in 2026.
The winners were announced before an audience of owners, general managers, senior decision makers, and guests from many of the finest historic hotels in the world, at the Williamsburg Lodge, Autograph Collection (1939) in Williamsburg, Virginia. The ceremony closed the 2026 Historic Hotels Annual Conference.
“We are delighted to honor the von Trapp Family with this prestigious award. It was chosen from an exclusive group of nominees and considered for several categories. It stands among the finest hotels and hoteliers in the world,” said Lawrence Horwitz, Executive Vice President of Historic Hotels of America and Historic Hotels Worldwide. “We applaud the dedication and passion of the individuals working at these iconic and legendary historic hotels, the people who keep the stories alive from the past and make staying or celebrating special occasions at these historic hotels memorable experiences.”
The von Trapp family lined up in a Stowe field, with Johannes on horseback. (Photo: von Trapp Family Lodge & Resort archive)
Carrying It Forward
“We are incredibly proud to carry on their traditions of warm hospitality, family, music, and a love of the outdoors,” Frame said. “Receiving the Legendary Family Historic Hoteliers of the Year Award is a wonderful tribute to our family, our dedicated employees, and the countless guests who have become part of our story.”
About von Trapp Family Lodge & Resort
Founded in 1950 by the von Trapp family, whose story inspired The Sound of Music, the von Trapp Family Lodge & Resort is a third-generation, family-operated, four-season destination in Stowe, Vermont. Situated on 2,600 acres, the property offers Austrian-inspired hospitality, outdoor recreation, a craft brewery, farm-to-table experiences, and breathtaking mountain views while preserving the family’s rich history and traditions. Learn more at vontrappresort.com.
About Historic Hotels of America®
Historic Hotels of America is the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation for recognizing and celebrating the finest historic hotels across the United States. The National Trust for Historic Preservation was chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1949 and is a private 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. To be nominated and selected for membership, a hotel must be at least 50 years old; designated by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior as a National Historic Landmark or listed in or eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places; and recognized as having historical significance. More than 300 historic hotels from 41 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico have been inducted. Learn more at HistoricHotels.org.
A guest takes in the view from the pond at the von Trapp Family Lodge & Resort. (Photo: Chadwick Estey)
Lars Dewall (50) races for St. Scholastica at the 2023 NCAA Division III Cross Country Championships in Newville, Pennsylvania. (Courtesy photo)
Lars Dewall has run four marathons and he has never run a slow one.
The debut was Grandma’s in June of last year, 2:22:57. Then California International in December, 2:14:15. Then Boston in April, 2:12:30. Then Berlin in September, 2:12:13, third American across the line. Four races, four personal bests, each one faster than the last, which is not how marathon careers usually go.
Dewall came out of Division III. He ran at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth and was an All-American there in 2023, one of the first two the cross-country program ever produced. He now teaches middle school social studies in San Diego. His training sounding board on broad direction is his college coach, Chad Salmela, who coaches cross-country at St. Scholastica, called the women’s team sprint in PyeongChang for NBC, and spent eight years on the US biathlon team before either of those things.
Salmela has a theory about why Dewall keeps getting faster, and it is not a comfortable one for American distance running. He has been making the argument for most of two decades, in a sport that was not his first one, and until recently he did not have a runner fast enough to make anybody listen.
“He’s like my living thesis right now,” Salmela said. “He’s actually texting me as we’re talking.”
Chad Salmela, back row center, with the 2026 College of St. Scholastica cross country team. In more recent years, Salmela has given up the nordic coaching role to concentrate on broadcasting during the ski season, which we will cover soon in part two of this series. (Courtesy photo)
Mileage is a distance, not a volume
The sentence above is his, written rather than spoken. It appears in the letter he sends to recruits, which is less a sales pitch than a seven-paragraph argument about exercise physiology, and it is the cleanest statement of the thing he believes.
“Mileage tells you how far you’re running,” he said. “It doesn’t break down what you did in that distance.”
He has been resisting the number for years and he still resists it.
“You can have a huge mileage week on threshold. You can have a small mileage week on relatively aerobic,” he said. “Two to three two-hour-plus workouts, that’s going to be fewer miles than three threshold workouts. So that mileage metric, I feel like it kind of misshapes things in people’s minds.”
Ninety-mile weeks are not the problem, in other words. What is in them is.
“Ninety-mile weeks at a lactate of 2.5 as opposed to a lactate of 1 is going to have a way bigger consequence down the road,” he said.
This is where the skiing comes in, and it is worth being precise about the lineage, because Salmela is. The interval sessions he leans on are not his. The one he uses the day before a race, a minute on and thirty seconds off, he calls “a complete ripoff from the Ingebrigtsens,” though the session appears in Marius Bakken’s own published account of the Norwegian model, as does the 45-seconds-on, 15-off session Salmela started using this autumn. Bakken, a Norwegian physician and former 13:06 5,000-meter runner, built the method out of more than 5,500 lactate measurements and mentored Gjert Ingebrigtsen (Jakob’s father) directly between 2011 and 2013. The family made it famous. Bakken wrote it down first.
What Salmela did was carry it sideways, out of a sport where lactate testing has been routine for forty years into one where it mostly has not. He is blunt in the recruiting letter about why that gap exists and what it costs: the discovery was “established decades ago in the early 1980s, and has been adjusted in many other endurance sports, yet somehow continues to evade American distance running.”
His own estimate of what the ceiling looks like is deliberately large.
“If you can train as a runner seven or eight hundred hours of aerobic training, it doesn’t have to all be running; you can improve way more than you think as a runner,” he said. “But how do you get those 800 hours? You can’t do it running. You’re probably going to start having a limitation there.”
That is a skier’s number, and he knows it. It is also the number he says Dewall has been running at for two years.
St. Scholastica’s Paul Schommer, foreground, and Joe Dubay bounding up Spirit Mountain in Duluth, Minnesota, in the fall of 2014. (Photo: Chad Salmela)
Injury is not the cost of doing business
The recruiting letter contains three words in capitals: “Injury is NOT necessary.” He gets more animated about this than anything else in our ninety-minute conversation.
“The first thing that always drove me nuts as a skier coming into the running world, before I even started coaching, was just the acceptance of injury as part of the deal,” he said.
He is careful to say he might be wrong, and then says why he does not think he is.
“Anytime you’re asking your body to do something it’s not able to do, you’re doing something wrong,” he said. “I think that’s a very important thing to remember. If you build the strength and you build the motor to handle it, you can pretty much avoid injury.”
Then the qualifier, offered without being asked for, which is the mark of someone who has actually thought about the limits of his own claim: “maybe I’ve just never taken anybody to their very maximal capacities so far, and that could be it.”
The mechanism he proposes is fuel. His argument is that a runner who has never taught their body to burn fat at easy intensities is spending glycogen on workouts that were supposed to be building aerobic efficiency, and that the bill arrives later.
“You’ve got to define where your aerobic threshold is running, and you have to make sure that you’re burning fat there,” he said.
He has a blunt way of describing the high school runner doing it wrong.
“You can’t be running 6.5-minute miles and you got a PR at 15:30. That doesn’t even compute. It’s not easy enough,” he said. “You’re still going to have better immediate success. But somewhere down the road, if you don’t learn how to burn fat, you’re going to probably get hurt.”
The same protectiveness shows up somewhere less expected, which is how he handles a team that is getting sick. Two weeks before we spoke, a freshman turned up to a threshold session with a sore throat and told nobody until afterwards. Three of the four men in his suite went down. By Thursday the squad was, in Salmela’s description, a shell of itself, and on Saturday fourteen of thirty made the workout.
The athlete who did not get sick was the fittest one in the room, and Salmela pulled him out of the hard session anyway.
“I’m not putting you through a level four workout right now when you’re rooming with three guys who probably are carrying the bug, because you’ll be sick by Saturday if we do it,” he said. “He was pissed, but I didn’t let him do it.”
The rule for everyone else is not negotiable and the arithmetic behind it is simple.
“If you’re sick today, you’re not training tomorrow,” he said. “The best case scenario is you catch it, you stop, and you have four days that you’re not training. That’s going to be the minimum.”
Against that he sets what a season costs. His athletes are chasing a minute off an 8k, and he does not think a sick athlete who races anyway gets it.
“They’re not running a minute faster in 8k this year, and they will not do it if they get sick,” he said. “They won’t do it.”
Hurdle bounding at a St. Scholastica dryland session. Salmela believes in the work and is his own cautionary tale about too much of it; a winter of jumps in his last season as a biathlete left him convinced he had compartment syndrome. (Photo: Chad Salmela)
What he got wrong first
Salmela is a strength evangelist who will tell you, unprompted, about the year he ruined a team with it.
“I loaded too much strength on some of my early teams coaching, and they got flat,” he said. “They got super slow, didn’t stay quick.”
What he settled on instead is periodized and, more importantly, individual. December is a strength block for everybody. In season it drops to maintenance and bodyweight work. Beyond that he decides person by person, and he is explicit that the people who say runners need strength and the people who say they do not are both partly right.
“You need a minimal amount of strength just to stay healthy,” he said. “And then some people need strength to be stronger, to be faster as a runner. They actually need strength to be a part of the catalyst that makes you your best.”
He has a sophomore who worked this out for herself before he did. She ran in high school, never lifted, went through the Air Force, got strong there, and arrived at the conclusion that the strength was the thing she had been missing all along. She now does three sessions a week on her own, more than Salmela gives anyone else on the roster.
Plyometrics get the same treatment, and the same warning, which comes from his own body. In his last season as a biathlete he loaded up on jumps and spent January and February convinced he had compartment syndrome.
“Really what it was is I had incredible anaerobic power and the racing season just kind of started having catabolic reactions in my shins,” he said. He credits Dave Bacharach, the exercise physiologist at St. Cloud State, with talking him out of the diagnosis: a lot of type 2 fibre, suddenly drowning in lactate every weekend.
“You have to be careful with plyos for aerobic sports because it’s anaerobic work, and it’s going to steal some of it,” he said.
The archaic notion
Ask him about tapering and he does not hedge.
“I think the taper is an archaic notion,” he said. “I think some people need a taper. You have to find the person who needs a taper. And there are some people out there, but I’d say they’re the minority.”
His team runs six to nine hours a week regardless of where the season is. The reasoning is that fitness is the thing being protected, and that the races themselves do the damage a taper is usually blamed on.
“Great races kick your ass, man,” he said. “They are hard to recover from. So if you want to have two or three great races in a row, you better watch that.”
When he does drop volume it is recovery, not peaking, and he says so. The most persuasive evidence came from a senior who diagnosed her own pattern and brought it to him: three straight years of running a personal best at conference and then one of her worst races of the season at regionals a week later.
“She goes, can we fix that? And I’m like, yeah,” he said. “We’re going to keep the volume high. We’re not going to taper.”
What replaces the taper is a race week with a shape to it, and this is the most directly usable thing he says all afternoon. A maximal effort five days out, long enough to spend real time at max heart rate. Then the Bakken session the day before.
“The reason I think you need that is because your heart will not be ready to respond to the work if you don’t do that,” he said of the hard day. “And if you do it any closer to the race, you’ll still be trying to recover from it.”
The day before, he keeps it short: five to eight repetitions of a minute on, thirty seconds off, in the tempo zone, perhaps five minutes of actual work.
“It’s the best pre-race workout I’ve ever found. Works almost universally,” he said. “Up until that point, I had found some workouts that work for some people and not for others.”
He does not prescribe the number. He hands the athlete a rule instead, and it is a small masterpiece of coaching.
“As long as the one you did last feels better than the one you just did before that, do the next one,” he said. “As soon as you feel like you’re working at all, you’re done.”
Salmela, center, with his St. Scholastica cross country coaching staff in August 2026. (Courtesy photo)
Leave the gait alone
There is one more piece, and it runs against most of what a modern running program sells.
“Meddling with natural biomechanics is kind of a no-no in my book,” Salmela said.
His most successful runner, he said, had a gait nobody admired and plenty of people wanted to correct. She was never injured until she stopped doing strength work.
“Her gait wasn’t pretty, but it worked, you know, and I recognized that,” he said.
His evidence for leaving well alone is a runner who arrived last year from a small high school program, had not scored for his team, and spent his first season trying to prove he belonged by going too hard at everything. It did not work. Salmela sent him away for a summer with an instruction to run more, at the intensity he was told and no harder.
“He comes in here, he looks so good. All the coaches are like, man, his running has improved a ton,” he said. “He had clodhopper feet last year, because he wasn’t a real runner. He hadn’t run enough yet. Comes in this year and he just comes off the ground, he looks natural, he looks like a runner now.”
Then the part he seems to enjoy most.
“And I did nothing,” he said. “I didn’t have to tell him anything other than follow the right intent.”
Dewall early in the race at the 2023 NCAA Division III Cross Country Championships, the fall he became one of the first two cross country All-Americans in St. Scholastica history. (Courtesy photo)
Which is more or less the argument in miniature. Dewall ran 110 to 130 miles a week building for Berlin, more than he had ever run, a third of it on soft surfaces, the intensity governed by lactate rather than by what the paces are supposed to look like. He got support from Puma’s PROJECT 3 program for the race. He went 2:12:13 and took seventeen seconds off a personal best he had set five months earlier in Boston. Salmela is careful not to claim all of it. Dewall now builds most of his training around cutting-edge running technology that Salmela admits he is “not terribly well-versed” in. “Still, I think the thesis IS a huge reason he is blowing minds, and why he can do these workloads,” Salmela wrote after our interview. “But not the only.”
Salmela has been saying for years that nordic volume would do this to a distance runner if anyone ran it properly. It took him until his fifties to find the runner who would.
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A path to the Gulf of Bothnia near the Salmela family farm in Finland. The training ideas he has spent most of two decades carrying into American running came out of that part of the world. (Photo: Chad Salmela)
Matt Dougherty has a way of knowing in September exactly what he is going to say in February.
It usually happens on the second day of the Adirondack Canoe Classic, the three-day, ninety-mile paddle from Old Forge to Saranac Lake that everyone in the North Country calls the 90-Miler. By then his skiers have been in a boat for two days. They have carried it over roughly five miles of portage trails. They are, by his description, flat on the ground.
“It was six hours of just going as hard as you can, which is still low on the L zones, but you’re putting out power for hours and hours and hours,” Dougherty said. “And then you get back in the boat.”
Dougherty is the head nordic ski coach at Paul Smith’s College, and also its head marathon canoe coach, which is not a combination most ski programs carry. In March his men won the USCSA national championship at Mount Van Hoevenberg, 68 points to St. Olaf’s 108, the program’s second national title in five seasons. His women finished second, as they did in 2022 when the men won the first one. He took the ski program over in the fall of 2020 with one skier on the roster and no recruits, at a college in the woods with fewer students than most high schools.
He is also, as of this year, the subject of a feature documentary, which is a strange thing to happen to a coach at a school of this size and which he did not see coming at all.
Paul Smith’s paddlers with their first-place plaques after the Adirondack Canoe Classic, the three-day, ninety-mile race the North Country calls the 90-Miler. Head coach Matt Dougherty runs the marathon canoe team as well as the ski team. (Courtesy photo)
Three days in a boat
The marathon canoe team is not a requirement for skiers at Paul Smith’s. A lot of them do it anyway.
“It gives me the opportunity to do the important lessons,” Dougherty said. “The 90 mile canoe race is super hard, and I can go back and be like, look at what we can do when we put our mind to it.”
The boats are the point. In the Voyageur class, where Paul Smith’s entered a seven-paddler crew in 2024 and won its division by two hours, the craft itself becomes part of the problem.
“It’s raining and you paddled,” Dougherty said. “You had to carry a boat that’s 300 pounds if you’re in the Voyageur canoe up and over a literal side of a mountain in a race.”
He is after two things. One is the plain demonstration that his athletes can do more than they think, a claim coaches make constantly and almost never get to prove in September.
“A lot of times our preconceived notion of what we can do is only limited by our own mind,” he said. “If you ask them at the end of day one, they’re like, there’s no way I can do that again. Day two, and you keep doing that, and you’re like, but what can you actually do if you open up your mind and say, like, I’m just willing to see, I’m willing to test those boundaries?”
The other is more useful to him in February.
“To affect change, you got to have shared experiences, even with a coach involved in it,” he said. “That say, like, we shared this really hard time, and there’s this high level of trust, and we can do super hard things. From there, we can then we can get into the training, and we can say, yeah, we’re gonna do 44 weeks of training next year, and you’re gonna put on 10 pounds in the weight room, and things that they’re like, what? But now it’s like, okay, we have a place to start from.”
There is a third thing, which he raises without being asked.
“It’s really hard for college students to understand all the hard things you’re going to go through in life, and I want them to be tempered and ready,” he said. “This is going to be hard to experience all of the emotions, sadness, grief, pain, but also to be like I can endure this.”
The roster Dougherty built. He took the program over in the fall of 2020 with one skier on it and no recruits. (Courtesy photo)
The long way back to Saranac Lake
Dougherty graduated from Saranac Lake High School in 1997 and got a running scholarship to Houghton University, then a small NAIA school in western New York, which is where the pattern that governs everything else started.
“Sport was an avenue to change my circumstances in life,” he said. “It changed my life because it got me to college. I paid for college. I got a degree, and then changed my circumstances drastically.”
He has two degrees, an undergraduate in outdoor education and ceramics, and a master’s in education from St. Lawrence in what he describes as cognitive behavior. He coached track and field for two decades before this, and he spent some of those years around people whose approach he took wholesale. One of them was Clyde Hart, the Baylor coach who put Michael Johnson, Jeremy Wariner and Sanya Richards-Ross on Olympic 400-meter podiums.
“You’d think, man, you have like three gold medalists on your team right now,” Dougherty said. “And you’d see him interact with his athletes, and you’d be like, wow, it’s always the person first. It is what’s going on in your life today, what’s going on the person before the athletic part.”
As a coach, he had chances to move up into Division I teams. He turned them down, and he credits his wife with the reasoning.
“What I realized then is, it’s a numbers game and it’s not a person game,” he said. His wife, he said, put it to him as a trade: “If you do this, you lose that, and it’s going to be miserable for you.”
He is now coaching three miles up the road from where Bill Demong grew up, at a college where Tim Burke’s father was a vice president for thirty-five years. He has a theory about what sticks from a life in that company.
“He would probably just hide his Olympic gold and silver medal for the rest of his life,” Dougherty said of Demong, who won gold and silver in nordic combined at the 2010 Vancouver Games. “But he would happily talk about what sport did, like what those experiences were.”
The hardware from a season in which the Paul Smith’s men won the USCSA national title and the women finished second. The team never set winning it as a goal. (Photo: Timo Ziegler)
Goals that do not squeeze anyone out
Paul Smith’s does not set a team goal of winning a national championship, even in years when it wins one.
“We just set process goals, because that’s the only thing we can control is what we do there,” Dougherty said. “And we caveat that with a little like, what do we hope that gets us. If we do all those things, we hope it can lead us to contending for a national title.”
The reason is not modesty. It is arithmetic about who a team goal excludes.
“I take such an individualized version of goal setting,” he said. “If we put a performance metric behind it, it often squeezes out other people in the program. It doesn’t allow their goals to exist.”
Last season one of his athletes was named to a US biathlon team for an international championship, which meant flying back from Germany and landing roughly a day before the national championships started.
“If the women’s team had said like our goal is to only win nationals and they were second overall, like that would have put her in a position where she’s like, well, I’m taken away from the team by going to World Juniors,” Dougherty said.
She went. The team finished second anyway. Nobody had to choose.
The team does have expectations, two of them, and he recites them the way people recite things they have said several hundred times.
“To be on this team, you got to be a good teammate first, and then maximize your opportunity,” he said.
What that produces, in his telling, is a program where the standard gets set from the back of the group.
“When a star is like, oh, I’m tired today, or this morning it’s raining and it’s 38 degrees, no one wants to ski, but they see the slowest guy kitting up and going out, then it allows all of us to kind of gain from that,” he said.
An ordinary training day on the trails at Paul Smith’s. Dougherty says his job is to make room for whatever an athlete is carrying, without asking for it directly. (Courtesy photo)
The person before the athlete
The documentary spends real time on mental health, and it is the part of the conversation Dougherty warms to fastest. He starts from what he does not know.
“I only get a piece of the story of this athlete,” he said. “We don’t know if they came from rough family life or they just feel like they don’t belong. All these things. Mental health issues are real, and I need to know about those. But I have to allow space for them to come up organically.”
“I can’t be like, who has mental health issues?” he said. “I’ve got to create the space for that.”
The space, in practice, is a rule about curiosity that the team applies to each other.
“We’re constantly like, we’re not judgmental on this team. Let’s be curious,” he said. “If as we look at a teammate and we wonder what they’re going through, instead of saying like whatever, we say like, oh, what’s the source of that?”
The same approach applies when he already knows an athlete is struggling. The problem then is how to open the door without making the asking the event.
“The really hard thing is when you get to the point where you know stuff’s going on, finding the way to indirectly be direct,” he said. “What do you need?” is the question he finds himself asking, and it generally opens the door.
That extends to how he thinks athletes should hold their own results. A race result, in his view, is a terrible place to store your sense of self.
“Their performance isn’t who they are, and it’s not anything connected to their value,” he said. “Whether we win by 20 points, lose by 20 points, doesn’t change their person or their value as a person.”
As he has gotten older he has become more concerned with sportsmanship, and he treats it as something other than a courtesy. It is how he teaches athletes to handle a disappointment and to recognize somebody else’s work.
“When you can say like, yeah, I didn’t have a great race today, instead of being sad and dour, if you go to celebrate someone you know who’s trained hard for a year and had a great day, you can’t be sad anymore,” he said. “It just changes you.”
He means it specifically. Clarkson won the USCSA men’s title at Mount Van Hoevenberg in 2024 and Paul Smith’s finished second, and Dougherty’s response was to have his team look closely at what the Clarkson skiers had done to get there.
“Even though we’d love to win, when you see someone perform like that, it’s actually inspiring,” he said. “The more we can be open to looking at performance and saying like other teams did great, but there’s value in me not just celebrating them, but seeing what they did and honoring it. I think it makes us better athletes in the end.”
Teammates and the Bobcats flag trailside. At a college of roughly 750 students, Dougherty says, everyone on campus knows the ski program. (Courtesy photo)
A small college and a film crew
Paul Smith’s enrolls roughly 750 students by the college’s own count, on 14,000 acres at the northern edge of the Adirondack Park. Nearly half the bachelor’s degrees it awarded last year were in natural resources and conservation. It is the kind of place where a skier’s Saturday gets rearranged by a professor.
“When you come here, it’s individualized; it is a personal relationship school,” Dougherty said. “My students are working with a professor; he takes an interest, he gets to know them, and then I find out, well, Saturday we’re actually going out with this professor. He’s taking us into the mountains to show us this specific part of our research.”
“It is harder when you have 700 students. Everything about that is harder: recruiting, getting people here,” he said. “But because of that, we live in a culture where everyone on campus knows the ski program.”
That extends past the campus. Dougherty calls the Saranac Lake and Lake Placid community around the program super fans, and he puts the college president, Dan Kelting, in that category.
“He shows up at ski races and he’s not just there to like cheer,” Dougherty said. “He’s also there like, what do you guys need? What does the program need? What do we need to keep bringing in great students as a ski program?”
His summary of the whole arrangement is that it could not exist anywhere else.
“It’s this weird subculture that probably could only exist in the Adirondacks,” he said.
Which brings up the film. A donor with a seasonal home on one of the lakes near the college met the team at an event, decided there was a story, and asked whether Dougherty would sit down with a documentary crew. Dougherty said yes without any clear idea what he was agreeing to.
“I expected a three to five minute kind of like infomercial type thing for YouTube,” he said.
What arrived was Adrenaline Films, an Orlando company that Dougherty said had got its start on the early seasons of Survivor and had lately been following a ballet company through the war in Ukraine. The crew embedded with the ski team for close to two years.
“This was like pretty legit documentary crew following us for a long time,” Dougherty said.
The result is Coach Matt and the Outdoor ‘Cats, directed by Robert Jury and produced by Michael Murray and Tim Ranzetta. It runs about 95 minutes, and it is free to watch, with ads, on Amazon Prime Video and on Tubi. Its spine is the 2024 season, in which the Paul Smith’s men lost the national title by two points.
“They’re really just telling the story of a team,” Dougherty said. “Small, tiny school in the woods is really another theme there. You can do anything, anywhere, kind of an idea.”
Any money the film makes goes back to the program, and he doubts there will be any.
“My guess, without knowing all the specifics of cost, is that this is a net loss,” he said.
The team that lost by two points in that film won by 40 in March. Nobody set that as a goal.
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When schedules are full, meals tend to follow the same rule as everything else: keep it simple. For many athletes, that means relying on recipes that do not require a long list of ingredients or complicated steps.
The goal is not something elaborate. It is a handful of options that are easy to prepare and flexible enough to fit different parts of the day.
Here are three recipes that fit that approach.
A yogurt base takes toppings in whatever combination is on hand. (Courtesy photo)
1. Protein Yogurt Bowl
This is the quickest of the three, and it starts with something already in the fridge.
What you need:
High protein yogurt
Fresh or frozen fruit
A handful of oats or granola
How to make it:
Add the yogurt to a bowl, then layer in fruit and oats. Adjust it to whatever is on hand.
It works because it does not require precision. The proportions can change each time and the result still holds together.
2. Simple Protein Smoothie
Smoothies earn their place in a routine because they travel well. With a few ingredients they come together in about a minute.
What you need:
1 banana
Milk or a plant-based alternative
A spoonful of nut butter
Ice
How to make it:
Blend everything until smooth. Adjust the consistency by adding more liquid if needed.
For an even simpler version, a drinkable protein yogurt works as the base and cuts the ingredient list further.
That keeps preparation short, which is usually what matters on a busy day.
3. Oat and Yogurt Mix
This one sits between a quick snack and something more filling. It can be prepared ahead or assembled on the spot.
What you need:
Rolled oats
High protein yogurt
Milk or water
How to make it:
Combine everything in a bowl or container and let it sit for a few minutes, or longer if preparing in advance.
The texture softens the longer it sits, so an overnight batch eats differently from one made on the spot.
Keeping It Practical
All three follow the same idea: few ingredients, simple steps, easy adjustments. That is what makes them repeatable.
A few reliable options beat variety for its own sake. It makes planning easier and saves rethinking meals each day.
Adapting to Different Moments
Not every recipe fits every part of the day. Some work better in the morning, others between sessions or later on.
A small set of options covers most of it without adding steps, which is what keeps things consistent when the schedule shifts.
A Simple Approach That Sticks
The recipes that last are the ones that are easy to repeat. They do not depend on special conditions or long preparation.
With a few ingredients and a straightforward approach, staying consistent from one day to the next gets easier, and eventually it stops taking any thought at all.
Hailey Swirbul during an intensity session at a U.S. Ski Team camp in Park City, Utah, in October 2018. The same pace can cost an athlete very different amounts from one day to the next. (Photo: Matt Whitcomb)
In my last article on training zones, published on FasterSkier, I tried to describe the challenges we face when we don’t use a common language. There is a lot of talk on social media about Zone 2 training, while most of us in the cross-country ski world understand this same training intensity as Zone 1. Others challenge the use of heart rate to set zones at all. These discussions are great, because they push all of us to better explain our beliefs and how we got there.
Today I want to share why I think heart rate is, for most athletes, a useful, available indicator of cardiovascular stress, even though it doesn’t necessarily capture the complete cost of exercise. I often hear that heart rate is too variable: heat and other environmental conditions can change it; fueling, hydration and fatigue can affect it; it doesn’t stay the same at the same workload (pace or power); and it doesn’t react quickly enough during hard efforts. All of which has some truth to it!
Hannah Halvorsen (left) ski bounding in Park City, Utah, in June 2016. Heat, altitude, fueling and fatigue all change what a given pace costs, and heart rate reflects that cost. (Photo: Bryan Fish)
Cost or Pace?
But let’s break it down. For all endurance work, from easy endurance work below 72 percent of maximum heart rate up to high-intensity work at 95 percent of maximum heart rate, heart rate is an indicator of the physiological demand and strain associated with producing energy. So when it is said that we should use other metrics to implement and track training because of these variations, I say, really? Shouldn’t we train day in and day out based on how the body responds to those external conditions? The same pace, power, speed or workload can carry widely different physiological demands on any given day. So what are we trying to train: the metabolic cost, or the speed, power or pace we can maintain? I would argue both, but in very different circumstances.
I should note that while I use percentages of maximum heart rate to discuss training, that doesn’t mean percentages of maximum heart rate are the best way to determine training zones. It is not a bad method if you test for maximum heart rate, but there may be better ways to use actual performance data to set training zones.
David Norris and Scott Patterson during a set of pre-race classic intervals. Outside of heart rate and perceived effort, few training metrics get measured every day. (Photo: Tom Horrocks)
Every Metric Moves
Then there are those who say we should use lactate, heart rate variability (HRV), rating of perceived exertion (RPE), ventilation, respiratory exchange ratio (RER) and other metrics that change with improved fitness. In fact, those may be better or similar metrics. The problem is that, except for RPE, they are not typically measured daily, so coaches don’t see how much they can vary from one day to the next. Any measure requires context to understand its daily variation. Why? Because the body changes every day in response to life and training stressors.
All of these measures require context, consistent testing protocols and an understanding of their day-to-day variability to be effective. The bottom line is that we need metrics that can be measured daily to understand how athletes are responding and adapting to training. When we are doing aerobic endurance training, often described as Zone 2 and, in the ski world, as Zone 1, the oxygen cost is reasonably reflected in heart rate during exercise.
Certainly, the metabolic cost of training changes from day to day with internal and environmental factors, which can require a higher heart rate to produce the same energy output. We also see heart-rate drift during these workouts: at the same pace or power, heart rate climbs. My response is, OK, this represents an increase in internal cost, and we should definitely respond to it. No metric is perfect, but heart rate captures an important and significant part of the internal strain of training.
Team Birkie’s Xavier Mansfield (left) and Zak Ketterson share a rollerski treadmill in 2021 while coaches Leo Hipp and Jeremy Hecker give feedback. A lab number is a snapshot unless it is measured often enough to show its own daily variation. (Courtesy photo)
Variation You Never See
To those who say other measures (ventilation, HRV, lactate levels, respiratory exchange ratio, respiration and others) are more accurate, OK. But without seeing how those measures change from day to day, you have no idea of the variation. People use lactate to guide training, for example, and the same goes for newer measures of muscle oxygen saturation and ventilation. They often set training zones at arbitrary levels, or from equally arbitrary estimates based on a visual read of a lactate curve, then assign work based on those values. But if lactate is not measured often during daily training, you have no idea how consistent those values are, or how they vary in response to the same factors that affect heart rate. From my observations, all of those metrics vary as much as heart rate.
No matter how we cut it, none of these measures is as precise as we like to think, because the body changes and responds daily to stress and external factors. And yes, what we are after is a measure we can observe every day. So let’s recognize the facts. Heart rate represents the internal cost of work. Sure, there are daily variations. But over time, and with context, we can understand those changes.
Kendall Kramer (right) in the 10 k classic at the Lahti World Cup on March 8, 2026, an interval-start race she finished in 27:40.8. Galanes puts races of 15 to 30 minutes in the middle of Zone 4. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
How I Set Zones
So this is how I use training zones. First, I use the zones as a tool to implement and assess the effects of training on each individual. Those assessments help us determine whether the zones and the training are effective. I believe training zones provide a reasonable method that will work for most athletes and doesn’t require regular lactate or lab testing or other expensive equipment.
So what do I do? I don’t do regular lab testing, because the athletes I coach live all over the country and many don’t have access to or opportunities for it. It is also quite expensive, and most importantly, I have often seen over the years that what we learn in a lab setting doesn’t correlate with what we see in training.
I do a six-minute test, which, according to research by Véronique Billat, corresponds to the pace at which VO2max is achieved. I use the average heart rate of the last two to three minutes of the test, and I assume that to be about 94 to 95 percent of maximum heart rate. Yes, I assume! But the six-minute test also gives me a repeatable field performance and a high heart-rate observation. I use it to inform my initial estimates, not as a direct measurement of VO2max pace or maximum heart rate. The point is to establish workable ranges, observe how the athlete responds and revise them when the evidence warrants it.
I also look at racing and high-intensity workout performance. Short races of 10 to 15 minutes should be in the top range of Zone 4. Races of 15 to 30 minutes should be in the mid-range of Zone 4, and races of 45 to 60 minutes in the low to mid-levels of Zone 4.
The 5-kilometer paved rollerski loop at the base of Mt. Telemark, outside Cable, Wisconsin, when it was laid in 2023. A fixed loop like this is all a Zone 1 check needs: 45 to 60 minutes of laps, with lactate and heart rate taken after each one. (Photo: American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation)
Checking Zone 1
To confirm the accuracy of Zone 1, I have athletes do 45 to 60 minutes of work on a standard loop of about 15 to 20 minutes, and we take lactate measurements after each loop. If lactate and heart rate remain stable, we know the endurance Zone 1 training is in the correct range. A stable lactate response suggests that the intensity is easy enough, but it does not necessarily identify the first lactate threshold, or LT1.
We need to understand that no method of determining training zones is precise. The body just doesn’t operate that way. For any training adaptation there is an optimal point of adaptation, but also a much broader range in which the adaptation occurs. So the objective when implementing training is to be as close to the optimal point as possible. But knowing where that is day in and day out is impossible, so being within a reasonable range is the goal.
Every adaptation has an intensity where it responds best and a much wider range where it still responds. (Figure: redrawn from Olympiatoppen educational material, 2020)
Close Enough
My conclusion is that using field-testing measures along with training and race performance data to support training-zone determination is adequate, and it allows us to build ranges that can move as fitness changes. There are no ideal “thresholds” or clear metabolic points we can use to determine training zones. LT1 and the second lactate threshold, LT2, are useful reference points, but different protocols and definitions can produce different estimates for the same athlete.
Other thresholds, determined by heart rate variability, DFA alpha1, respiration and muscle oxygen, may prove useful in the future, but so far they have not been fully validated and likewise cannot identify clear physiological thresholds.
So we are left with what is practical and available to developing and recreational athletes. Let’s get close enough, control training effectively and learn what works based on the data for each athlete. Heart-rate metrics fit that need best.
We can debate exactly where one training zone ends and another begins, but no test gives us a number that will describe an athlete perfectly every day. For the athletes I coach, heart rate gives us a practical place to start and a way to follow their response over time. I use field tests and race results to establish working ranges, then look at heart rate alongside pace, perceived effort, conditions and, when available, lactate. If those observations no longer agree, I revisit the zones.
The goal is not to defend a particular method or number on a chart. It is to help an athlete do the work as intended on a given day, learn from the response and make a better decision the next time. That is where training zones earn their value.
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Canadian biathletes Brendan Green and Scott Perras rollerskiing up Guardsman Pass above Park City, Utah, during a fall 2015 camp. (Photo: Matthias Ahrens)
Soldier Hollow Nordic Center is hiring a Venue Operations Supervisor to run snowmaking, snowcat grooming and trail operations at the Midway, Utah venue that hosted biathlon and cross country skiing at the 2002 Olympics.
The job is full time and year round, and it sits at the center of how the venue works. Winter means building base, setting classic and skate track, shaping the tubing hill and prepping racecourses. Summer means mountain bike trail construction, roller ski trail repair, mowing and fleet maintenance across 31 kilometers of terrain.
Soldier Hollow is operated by the Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation, which also runs the Utah Olympic Park in Park City and the Utah Olympic Oval in Kearns. With the Games returning to Salt Lake City in 2034, the venue crew is preparing trails that have to work for World Cup athletes and first time skiers alike.
Skiers training near the biathlon range and the Sports Discovery Center at Soldier Hollow Nordic Center in Midway, Utah. (Photo: Tanzi Propst)
The Position
From the posting: “Soldier Hollow Nordic Center in Midway, Utah, is hiring a Venue Operations Supervisor to work in snowmaking, snowcat grooming, and trail operations at the Salt Lake 2002 Olympic biathlon and cross-country venue. With the Olympics returning to Utah in 2034, you’ll help prepare Olympic-caliber trails for daily skiing and events and assist with maintenance and operations of this year-round facility. If you’re a hands-on leader who knows snowcats, snow guns, and trail building, keep reading.”
Schedule, Pay and Benefits
Full time, year round, hourly position
Pay range: $24 to $30 per hour, depending on experience
Overtime eligible and expected during winter operation
Winter: the weather sets the day. Snowfall, temperatures and events shape each shift, and prime snowmaking happens overnight
Spring through fall: Monday to Friday, plus event weekends
Medical, dental and vision
HSA and 403(b) retirement with company matches
Up to $200 wellness credit
Friends and family vouchers for winter tubing, the bobsled experience, a Utah Olympic Park summer gold pass and more
The start and finish area built for a race at Soldier Hollow Nordic Center. (Photo: Tanzi Propst)
What the Job Asks For
Must haves:
3+ years of snowcat grooming and snowmaking experience
2+ years maintaining and repairing heavy equipment, snowmobiles and vehicles
1+ years leading a field crew, including hiring, training and scheduling
Experience preparing venues and courses for events such as mountain biking, cross country skiing or biathlon races
Valid driver’s license
Comfortable with snowmaking software, equipment logs, email and the Nordic Pulse app
Ready to work outdoors in every Wasatch season
Nice to haves:
Chief of Course experience
Welding skills
Three phase electrical experience
Nordic ski area operations background
Tubing lanes built and maintained each winter at Soldier Hollow Nordic Center. (Photo: Tanzi Propst)
A Day in the Life
From the posting: “Winter starts with an aggressive snowmaking push. When temperatures drop overnight, you and your crew fire up the system and build base so the tubing hill and ski trails open on time. Once the snow is down, you set classic and skate track, shape the tubing hill, and prep racecourses. In summer, you shift to mountain bike trail construction, roller ski trail repair, mowing, and fleet maintenance. Every day, you lead alongside your crew, and every athlete, family, and racer feels the result.”
An aerial view of the trail network at Soldier Hollow Nordic Center. (Photo: Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation)
Why Soldier Hollow
“As part of the Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation, Soldier Hollow exists to cultivate champions in sport and in life,” the posting reads. “Our venue crew is preparing for 2034, and we’re not afraid to try new things. Last winter, we stored 12,000 cubic meters of snow to jump-start this season. You’ll join a crew that values fresh ideas, building trails for World Cup athletes, first-time skiers, and mountain bikers across 31 kilometers.”
The foundation describes the person it is looking for this way: “You’re happiest with grease on your hands and a plan for tomorrow’s grooming. You bring Grit to midnight snowmaking shifts and Excellence to every corduroy line, always looking for a better way. You build a strong crew through Collaboration, working right beside your team. You want your work to have Impact on athletes chasing Olympic dreams and on the Community that skis, bikes, and hikes these trails.”
How to Apply
Apply through the Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation listing:
The role is also listed on the foundation’s careers page at utaholympiclegacy.org/careers, alongside a seasonal Snowmaking, Grooming and Trail Crew Lead position at Soldier Hollow. Questions about hiring can go to hr@uolf.org or 435.658.4218.
Benilde-St. Margaret’s School is hiring a Head Nordic Ski Coach to lead its cooperative program with DeLaSalle High School for the 2026-27 winter season. BSM is a Catholic, college-preparatory school in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, on the western edge of Minneapolis, and its Nordic team brings together skiers from both schools through a long-standing partnership.
The program is replacing both its head coach and its senior assistant coach this season. The roster is young, with a strong freshman class, and the program is looking for a coach who can build on the team culture the previous staff established while developing that talent toward a run at the state meet in the coming years.
The Benilde-St. Margaret’s/DeLaSalle Nordic team last December. (Courtesy photo)
Position Overview
The head coach develops skiers of every experience level, builds a welcoming team culture and pursues competitive excellence, with student-athlete growth at the center of the program. That means setting a positive, inclusive tone for athletes from both schools, communicating clearly with families and school leadership, and building a team in which every skier feels valued and challenged. The head coach also leads and supports the assistant coaching staff, with an emphasis on consistency and a smooth transition into the season.
The Details
Head coach of the Benilde-St. Margaret’s/DeLaSalle cooperative Nordic program for the 2026-27 winter season
Stipend, commensurate with experience — $5,000 to $8,000
Reports to Matt Pryor, BSM Director of Athletics & Activities
After-school practices and meets through the winter, plus preseason planning and coordination with both schools
The selected candidate must complete BSM’s hiring, background check, Safe Environment and coaching requirements before working with student-athletes
Responsibilities
Plan and lead practices, competitions and athlete development throughout the season
Teach sound ski technique, conditioning, race strategy and safe training habits
Coordinate schedules, transportation, equipment and meet logistics with the BSM Athletics & Activities Department and DeLaSalle
Recruit, supervise and develop assistant coaches in collaboration with BSM
Communicate proactively with athletes and families, including schedule updates through BSM’s designated platform
Maintain program equipment and keep an accurate inventory
Uphold BSM’s standards for sportsmanship, student well-being and Minnesota State High School League compliance
Qualifications
Required:
Experience coaching or competing in Nordic skiing
Strong organizational and communication skills
Ability to work effectively with student-athletes at varying skill levels
Commitment to a safe, supportive team environment
Preferred:
High school coaching experience
Familiarity with Minnesota Nordic skiing competitions and the MSHSL
Experience leading a coaching staff or a cooperative program
Why Lead at BSM
BSM sets out to develop student-athletes as competitors, teammates and people, and its coaches build programs rooted in belonging, accountability, growth and Red Knight pride. The next head coach steps into a program with dedicated skiers, families and assistant coaches, has the backing of both schools, and gets to bring their own vision to athlete development and team culture.
How to Apply
Send a cover letter, résumé and references to Matt Pryor, Director of Athletics & Activities at Benilde-St. Margaret’s School: mpryor@bsmschool.org.
Applications will be reviewed as received. The opening is also listed on the BSM careers page.
YMCA of the Rockies is hiring a Nordic Center Supervisor at Snow Mountain Ranch in Granby, Colorado, a seasonal role leading the day-to-day operations of the ranch’s Nordic Center through the winter.
Snow Mountain Ranch sits on 5,100 acres of meadow, aspen and spruce forest in Grand County, about an hour and a half from Denver and near the western entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. Its Nordic Center grooms more than 80 kilometers of trail and runs rentals, retail, lessons and Nordic programming for guests and groups, along with larger events across the season.
The supervisor works under the Nordic Director and takes charge of the center when the director is away.
Position Overview
The Nordic Center Supervisor runs daily operations of the Nordic retail and rental center and trains, schedules and supervises the center’s staff and instructors. The role coordinates ski lessons, Nordic programming and guest group activities, works with Bryan Mountain Ski Patrol on safety and emergency response, keeps inventory in order, and helps prepare for the bigger Nordic events on the calendar.
The Details
Seasonal position based at Snow Mountain Ranch, Granby, Colorado
$19 to $21 per hour
Reports to the Nordic Director
Weekend and holiday availability required during the winter season
PSIA Level 1 training, waxing knowledge and First Aid, CPR and AED certification can be provided if needed
Skiers head out across the meadows at Snow Mountain Ranch in Granby, Colorado. (Photo: YMCA of the Rockies)
What You’ll Do
Lead daily operations of the Nordic retail and rental center
Train, schedule, supervise and support Nordic Center staff and instructors
Coordinate ski lessons, Nordic programming and guest group activities
Teach beginner Nordic ski lessons based on PSIA Level 1 training
Help guests choose the right equipment and offer skiing and waxing advice
Perform and teach practical waxing for classic and skate skis
Maintain inventory and keep the Nordic Center organized and ready for guests
Coordinate with Bryan Mountain Ski Patrol on safety and emergency response
Support larger Nordic events and special programming throughout the season
Step into the leadership role for the Nordic Center when the Nordic Director is away
Groomed trail through the pines at Snow Mountain Ranch. (Photo: Brady Robinson)
Why Work Here
The trails start outside the door. The job puts you on skis, in front of guests and in charge of a team every day. At YMCA of the Rockies, staff create meaningful experiences for guests while living out the organization’s values of caring, honesty, respect, responsibility and faith.
Open meadow skiing below the forested hills at Snow Mountain Ranch. (Photo: YMCA of the Rockies)
You’ll Thrive Here If You
Love Nordic skiing and sharing it with others
Enjoy working outdoors in snow, cold and changing mountain weather
Have strong leadership, communication and customer service skills
Enjoy training and developing a team
Can ski confidently on groomed and ungroomed terrain
Like a job where no two days are exactly alike
Are comfortable working weekends and holidays during the winter season
Bring a positive, professional, problem-solving attitude to a busy environment
Thomas Stephen of Canada in the fog at the Oslo World Cup mass start in March 2026. One coach’s Zone 2 can be another’s Zone 1, and the label means little until you know what it is anchored to. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
Over the last decade I have often thought that we need to find a better way to define training zones. I have assessed every model under the sun and even tried to create some new ones. From a metabolic perspective, three-zone models probably make the most sense, because physiological anchors form the transition points, even though some of those anchors, lactate threshold among them, are questionable. Then there are five- and seven-zone models. Which are best, and which are most accurate? The answer is probably none of them. They all have limitations, and there really is not a better method.
Some coaches set training zones from maximal heart rate. Others use lactate measures referenced to heart rate, pace or power, and still others use gas analysis (ventilation, VO2, RER and so on). Whatever the method, the important point is how the zones are used and implemented in training. While there may be a valid physiological basis for training zones, their primary use is to quantify training as planned and as performed. That is how we assess which methods of training have worked for the individual athlete.
Julia Kern racing the 10 k freestyle at the Trondheim World Cup in December 2025. A higher heart rate at a standard effort can reflect heat, glycogen depletion or fatigue, and all of those should change the day’s training. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
Heart Rate Holds Up
Many coaches and even physiologists claim that heart rate is too variable to be used reliably for training control. Of course it is variable. Physiology varies daily with fatigue, recovery, hydration, glycogen status and more. In my experience, heart rate is no more variable than any other metric we use. We just don’t recognize the variation in the others, because it is not practical to measure them every day. Human physiology is complex, and in general heart rate reflects the current status of an athlete’s physiology. Under any system, it is important to train at a level that reflects the individual’s physiology and condition on that day. Heart rate is as good as anything for that, and I would argue better, because the daily variation is easy to assess.
Heart rate is inexpensive, practical and physiologically informative. A higher heart rate at a standard workload can reflect warm weather, glycogen depletion or general fatigue, all of which matter when adjusting the day’s training. A lower heart rate at a standard workload often reflects improved fitness, though occasionally it can also reflect fatigue and increased parasympathetic drive of the autonomic nervous system.
Team Aker Dæhlie’s five-zone scale. Its Zone 2 runs from 1 to 2 mmol/L of lactate, overlapping Zone 1, which sits below 1.5. (Chart: FasterSkier)
Whose Zone 2?
One example is a document published a few years ago by Team Aker Dæhlie in Norway, which laid out a slightly different training zone model than I was used to seeing out of Norway. Given the popularity of Zone 2 training, I believe it is important to understand how the proponents of a particular system of training define and use their zones.
In the Aker Dæhlie system there is significant overlap between Zones 1 and 2 in terms of lactate, with Zone 1 below 1.5 mmol/L and Zone 2 at 1 to 2 mmol/L, while the heart rate ranges are what I consider consistent with how most training zones are delineated. The implication of that lactate range is that lactate is highly variable and not the same between individuals. From the published document we can see that their Zone 2 does not fit what some may consider Zone 2. It fits how I would describe Zone 1: endurance training not to exceed 70 to 75 percent of maximal heart rate. We need to realize that lactate may vary greatly from day to day and can’t be viewed as a hard and fast anchor for a specific training zone.
Listening to many podcasts and reading many articles and publications, I hear people discuss training zones as if they were talking about the same thing. Most often they are not. The recent popularity of Zone 2 training is a good example: what Iñigo San Millán means by Zone 2, many of the common five-zone models would define as Zone 1.
So if you want to use and reference the Aker Dæhlie zone system, you should also be aware of this statement about Zone 2 in their published document:
Zone 2: Semi-hard long sessions with a heart rate at around 140-155 bpm and with lactate up to 2 mmol/L, is considered intensity 2 training. Scholars debate over the importance of this training. In our experience, this training costs more than it is worth, and should therefore not be prioritized. L2 can work well to learn/automate correct technique. Again, evaluate cost vs benefit! Typical length of a session is 1 to 3 hours of continuous activity.
Zones 3, 4 and 5 are close to how many would describe training in those ranges, although Zone 3 here may sit a bit lower than it is often described. But the Aker Dæhlie team is primarily a long-distance team, and we don’t know whether they use different zone ranges for World Cup skiers, or whether World Cup skiers do more of their intensive training in Zone 4.
Marit Bjørgen’s average monthly endurance hours by phase during her most successful seasons. (Chart: FasterSkier. Data: Solli, Tønnessen and Sandbakk, Frontiers in Physiology, 2017)
How Bjørgen Trained
A chart like the one above is often used to illustrate how one of the best female cross-country skiers ever trained during her most successful years. The data comes from an extensive study of Marit Bjørgen’s training.
The zones used to classify Bjørgen’s training. The top of the low-intensity target and the bottom of the moderate-intensity target sit 25 beats apart. (Chart: FasterSkier. Data: Solli, Tønnessen and Sandbakk, Frontiers in Physiology, 2017)
A 25-Beat Gap
To provide context, these are the zones used to define this athlete’s low-intensity (LIT), moderate-intensity (MIT) and high-intensity (HIT) training. The low-intensity target is where we might expect it, at 67 to 75 percent of maximal heart rate. However, there is a large gap, some 25 beats per minute, between the low- and moderate-intensity targets, with the MIT target at 89 to 92 percent of maximal heart rate. That MIT zone is quite different from what is described in the Aker Dæhlie document.
A typical five-zone scheme places the first ventilatory threshold at about 80 percent of peak heart rate. For most athletes, Galanes argues, it sits lower. (Chart: FasterSkier)
Another Common Model
Here is another example, much like the zone table published by Aker Dæhlie. It is a good theoretical model, but again I would suggest that endurance training above 75 percent of maximal heart rate is unnecessary, and the cost-benefit assessment does not suggest a benefit. We also see that LT1/VT1 is probably not at 80 percent of maximal heart rate for most athletes.
Each adaptation has an intensity where it responds best, but none of them stops at a zone boundary. (Figure: redrawn from Olympiatoppen educational material, 2020)
Zones Overlap
Most of us consider training zones hard and fast, but that is not the case. The chart above illustrates the possible range of metabolic and neuromuscular benefits of different training intensities. I believe the reason to use zones and monitor training is to ensure effective training adaptation. That is why I say that endurance training at more than 70 to 75 percent of maximal heart rate does not have a positive cost-benefit. As recovery time increases, adaptation slows, and the time to readiness for the next hard session can be extended.
The chart is an excellent depiction of how adaptations overlap across training intensities. Each metabolic and neuromuscular adaptation has a theoretical optimal range, but the adaptations still occur well outside those ranges.
A lactate test in the middle of a hill-bounding session, with coach Will Sweetser and Quinn Holan. If you use lactate, spot-check often enough to learn your own daily variation. (Courtesy photo)
My Advice
When analyzing what others say or publish, look closely and question what their training zones are based on. You must be speaking the same language before implementing any changes.
Pick a training zone model that makes sense to you. If you are going to use lactate, you must do frequent spot checks so you understand your individual daily variation. You absolutely cannot rely on a one-off test to make training decisions.
Use new and emerging technology, such as respiration and muscle oxygen monitoring, only after validating its consistency and variability.
Don’t jump from trend to trend. There are a lot of them out there. Learn from what has worked, and weigh emerging science against experience. Remaining current does not mean trend-hopping to stay relevant on social media.
Be clear on terminology. The same term can mean very different things to different scientists and coaches.
Use a couple of tests that produce meaningful data and inform training decisions. Collecting more data does not make for better programs.
For most people, perhaps everyone, percentage of maximal heart rate is a practical way to determine training zones.
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Cross-country skiing might look smooth and effortless from the outside, but your feet are working hard with every stride. Between snug ski boots, repetitive movement, cold temperatures, and long hours on the trail, even minor foot sensitivity can become difficult to ignore.
For skiers who deal with bunions, pressure points, or general discomfort, looking after their feet away from the snow can make a noticeable difference. Reducing unnecessary pressure during everyday life gives your feet more of a chance to recover between ski sessions.
Choose Everyday Footwear Carefully
What you wear when you are not skiing matters just as much as what you wear on the trail. Narrow shoes, stiff materials, and cramped toe boxes can all place extra pressure on sensitive areas.
Look for footwear that gives your toes enough room to move naturally and does not squeeze the sides of your feet. Women who experience bunion discomfort may find that choosing specially designed shoes for women with bunions helps reduce unnecessary rubbing and pressure throughout the day.
Your everyday footwear should feel comfortable from the moment you put it on rather than relying on a lengthy breaking-in period.
Pay Attention to Your Ski Boots
Ski boots need to provide support and control, but that does not mean they should feel painfully tight. A poor fit can create concentrated pressure around bunions, toes, and the sides of the feet, which can lead to long term problems.
When choosing or adjusting cross-country ski boots, pay attention to where pressure develops. Your heel should feel secure, but your toes should still have enough space to avoid constant rubbing. If discomfort appears in exactly the same place every time you ski, it may be worth speaking to a professional boot fitter.
Give Your Feet Time to Recover
It can be tempting to stay active every day, particularly during ski season, but recovery matters. After a long session, give your feet a break from restrictive footwear.
At home, wear comfortable slippers or supportive shoes that allow plenty of space around sensitive areas. Gentle foot stretches may also help relieve stiffness after repetitive skiing movements.
Team USA’s matching socks (Photo: Fischer / Nordic Focus)
Choose the Right Socks
Socks can have a surprisingly big impact on comfort. Thick socks are not automatically better, as they can make ski boots feel tighter and increase pressure.
Instead, choose moisture-wicking ski socks that fit smoothly without bunching. Avoid seams that sit directly against sensitive areas. Experimenting with different sock thicknesses can help you find a combination that keeps your feet warm without making your boots overly snug.
Listen to Early Warning Signs
Foot discomfort rarely improves when it is repeatedly ignored. Redness, rubbing, soreness, or numbness can all be signs that something needs adjusting.
Cross-country skiing should challenge your fitness, not leave your feet struggling for days afterward. By combining well-fitting ski equipment with comfortable everyday footwear, sensible recovery, and attention to early discomfort, you can reduce unnecessary pressure and spend more time enjoying the trails.
Kate Oldham racing the 10 k freestyle at the Trondheim World Cup in December 2025. Races of 5 to 15 kilometers, Jim Galanes points out, are not raced at threshold. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
For the last couple of decades, the priority for high-intensity training has shifted from threshold, to VO2max, and now back to threshold again. Nowadays threshold training is increasingly presented as the ideal endurance training intensity. The suggestion is a high aerobic stimulus at a low recovery cost, repeatable and sustainable. VO2max is often portrayed as the opposite: a very high stimulus, high stress, very high fatigue, and something to be used carefully, if at all. Folks, we have seen this story before, in the threshold boom of the mid to late ’90s.
From some perspectives this may be intuitively correct and perhaps logical. If we compare one minute of threshold work to one minute at VO2max intensity, the VO2max work is more demanding. That is a no-brainer. There is more carbohydrate use, higher oxygen demand, higher lactate production, greater perceived exertion and generally a greater physiological disturbance. But is that the way training really works? We build training plans around individual workouts and daily and weekly loads, not per minute of high-intensity training.
For example, we might plan 5 x 4 minutes at VO2max intensity, or 20 minutes of total work. Or it might be 4 x 10 minutes at threshold, or 40 minutes of total work. When we look at the load of the whole session, things become far less clear. Both types of training produce similar adaptations, although the adaptive signal from the higher-intensity work is much stronger, and there is little evidence that a threshold session creates less recovery demand than an appropriately controlled VO2max session.
This is really the point I want to make. We need to stop confusing intensity with training load, and, perhaps more important, we need to stop confusing training load with the recovery timeline. They are related, but they are not the same thing.
As I have written before, threshold is a moving target, and defining it is problematic. There are perhaps a dozen or more methods used to determine threshold, and they can produce very different speeds, heart rates, power outputs and lactate values. Some athletes are working just above LT1 and calling it threshold. Others are working around 4 mmol, and others are using ventilatory threshold, critical power, some percentage of race pace, or simply an intensity that feels controlled and hard. So when people say “threshold training,” I am not sure we are even talking about the same thing. That alone should make us careful about assigning a fixed physiological cost or benefit to threshold training.
The generally accepted training model is usually described like this: easy endurance training provides a relatively small stimulus at a relatively low cost, so we need a lot of it. Threshold gives us a much larger aerobic stimulus, still at a manageable recovery cost. VO2max gives us a very large stimulus, but at a very high recovery cost. Again, that makes intuitive sense, but is it true when we compare realistic sessions? I am not convinced it is. In fact, I am certain it is not.
If we think of training load in simple terms, it is a combination of intensity and duration. Higher intensity produces greater load per minute, while longer duration produces more total load. A 3-hour easy workout, for example, produces a bigger training load than a 75-minute workout with 5 x 4 minutes of VO2max intervals. This is obvious, but somehow we often forget it when discussing threshold and VO2max training.
Take a typical VO2max workout of five by four minutes, 20 minutes of work. Using Firstbeat’s TRIMP model, that might create about 55 to 60 TRIMP. Now take a threshold workout of four by ten minutes, 40 minutes of work. That might generate something in the 95 to 100 TRIMP range. With Firstbeat we can also look at EPOC as an estimate of the disturbance of homeostasis. Again, these are estimates and certainly not perfect measures, but 20 minutes at around 90 percent of VO2max might produce an EPOC of around 175 ml/kg, while 40 minutes at around 85 percent might produce an EPOC of 225 ml/kg. Once again the threshold workout produces a significantly higher stress load.
I don’t want to get hung up on whether those exact Firstbeat numbers are accurate, because that is not really the point. The point is that it is entirely possible for the lower-intensity session to produce the larger total load, and that should not surprise anyone, because it is twice as long.
The same thing happens if we use session RPE. Twenty minutes of VO2max work at an RPE of 9 gives us 180 AU (arbitrary units), while forty minutes of threshold at an RPE of 6 gives us 240 AU. Again, the threshold session creates the larger estimated training load. That does not prove threshold is more stressful or that it takes longer to recover from. TRIMP and session RPE are measures or estimates of training load, not measurements of recovery time.
We have at least three different things being discussed as if they were the same: the intensity of the exercise, the total load of the workout, and how long it takes the athlete to recover. A VO2max interval clearly creates greater physiological disturbance per minute. A longer threshold session may create a greater total training load. Neither one, by itself, tells us which athlete will be better recovered 24 or 48 hours later.
High cost per minute is not the same thing as high cost per session, and high session load is not necessarily the same thing as longer recovery.
Otto Invenius, Campbell Wright, Maxime Germain and Adam Runnalls climbing the Stelvio Pass on rollerskis above Livigno, Italy, in July 2025. The adaptations from threshold and VO2max work overlap far more than the zone names suggest. (Photo: Manzoni/NordicFocus)
What Are We Actually Trying to Adapt?
The other issue is that we spend far too much time talking about training zones and not enough time talking about desired adaptations. What adaptations are we trying to create? That should come first.
VO2max training provides a very strong aerobic stimulus at near-maximal oxidative capacity. It can increase maximal cardiac output, improve oxygen transport, create very high muscular oxygen demand and expose the athlete to speeds and power outputs similar to race demands. Threshold training lets us accumulate a large amount of work at a high aerobic fractional utilization. It can improve sustainable speed or power, oxidative capacity at that intensity, and the ability to maintain a high percentage of maximal aerobic power for a longer period of time.
These adaptations overlap a great deal. I sometimes hear people talk as if threshold develops lactate clearance and the muscles’ ability to sustain work, while VO2max develops the central cardiovascular system. But VO2max training creates a large muscular stimulus as well. ATP turnover is very high, calcium flux is high, metabolic disturbance is high, and the signaling associated with mitochondrial biogenesis is substantial. VO2max training is not simply “central cardiovascular training.” It also provides a significant peripheral training stimulus.
Threshold training obviously produces a similar but slightly smaller mitochondrial and muscular signal for adaptation. But I think its real advantage may be something much simpler. Because the intensity is lower, we can normally do considerably more of it. That allows us to accumulate a large amount of work at a high aerobic fractional utilization, with substantial muscular recruitment and a large amount of sport-specific work.
That may be threshold training’s most important characteristic. Not that it creates some unique physiological adaptation unavailable at other intensities, but that it allows us to accumulate considerably more work while still creating a high oxidative demand.
This can be particularly important for an athlete who already has a high VO2max and whose limitation is the fraction of that VO2max that can be sustained. If fractional utilization is relatively low, increasing sustainable aerobic power may be far more important than trying to push VO2max another few percent. For that athlete, a greater amount of threshold work may make very good sense.
But that is an argument based on the needs of the athlete, not an argument that threshold is inherently a better training intensity or that we recover from it more quickly.
Lactate clearance and resynthesis is another area where I think training discussions have become confused. We often hear that threshold training is necessary because the athlete needs to train to “clear lactate.” I have always had a problem with this explanation, because it is neither accurate nor scientifically valid. Remember, it is lactate we are talking about, not lactic acid, as many refer to it.
Lactate is not a waste product that suddenly appears at threshold and then needs to be removed. It is being produced, transported and oxidized all the time, at all intensities, and it is an important fuel. Endurance training improves the ability to transport and oxidize lactate, but there is no reason to believe this only happens at threshold. High-intensity interval training also improves lactate transport and can move lactate threshold substantially.
VO2max intervals also create very high lactate production and turnover. So if we are looking at the lactate shuttle, why would it only, or even preferentially, adapt when lactate is sitting around 2, 3 or 4 mmol? That doesn’t make much physiological sense to me. Producing higher levels of lactate will stimulate resynthesis.
The same is true for mitochondrial biogenesis, oxidative enzymes and capillarization. We cannot neatly assign these adaptations to one training zone, because there is considerable overlap between endurance, threshold and high-intensity training.
That doesn’t mean all intensities are the same. They clearly aren’t. It means we should be careful about inventing unique adaptations for a training zone simply because we have given that zone a name. Threshold training is not the only method, or even the optimal method, to improve lactate oxidation and resynthesis.
A University of Vermont skier on rollerskis at Craftsbury Outdoor Center in October 2025. Autonomic, glycogen, muscular and mechanical recovery all run on different clocks. (Photo: Phillip Belena/EISA)
What Is Recovery?
Another problem in this discussion is recovery. People will say that threshold is easier to recover from. Maybe, but recover from what? Autonomic disturbance, glycogen depletion, neuromuscular fatigue, muscle damage, mechanical load, dehydration or psychological fatigue? These are not the same thing, and they do not necessarily recover at the same rate. A 2-hour run and a 2-hour rollerski at the same intensity, for example, carry very different mechanical loads to recover from.
HRV may tell us something about autonomic recovery, which should also reflect other aspects of recovery but does not specifically measure them. Resting heart rate can tell us something, but again not everything. Blood lactate tells us something about what is happening during and immediately after the workout, but remarkably little about whether the athlete is going to train well 24 or 48 hours later. Creatine kinase may tell us something about muscle damage, but there is huge individual variation. So when we talk about recovery cost as if it were one number, I think we are being too simplistic.
This is also why I don’t think we can simply use TRIMP, EPOC, duration, distance or session RPE to say one workout takes longer to recover from than another. They can give us useful information about internal load or physiological disturbance, but they are not recovery measurements. Ultimately, recovery must be considered in terms of which physiological systems were stressed and, more practically, what the athlete can do in the days immediately after a hard workout.
Carbohydrate use is another good example. VO2max exercise clearly has a higher rate of carbohydrate use per minute than threshold exercise. But once again, the session matters more than the minute. Twenty minutes at VO2max intensity may have a very high glycogen cost per minute. Forty, fifty or sixty minutes at threshold has a somewhat lower rate, but it is sustained for two or three times as long. We cannot automatically assume that the shorter VO2max workout creates greater total glycogen depletion.
This becomes particularly important when athletes are doing regular quality sessions. If glycogen restoration is an important part of recovery, a long threshold session may impose a very substantial recovery requirement despite producing lower lactate concentrations and feeling much more controlled. An athlete does not have to be lying on the ground after a workout for that workout to have been expensive to recover from.
That is one of the problems I see with the idea that threshold can be repeated frequently simply because lactate is controlled. Low lactate does not necessarily mean low glycogen use, low muscular load or rapid recovery. If we keep extending the duration of the threshold work, at some point the additional work has a cost.
Which brings us to what I think is probably the most meaningful recovery measure, and one that is surprisingly rarely studied: can the athlete perform the next important training session at the expected level?
Lucas Wilmot, Kristen Bourne, Murphy Kimball and Tabor Greenberg after their first L3 intervals at a 2025 camp in Bend, Oregon. (Photo: Leann Bentley)
An Interesting Study
One of the more interesting comparisons was made by Seiler, Haugen and Kuffel with highly trained runners. On one occasion the athletes did a threshold session of around 30 minutes between the first and second ventilatory thresholds, and on another, six three-minute intervals at around 95 to 96 percent of VO2max. I would point out that 95 to 96 percent of VO2max is already hard, and above what I would normally call a controlled VO2max session.
The differences between the workouts were substantial. Lactate during the threshold session was around 2.7 mmol, while during the VO2max intervals it was around 7.1. Perceived exertion was also much higher during the VO2max workout. By almost any acute measure the VO2max workout looked harder, so we might reasonably expect recovery to take longer. But HRV recovery following the two sessions was remarkably similar.
Now, this study does not fully answer the question. The threshold work was only around 30 minutes, HRV measures one part of recovery, and there are all kinds of differences between athletes. But it does challenge an assumption that I think is important. Greater acute metabolic disturbance does not necessarily mean longer recovery, but the dose does.
It also raises what I think is an even more interesting question. What would have happened if the threshold session had contained 40 or 50 minutes of work rather than 30? That would be much closer to the threshold sessions many trained endurance athletes are actually doing.
U.S. Biathlon coach Armin Auchentaller with Campbell Wright during summer training in Livigno, Italy, in July 2025. A controlled VO2max session is about time at high oxygen uptake, not about producing as much lactate as possible. (Photo: Manzoni/NordicFocus)
Control of VO2max Training
There is another issue here that I think is important. A lot of people seem to think VO2max training means going as hard as possible. It doesn’t, at least not the way I see it and use it.
If I give an athlete 5 x 4 minutes of VO2max work, I am not asking them to race every interval or see how much lactate they can produce. I am trying to get them to accumulate time at a very high oxygen uptake, typically around 90 to 95 percent of maximal heart rate and VO2max.
If the objective is a cardiovascular and oxidative stimulus, we need sufficient intensity to drive oxygen consumption toward a very high fractional utilization of VO2max. For many athletes, something in the range of 90 to 95 percent of VO2max may be enough to accomplish that. Once we have produced the stimulus we are looking for, going harder does not necessarily make the workout better.
This becomes important when we compare threshold and VO2max training. If someone compares a carefully controlled threshold session with a set of VO2max intervals performed as hard as possible, then of course the VO2max workout is going to look very stressful. But that may simply be a badly controlled VO2max workout.
A well-controlled VO2max session and an all-out interval session are not the same workout, just as a controlled threshold session and a threshold session that slowly turns into a race are not the same workout. Anyone who has coached for very long has seen both.
A University of Vermont skier on the rollerski track at Craftsbury in October 2025. Forty minutes at threshold is a lot of work, and so is fifty, and so is sixty. (Photo: Phillip Belena/EISA)
What Is Threshold’s Real Advantage?
In my view, the strongest argument for threshold training is not that it produces some special adaptation, but that athletes can accumulate a lot of high-quality aerobic work. Forty minutes at threshold is a lot of work. Fifty minutes is a lot of work. Sixty minutes is a lot of work. For an elite endurance athlete doing a very large total training volume, that may be exactly what is needed, provided the athlete can recover from the overall workload of the training period.
Threshold gives us a way to accumulate a substantial amount of work at high oxidative fractional utilization, with considerable muscular recruitment and a lot of sport-specific work. For an athlete with a high VO2max who needs to improve fractional utilization or sustainable aerobic power, this can be valuable.
I think this is where some of the current discussion around threshold becomes problematic. Because it is controlled, because lactate is relatively low, and because the athlete is not destroyed afterward, threshold starts to be treated almost like endurance training. It isn’t. It is still hard training, and if you do enough of it, it carries a substantial training load and potentially a substantial recovery cost.
The question is not simply whether forty or fifty minutes at threshold creates more adaptation than twenty minutes of VO2max work. It probably creates more of some kinds of stimulus simply because we are doing so much more work. The more useful question is whether the additional adaptation we get from that extra work is worth the additional load and recovery cost.
Kevin Bolger in the fog at the Oslo World Cup mass start in March 2026. The first question is what adaptation an athlete needs. The second is the smallest dose that will produce it. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
Are We Asking the Wrong Question?
The debate is usually framed as threshold versus VO2max. Which is better? I don’t think that is the right question. The first question should be what adaptation this athlete needs. The second, and I think this is more important, is what is the smallest dose capable of producing that adaptation? It isn’t necessarily 40, 50 or 60 minutes. The third is what effect that dose will have on the training the athlete can perform over the next several days.
We tend to assume that if some training is good, more of it must create a greater adaptation. Up to a point that is probably true. But the objective of training is not to produce the largest possible stimulus in every workout. It is to produce enough stimulus to create the adaptation while still being able to absorb the rest of the training.
If an athlete has a relatively low VO2max and that is limiting performance, perhaps 15 or 20 minutes of controlled VO2max training gives us exactly the stimulus needed. If that is enough to stimulate the adaptation, why do 50 minutes of threshold just because threshold is currently popular?
On the other hand, if an athlete already has a very high VO2max but relatively poor fractional utilization, and cannot sustain a high percentage of it, then perhaps a larger volume of threshold work is exactly what is required. In that case the ability to accumulate 40 or 50 minutes at high aerobic flux may be the important stimulus.
NENSA athletes rollerskiing together in Craftsbury, Vermont. A workout can look great on paper and still be the wrong choice if it costs the next two days. (Photo: Chris City)
The Training Week Matters More Than the Workout
I also think we make a mistake when we look at workouts in isolation. A workout can look great on paper and still be a poor training choice, because the real issue is not simply what happened during those 60 or 90 minutes. It is what that workout allows us to do over the next several days.
Suppose a threshold workout produces 10 percent less adaptive stimulus than a VO2max session but allows the athlete to train substantially better over the following two days. Threshold may clearly have the better stimulus-to-recovery ratio and therefore be the better choice.
But reverse the situation. Suppose 20 minutes of well-controlled VO2max work produces the adaptation we want and the athlete is ready to train normally the next day, while 40 or 60 minutes of threshold creates substantial glycogen depletion and muscular fatigue. In that circumstance, the shorter VO2max workout may have the better stimulus-to-recovery ratio.
We shouldn’t decide the answer beforehand simply because one workout carries the label “threshold” and the other “VO2max.” Threshold is not automatically low cost, and VO2max is not automatically high cost. The dose matters, the athlete matters, the training done before the session matters, what needs to be done after the session matters, and the total training week matters.
Therese Johaug racing the mass start at the Lahti World Cup in March 2025. Even races of up to 90 minutes, Galanes says, are often skied well above threshold. (Photo: Thibaut/NordicFocus)
Dose, Adaptation and Recovery
I am certainly not arguing against threshold training. Rather, I am arguing that the dose needs to be controlled relative to the individual athlete, and that the time to recover is not what is often suggested. I use threshold with athletes who need it, and it can be effective. But I do think we need to be more careful about how it is being presented. It is not automatically what every athlete needs.
Threshold and VO2max training have different characteristics, but their physiological adaptations overlap substantially. VO2max training provides a very large physiological stimulus in a relatively short period of time and appears particularly useful when maximal aerobic capacity is what we are trying to improve. Threshold allows us to accumulate considerably more work at a high aerobic output and can be extremely effective when sustainable aerobic power or fractional utilization is the limitation.
Both can be valuable, and both can be overdone.
In my experience, especially over the last decade, I have seen far more athletes become flat, stale, overtrained or simply stagnant from doing too much threshold training than from doing properly controlled VO2max work. Usually it comes from doing too big a volume of threshold work, too often. That doesn’t mean threshold is bad. It means threshold must be appropriately prescribed and dosed.
I also think the very large amounts of threshold work we sometimes see promoted are primarily appropriate for highly trained elite athletes who are also doing very large overall training volumes and have spent years developing that volume. I would be much more cautious applying the same model to younger athletes, developing athletes, masters athletes, or anyone doing a much smaller overall training volume.
There is another point that seems to get lost. Athletes racing 5, 10 and 15-kilometer events are not racing those events at threshold. I have decades of data showing that even in races of up to 90 minutes, fractional utilization can be well above threshold. The shorter races are at a very high intensity, in what is defined as the VO2max zone. At some point we need to train that capacity directly. Doing more threshold work because it is supposedly lower cost does not eliminate the need to train at race-relevant intensity.
In the end, I think we need to get away from ranking training zones as good, bad, safe or dangerous, and think more in terms of dose, desired adaptation and recovery. What are we trying to adapt, what dose is needed to produce that adaptation (often less than we think), and what does that dose cost us in terms of the training that follows?
The most valuable workout is not necessarily the one that creates the greatest immediate physiological disturbance, nor is it necessarily the one that accumulates the most minutes around some predetermined lactate value. It is the workout that provides enough stimulus to produce the adaptation we are looking for while preserving the athlete’s ability to absorb the rest of the training program.
In the end, that is the balance we are trying to find.
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Mid-August is a time to reflect on the summer and start looking forward to the upcoming changing of the seasons. The long, sunny days have brought me many adventures this year, particularly to lakeside destinations like Achensee just up the valley from Innsbruck. A quick dip in the lake is an excellent way to cool down after a bike ride, hike or even rollerski, in the mountains with friends on a hot day. Soon, though, the temperatures will begin dropping and our favorite trails start preparing for the coming winter.
If you’ve been dreaming of exploring Europe’s top cross-country ski trails this winter, there is still space on several Lumi trips to the Alps and Scandinavia. Whether you’d like to check a Worldloppet event (or two!) off your list or simply sight-ski in a new country at your own pace, Lumi’s expert, local trip leaders will help make you get the most out of your ski time in Europe. Check out Lumi’s 2027 winter calendar below and start making your plans today.
Ski in Seefeld & Seiser Alm
Explore the trails on Seiser Alm, one of Italy’s premier Nordic skiing destinations (Photo: Lumi Experiences)
This Winter Seefeld, Austria and Seiser Alm, Italy are renowned for their approachable, yet scenic skiing during the winter months. Start your journey on the nearly-flat trails of Leutasch outside of Seefeld, where picture-perfect mountains rise above the valley below. Trailside huts serving traditional Austrian fare, including the classic Aperol Spritz, dot the trails so you’re never far from a snack break or full meal. Continue your trip on Seiser Alm, where the higher elevations place you above the clouds and nearly at eye-level with the craggy Dolomite spires that ring this high-altitude plateau. Both locations have reliable snow-making capabilities that enable them to open the trails by November before natural snow takes over in December and beyond. The March trip is already sold out, but we still have space on both January trips to Seefeld & Seiser Alm trips. Reach out soon! Our January 20 departure only has one room remaining.
Earn Two Worldloppet Stamps Towards Your Masters Medal
Ski through Finland’s dense forests at the Finlandia-Hiihto (Photo: Finlandia-Hiihto)
If you’re craving the thrill of participating in a major ski marathon, look no further than Lumi’s Marcialonga & König Ludwig Lauf and Finlandia & Tartu trips. Both trips feature Worldloppet events on back-to-back weekends, putting you that much closer to reaching your Worldloppet Master medal. Your expert, local trip leaders assist with all race logistics, including ski waxing for each event so you can simply focus on enjoying the skiing and surroundings on your big event day. We only have a few spots left on both trips, so if you’d like to participate in two Worldloppet events on one trip we recommend reaching out soon.
The Marcialonga & König Ludwig Lauf trip features skiing in Italy, Austria and Germany over 11 days, allowing you to experience some of the best skiing and dining in each region. New for 2027 is the chance to participate in the 32 km Marcialonga “Just for Fun” event, the perfect distance for those who aren’t able to ski the full 70 km classic event. After skiing the beautiful trails in and around Seefeld, Austria, continue your Worldloppet pursuit at the König Ludwig Lauf in Germany on their newly refreshed, snow-secure course.
Whether you ski the full 70 km course or the new 32 km “Just For Fun” event, crossing the Marcialonga finish line is an exciting accomplishment (Photo: Lumi Experiences)
Later in the winter you’ll have the opportunity to ski the Finlandia-Hiihto and Tartu Ski Marathon on Lumi’s Finland & Estonia trip. Both events feature moderate terrain and a relaxed atmosphere in part due to their smaller size – especially compared to Worldloppet events like the Birken, Engadin and Vasaloppet, all of which regularly reach over 10,000 participants. In addition to enjoying both nations’ Olympic museums, cuisine and trails, guests have the opportunity to sauna every day in Finland in a variety of traditional Finnish saunas.
Join skiers from around the world in a group stretch before skiing the Finlandia-Hiihto Worldloppet (Photo: Finlandia-Hiihto)
Sight-Ski Your Way Across Norway or Slovenia & Italy
Not interested in participating in a ski marathon? Join a sight-skiing trip in Norway or Slovenia & Italy next winter. Lumi’s sight-skiing trips skip the races so you can focus on enjoying the scenery, cuisine and culture that make each destination unique.
Ski the Holmenkollen trails above Oslo before trekking north to Norway’s Sjusjøen trails (Photo: Lumi Experiences)
We have two Norway Sight-Skiing trips scheduled for mid-February next winter, each of which begins in Oslo on the Nordmarka trails before shifting north to the Olympic city of Lillehammer and the seemingly endless trails of Sjusjøen. Enjoy Oslo’s harbor from two unique angles: first from the top of the iconic Holmenkollen Ski Jump high above the city, then from the water on a floating sauna – before an optional cold plunge into the icy waters. Our February 14 departure is almost full, with just two more rooms available for up to 4 guests
Lumi’s Slovenia & Italy Sight-Skiing trip in early-March is the perfect trip for those looking to explore a quieter corner of the Alps. Your accommodations for the week-long trip are just a few minutes walk along rustic village paths to the trails, which lead directly to the famous Planica Nordic Center, site of the 2023 FIS World Championships. Ski to one of our favorite trailside huts in the Julian Alps before taking a gondola ride to a mountaintop village nearly a kilometer in elevation above the valley below. Wrap up your trip with a visit to Lake Bled, one of Slovenia’s most cherished natural wonders.
Discover the quieter trails of the Julian Alps in Slovenia and Italy (Photo: Lumi Experiences)
End Your Season Under the Auroras in Iceland
Part Worldloppet trip, part sight-seeing adventure: Lumi’s Iceland Fossavatn trip in mid-April has a little bit of everything. Start your trip off in Reykjavik before trekking northwards along Iceland’s rugged interior, with stops at volcanic craters, scenic waterfalls and geothermal springs. Upon reaching the country’s Westfjords region, you’ll find a beautiful trail network just above sea level, with stunning views of the fjord in the glacially-carved valley overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. After participating in the last Worldloppet event of the season, celebrate with your fellow skiers from around the world at the Fossavatn’s famous cake party, with dozens of delicious cakes to choose from – not to mention freshly-caught seafood served at restaurants throughout Ísafjörður. With almost no light pollution to speak of, this trip has the highest chance of seeing the northern lights of any Lumi trip.
Visit Iceland next April for the chance to see the northern lights (Photo: Annika Landis)
Space is limited on many of these trips, so if you are interested in traveling to Europe with Lumi for your next ski vacation, reach out soon to secure your spot. Message reservations@lumiexperiences.com for a detailed trip itinerary or to sign up. We look forward to hearing from you!
As the world’s premier cross-country ski travel company, Lumi Experiences offers boutique trips that introduce travelers to winter cultures where Nordic skiing is a part of everyday life — from Sweden to Slovenia. It’s a ski vacation like no other.
Media contact: Nathan Miller – Marketing & Guest Communications Manager – nathan@lumiexperiences.com
Alison Mackie rollerskiing during summer training in July. She trains with the Alberta World Cup Academy in Canmore, Alberta. (Photo: Nathaniel Mah)
For Alison Mackie, the 2024 Junior World Championships in Planica never really started.
She had arrived in Slovenia with reason to expect something. A year earlier, at 17, she had finished 13th in the 20 k at the junior championships in Whistler, British Columbia, on home snow, in exactly the kind of long, grinding distance race that suits her. In Planica she missed the qualification in the opening sprint, fell ill, and watched the rest of the week from a hotel room. She was not on the tracks when her Canadian teammates made history either: Sonjaa Schmidt won the U23 sprint, and Canada won the U23 relay.
Back at her base in Canmore, Alberta, at the end of that season, Mackie and her coaches set a target for the next one. Top five at the 2025 Junior World Championships in Schilpario, Italy.
Privately, she wanted more than that.
Mackie in bib 6 during the classic sprint at the 2025 Junior World Championships in Schilpario, where she finished fourth. Two bronze medals followed in the distance races. (Photo: Newspower.it)
A Comeback in Schilpario
“Yes, Junior World Championships in Schilpario were the main focus of my season that year,” Mackie said. “I trained specifically for that event to get my best shape there. But I wouldn’t say revenge, instead a kind of comeback because the year before in Planica I was pretty disappointed because I haven’t had the opportunity to race being sick.”
On the Italian tracks she won bronze in the 20 k mass start classic, then bronze again two days later in the 10 k interval start skate. She was fourth in the classic sprint. They were the first junior world championship medals won by a Canadian woman since 1989.
“I wanted a top five, and I finished with three top fours, including two medals,” she said. “The preparation we had put in proved to be correct, and I had a lot of confidence before starting the championships because I felt really good in the previous months leading up to my arrival in Italy.”
Mackie on a summer rollerski session in July. She started racing in Alberta as a teenager and won her first national title at 16. (Photo: Nathaniel Mah)
Put on Skis Before She Could Walk
Mackie was born in Montreal and raised in Edmonton, and she is 20 years old. Her mother, Jennifer, is a pediatrician. Her father, Andrew, is a pediatric cardiologist. Both of them ski, and both of them had her on skis before she has any memory of it.
“My parents put me on ski as soon as I could walk,” she said. “So skiing accompanied all my childhood. Then I took real ski lessons and I started doing racing in my region of Alberta during my teenage times. That’s till Covid period arrived and with the restrictions I had nothing else to do others than training. But anyway, I really enjoyed myself during that period, developing my technique with my coaches at Edmonton ski club and when Covid finished my very first race that I won was our National title in March 2022 as a 16 year old.”
Canada is known around the world as the home of ice hockey. Why did you choose cross-country skiing over hockey, freestyle, or swimming, following Summer McIntosh’s footsteps for example?
“In parallel with cross-country skiing, I did a lot of other sports like cross-country track and field, rock climbing, mountain biking, swimming, soccer and in all of these sports I wasn’t as super competitive as I was in cross-country skiing. I did that only for fun as an opportunity to stay healthy during summer period. Cross-country skiing has been to me the only sport I competed at my best in my early ages and my favourite discipline. That’s why I chose it.”
That first national title, won in Whistler in March 2022, is the race she keeps coming back to.
“Yes, that race in Whistler BC was one of the first big races after the Covid pandemic,” she said. “I trained a lot during that period and didn’t have the opportunity to race and see my level, and when I went to my first National Championships and won the first race, it was a special moment and made me realize that I wanted to keep pursuing cross-country skiing for even better results and seeing how far I could get.”
Mackie racing to eighth in the Olympic 10 k freestyle in Tesero on Feb. 12, the best Olympic cross-country result by a Canadian woman. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
Eighth at the Olympics
The line has run one direction since. Two bronze medals at Junior Worlds. Her first World Cup top 10s, in Toblach and Val di Fiemme. Eighth in the 10 k free at the Milano Cortina Olympics in her first senior season. Gold in the 20 k mass start free at the U23 World Championships in Lillehammer in March. And at the end of that season, on 548 points, the FIS U23 overall World Cup title, the first won by a Canadian woman, with the finals held at Lake Placid.
At the Milano Cortina Olympics you finished eighth in the 10 k free, after your first World Cup top 10s in Toblach and Val di Fiemme. What do you remember from those two weeks in Italy?
“It was super cool being part of that multi sport event that the Olympic Games represent. It was my dream since I was a child watching Olympics on TV and having the opportunity to compete in high level in this huge event was really special to me. Definitely they have been long two weeks, also overwhelming at the time, but made me really happy how I performed overall and the 8th place I got in 10km skating has definitely been the highlight without any doubt. Entering the top 10 has been quite a surprise to me in that moment, because there were all the best skiers at the starting line. But now looking back at all the hard work I did during the whole season and the good results I got before that race in both World Cup and in under 23 World Championships, I wouldn’t say it was a huge surprise for me. Probably demanding Val di Fiemme’s track suited me very well, given that I finished as well 8th in Tour de Ski’s Cermis climb the month before.”
What is the current situation in Canada for cross-country skiing, in terms of ski club membership, visibility in the national media, and financial support?
“I would say the current cross-country skiing community in Canada is pretty small, if compared to other European power nations, but strong and with lots of passion in developing our discipline. There are a lot of young skiers coming up and I think it is very exciting for the great results to come in the future. Our National sports organization here in Canada are working really hard to make sure our National team can get all the support we need in order to achieve some World Cup podium with both boys and girls team during the seasons to come.”
Mackie on the treadmill during a lab test in May. Distance racing is her strength, and finding speed is the summer’s assignment. (Photo: Nathaniel Mah)
Distance Strength, Sprint Homework
Describe yourself as a cross-country skier. What are your characteristics, your strengths, and the areas you are working on for the coming seasons?
“I describe myself as a pretty strong skier in distance races, while I struggle a bit in sprint not to get through the top 30 and consequently not play the sprint finals, that is an element that I am working on in next seasons,” she said. “Between classic and skate I have found more success in free technique in the past seasons, but I enjoy training both classic and skate equally. Distance races are definitely my strength but I am working to improve my speed skiing as well so I could become a really strong overall skier in order, in the future, to fight for a higher overall spot in World Cup.”
And the criticism you get from your coaches?
“More than critics I would call special feedback from my coaches. Because sometimes I have a tendency to train too much and too hard that I need. That is something I am working on this summer, knowing when to push my body and when to give the correct time to rest and recover.”
The World Cup calendar keeps skiers from outside Europe away from home for close to five months a season. How hard is that for you?
“Personally I have spent on the road, following World Cup calendar, the past two seasons, but not the full European calendar. I really enjoy travelling and being on the road, so I don’t think it is a huge struggle for me. It is tough to not see friends and family for a long time but I am really lucky that I had friends and family came and watched me on tracks while I was in Europe a couple of time during season. Next season it will be quite different for me, because I am transitioning to attend the University of Utah so I will leave World Cup a bit because I do need to go to class and represent the University of Utah in North America as well.”
Mackie at the Holmenkollen World Cup in March, a week before the tour reached Lake Placid. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
A Winter Without Diggins
The World Cup went to Minneapolis in the last two seasons, and Lake Placid hosted the finals in March in front of enormous crowds. Why not race in North America more often?
“We do have actually Canmore scheduled for World Cup 2028, but realistically there are not so many resources for cross-country skiing in North America,” Mackie said. “It takes a lot of money and human power for the organization and preparation of those races. Of course, it will be amazing to have more opportunities to race in North America in the future but I have to be realistic and understand that organizing an event here in Canada, for example every four years, require lots of efforts and preparations from the local organization. Maybe we need more venues in North America that we currently have that are able to bring here World Cup events. I admit with huge pleasure that in the past seasons both Minneapolis and Lake Placid events showed how strong local communities are in terms of support and enthusiasm for cross-country skiing and those events have been a great boost for our discipline in North America, especially between young kids.”
After fifteen seasons, this will be the first World Cup winter without Jessie Diggins, who clinched one more crystal globe in Lake Placid in March before retiring. Will she be missed outside the U.S. team as well? Did you ever get advice from her?
“I definitely think Jessie’s presence will be missed in World Cup. Not only inside USA Team. I think she has always been a positive skier and a really amazing role model in so many ways. And 100% her presence, her ambitious way of racing and unique skiing spirit will be missed. That will definitely change some racing tactics as well. I had the opportunity to train together with Jessie in New Zealand last summer and it was a pretty cool experience and I wish all the best in her future.”
Mackie fitting a metabolic mask before a treadmill test in May. She trains in Canmore and will study medical engineering at the University of Utah this year. (Photo: Nathaniel Mah)
Canmore, Utah, and Life Off the Snow
How is the Canadian team organized, and how is training divided between the women and the men at camps and at home?
“I think Canadian skiing is gonna take a really exciting trajectory. I am really excited to work with our new Swedish coach Stefan Thomson over the next seasons but also in our group here in Canmore we have Norwegian Tormod Vatten as our assistant coach and with them we have a really strong support staff. For the Canadian National Team over the next seasons is going to be really exciting seeing where we all can go in World Cup and I am really proud to be part of this young but strong group of skiers that our Nordiq Canada are building now, under the [leadership] of former Olympic champion Beckie Scott and our amazing ski communities.”
How do you manage your studies, at Queen’s University until last year and now at the University of Utah, with training and racing that run through most of the academic year?
“I just make sure that I manage my schedule accordingly to have enough time for both my trainings and school throughout my day. I think having something other than skiing to focus on is really important for me. I was an online student at Queen’s University over the past two years and now I am transitioning to the University of Utah studying medical engineering. I think it is important the communication with the professors, making sure they know that my situation is a little bit different if compared to normal students, due to the fact that my training sessions, travels and races during winter season take my mind. But despite that my goal is to give my full focus during hours in classrooms too.”
What kind of person are you away from cross-country skiing? Your personality, your interests, what you do on days off from training and racing?
“Outside of cross-country skiing I am a pretty introvert person. I try to keep things on my own. I like studying and I really enjoy sewing clothes in my free time. I truly also love to learn new things and that is why I am excited to attend the University of Utah this year. I also love to spend time in the mountains nearby Edmonton where I grew up and in Canmore where I train myself with Alberta World Cup Academy and where I graduated in High school. Hiking, Mountain biking, running and skiing, of course, are my favourite activity when I can spend my time outside in the lush Canadian Nature.”
In 10 to 15 years, at the end of your career, you will be proud of yourself if what?
“I think, regardless of what I achieve in my future, I will be extremely proud of my career in addition to what I already accomplished. But really, my goal is just to ski because I love it and see where I can get of myself and also trying to inspire other young skiers. I think that there are a lot of young skiers in Canada right now, who have the potential to be amazing athletes. I really want to inspire them, showing them that anything is possible, it doesn’t matter what country you are from or how old you are. So regardless of what I achieve over the rest of my career I will always be proud of what I have already achieved.”
Paolo Romanò is a freelance reporter based in Italy who covers cross-country skiing and Nordic combined.
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Torsten and Lars Brinkema were two brothers from Minneapolis with a GoPro, a film school semester between them and no feature credits at all when they talked their way into a U.S. Cross-Country Ski Team camp in Bend, Oregon, in the summer of 2023. They spent the following World Cup season inside the team, paid their own way through it, and came home with roughly 500 hours of footage. What they cut it into is Threshold, the documentary about Jessie Diggins and her eating disorder that premiered on Peacock in February and is now available to rent in the United States and Canada.
Earlier this month we published head coach Matt Whitcomb’s account of that winter and what the team changed because of it. This is the other half: the brothers’ own version, recorded before the rental release. Torsten is 26 and lives in Brooklyn. Lars is 23 and splits his time between Minneapolis and Los Angeles. They are still working as a duo.
Below is a transcript of the Brinkemas’ conversation with FasterSkier. It has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. LB is Lars Brinkema, TB is Torsten Brinkema, MV is Matthew Voisin.
Lars Brinkema filming on snow at a U.S. Ski Team camp in Bend, Oregon, chasing Jack Young up the trail. The brothers had done the workouts themselves, which is the reason the team let them near one. (Photo: Patrick Conroy)
MV: I would love to back up a little and just hear about you two as young guys, how this all manifested.
LB: To start at the very beginning, Torsten and I were both born in Minneapolis and grew up in that whole Minneapolis ski world. We had skis on right when we started walking. So we really grew up in the same community that Jessie had grown up in, and she was kind of just this idol that we looked up to. We both remember where we were when we were watching that gold medal race in Pyeongchang. And then fast-forward to when we were getting older, just always carrying cameras around, usually a small GoPro on our ski trips. Torsten ended up skiing for Colby College, and that is where he met Ben Ogden, racing against him on the collegiate circuit.
TB: I got my ass kicked by Ben in most of the EISA college races. But I was always interested in shooting a lot of ski trips. I left school trying to figure out how to put those two pieces together, because I knew I was not good enough to be a professional skier, but I also wanted to capture the sport that I loved so much. It took a year of trial and error doing gigs for outdoor brands and whatnot.
Then, when we figured out the World Cup was coming to Minneapolis, I talked with the Loppet Foundation, which is the club Lars and I grew up skiing for. I was kind of like, listen, do you guys need any promotional materials? People should be getting excited for this event that is happening at Wirth Park. I convinced them on a shoestring budget to send me to Holmenkollen in the spring of 2023. I stayed with a family friend out there, reconnected with Ben, and met a lot of the other skiers on the team. I think they were kind of surprised to have an American photographer out there with them, just because they are not getting much coverage once they leave. Ben was sort of like, we have to figure out how you guys can stick around with the team a little bit longer. It was just me at this point, but Lars was in film school. So Ben pitched Matt Whitcomb that he should invite us to their Bend, Oregon camp.
MV: What did you think you were making at that point?
TB: Lars and I basically bought cinema cameras and showed up at camp. We were definitely inspired by a lot of other sports documentaries at the time, niche sports finding success in that genre, people going, oh my god, look at Formula One, I have never heard of this sport before but I am really loving the series. And we were like, we could probably do something like that with skiing. Make it look really cool.
I think the team was happy to see filmmakers who could not get in the way of their workouts. Jessie had experiences in the past with a brand interrupting an interval session, asking her to do another interval. This is just something that would never even cross Lars and my mind, to alter the workout, because we know how intense they are. We know the workouts. We have done them before. So we were kind of flies on the wall, and I think that proved our ability both as skiers and as filmmakers, to be in that documentary position and not get in the way.
MV: What were you envisioning before it started to become more about the eating disorder and the mental health challenges?
LB: Just bringing this sport that we grew up in and that we loved to the masses. We had seen smaller endurance sports, whether it was a YouTube channel or on Netflix, sports that we loved but not a lot of people in the U.S. tracked. And there was always this element to the successful films about sports that was more the human side of the story. We approached it very open-ended. We kept those options really open for a majority of our filming. We were still capturing when we went on the World Cup, talking to European athletes, we had some fun conversations with Klaebo on camera. We just spent every waking moment following different stories.
I would say we were definitely, kind of subconsciously, following Jessie’s story more than others, and that just developed over the time of filming. Not until the editing process is when it really shaped. We had 500 hours of footage, so many different interviews with so many different athletes, doctors, staff on the U.S. team. And as we started to screen rough cuts to film industry people around Los Angeles and New York, we were getting so much feedback that Jessie’s story was the most resonant of all of them.
MV: You have 500 hours, and then at some point you have to make the decision that almost all of it is hitting the cutting room floor. How do you feel your way through that?
TB: Having an editor who had never cross-country skied before was totally instrumental in figuring out what would resonate with the wider audience we knew we had to appeal to. And there are also those moments where Lars and I were deep in the Arctic Circle, freezing our butts off, trying to get a time-lapse of the northern lights, out there for two hours and so attached to this one shot that we worked so hard for. I remember being in the cutting room and him saying, it is not serving the story, you have to cut it. Those were the things that were so hard to let go of.
And of course all these other stories, U.S. Ski Team members, Klaebo, Emma Ribom, Pellegrino, people that we really looked up to, and all of their stories deserve to be told. But at the end of the day, when you have this Jessie story that is so compelling, you cannot really deviate from it if you want to give her story the time it deserves. At the industry screenings, Lars and I walked in with a lot of questions about what would resonate with a non-skier audience, and people just kept saying, Jessie, Jessie, we want more Jessie.
Jessie Diggins and Torsten Brinkema at the team’s Park City camp, in the open-ended stretch of filming before anyone knew what the story was. (Photo: Willie Maahs)
MV: How did you get hooked up with Patrick Dempsey?
LB: It was about six months into filming, right after the Tour de Ski, at a camp between that and the next World Cup stop. Growing up in the Midwest, we did not have any connections to the whole Hollywood world, but we definitely needed to find someone to help us get a foot in the door. So we asked Jessie if she had anyone in her directory who worked in that space. She remembered that Patrick had supported the ski team, and she was able to just send him an Instagram DM. He responded right away and said to send Torsten to his house in Maine. A couple of months later we showed up at his doorstep and pitched him on the idea. He had grown up cross-country skiing in his backyard in Maine, so he is very connected to the sport and a huge Jessie fan.
MV: Jessie is big, but Dempsey is on another level. What was that like?
TB: It was pretty wild. We knew this was a ticket for us into a new world that we had always hoped to get the keys to. And credit to him for inviting us over, because the roadblock we hit at every stage of this process is that we have no films to our name. We have a couple of short projects that nobody has seen. So we are asking someone with the credits that he has to trust us with nothing to see for it. Obviously Jessie’s word goes a long way with him. We had to swallow our awe of him and realize this was a huge opportunity, and tell him what we really believed: that there was a story in those 500 hours. At that point we had not really cut anything. He became a very important part of shaping it down to what it became in the end.
MV: What other filmmakers have inspired you? What did you grow up watching?
LB: One huge one was Jimmy Chin, especially with Free Solo. That may have been the first ever documentary I saw in a theater. This niche sport was brought to a thousand theaters across the country… such a huge story and such an interesting character. That was one of the times we were like, wow, we could bring a sport that we love to the big screen in an impactful way.
TB: To add to that, I remember, I think it was actually while we were filming on the season, I saw a really old Herzog documentary from the 1970s called The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner. Herzog was in his late twenties, early thirties, and he dedicated basically a whole year to following the ski jumping circuit, when it was at that really gnarly phase of people pushing the boundaries on these jumps, ending up jumping all the way to the flats, a whole bunch of drama between the jumpers and the officials. The fact that he was caught up in this story when he was around our age, and it felt like we were doing a similar thing, dropping everything to follow this circuit in unfamiliar landscapes. That just felt like, wow, if one of these great documentarians dropped everything for a ski documentary, we must be doing something right.
MV: It is expensive to travel around Europe for a whole season, and the ski team is pretty transparent that their budget is tight. How did you make those numbers work?
LB: We definitely had to pay our whole way through that season. There was not support from the ski team, in that they did bring us on, we were marked as members of the team crew, so we got our bibs and access to the races. But we basically had the ski team and Jessie help us find people who in the past had supported the ski team. It is not funded by the government; the ski team lives off these people who donate. So we went through their list of people who were instrumental in making sure the ski team could have success, people who paid for the wax van they use to this day. Over the course of filming we were always having to fundraise more and more money.
Later on, when we were fine-tuning the edits, there were still a lot of payments to be made. We talked to Jessie’s sponsor, the Emily Program. That was a really cool opportunity, because now they are supporting the film, but they are also bringing it around the country to treatment centers and educational screenings.
MV: You set out to tell a fun story and ended up helping people with something that is a real medical issue. Do you take a beat to think about that?
TB: That is kind of the goal right now. We had a release with Peacock, which in a way felt like being viewed by this Olympic ski audience, but not everyone in the U.S. has Peacock, so right now we are figuring out how we can reach the people we did not reach in that initial release. For sure our target audience is this young group of impressionable people who are growing up either struggling with this disorder or who have people around them who have struggled with mental health. We have heard from people who have never skied before who say they were so moved by Jessie’s story. That is the biggest compliment we can get.
It is a really hard thing to do, for her to pass one of the hardest years of her life on to us, filmmakers who had never made a film before, to then put out to the world. I remember when we showed her one of the rough cuts. She told us that this is the story her 18-year-old self desperately needed to hear. When we got her blessing, and when she said that, we took it and we ran with it, because we knew we could have that impact on countless other people who were struggling. That was a huge motivator for us.
Torsten Brinkema on a summit in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in April 2024. This one never made the film either. (Photo: Brinkema Brothers)
MV: Can you give me a specific memory from being in Europe?
TB: Mine jumps to not a specific story, but this life on the road, which was so crazy for Lars and me. It was crazy to see the athletes, but also the staff who have done this year in, year out. It really is a wild lifestyle, packing up and going to a hotel room in the middle of nowhere in Finland, where there is light for five hours out of the day, then getting up and packing up and going to the next location in Sweden. The dedication these crews have is crazy, away from their families, away from the normal comforts of living in the States, and the fact that they repeat it every year.
We pretty much joined every training session and filmed as much as we could, then charged the cameras and packed all the footage onto a hard drive. I always loved those nights when we were really tired, it is super dark out, there is nothing to do, and we would walk over to the wax truck and see what those guys were up to. It was always something fun. They are always blasting music, maybe having a shot of Jägermeister. I think they liked having us around because we were these young people who were totally oblivious to the waxing scene, so we could pick on whoever was not busy at the time. They had been living this life for five, ten years, and Oleg has been around, I do not want to quote how many. These guys are putting everything on the line and being away from their families to make the fastest skis in the world.
MV: You mentioned the cameras. What was the gear you used to capture these moments?
TB: We were rocking two Sony cameras, the FX6 and the FX3. That was a progression from, honestly, GoPros. Lars and I just loved being able to carry a camera that would not get in the way of anything, which was so important. We did a 20-mile run with Zanden, Gus, Luke and JC in Alaska, and we carried both our cameras and the drone in a backpack. We always wanted to be able to carry everything we had with only a backpack. That was the goal. In the winter we did a ton of skiing without poles, carrying those cameras, setting up a shot for a while and then skiing alongside people and trying to get it.
The drone was another really key part of the setup, because it let us get beautiful shots of people when we could not keep up with them, which was most of the time. We could only set up these flyby shots for a 20-second clip before they sped past us. We are super proud of those shots, because it took thousands of them to get the five or six that appear in the movie of Jessie flying by in a training session. We also had to figure out how to make the cameras work in the cold, which was something we had not really experienced before. It involved a lot of hand warmers and duct tape, but we eventually figured out a system that worked even at minus five in Finland.
MV: I have used hand warmers to keep my batteries warm too, but what is the duct tape for?
TB: Taping the hand warmers to the battery on the camera, right on the part of the camera where the battery is.
LB: We would have extra ones in our jacket pocket or in our pants, trying to keep them close to body heat so we could swap them out.
MV: Lars, what stands out for you?
LB: Just seeing the sport in Scandinavia was this insane experience. I remember the first Holmenkollen that we followed. I am sad it did not make the movie, but it was absolute mayhem. More people than are in the stadium for the Super Bowl. A hundred some thousand people in the woods watching these skiers who are going by maybe once every 20 minutes. It was not for a sprint, it was not for high impact crashes, it was just to watch these skiers go by, and they were so into it. I remember the big races in the U.S., high school meets, maybe the state meet, have a lot of people out there watching. But seeing all the young fans in Scandinavia watching this sport and being so jazzed up about it, maybe drinking a little too much during the race, it was such a cool experience that you do not get in the U.S.
TB: It was crazy to experience that and compare it to Minneapolis. We had plenty of those fan experiences, not to the scale of Holmenkollen, seeing the Swedes, seeing the Finnish people. But then coming back to Minneapolis, everyone who was there, most of them traveling long distances, doing crazy things to be there to watch the sport they had been waiting so long to see. That was insane in its own right, because here we are almost matching the energy of Holmenkollen on the trails Lars and I grew up skiing on. We learned how to ski on the 5k Wirth course.
Then I did a warm-up lap with Jessie before the 10k, and I started crying skiing down the sledding hill, because it was insane. The people, the roar of the crowd, traveling with her as she went around that loop. I feel like we were so blessed to be able to have that finish the movie, because it really felt like a homecoming for Jessie, and a realization of the legacy she has left, both in Minnesota and in the ski world.
Torsten Brinkema, left, on the warm-up lap with Jessie Diggins before the 10-kilometer freestyle at Theodore Wirth Park in Minneapolis, February 2024. (Photo: Dustin Satloff)
MV: What is something you are each really proud of?
LB: Just coming into the film with such an open idea about what it could be, and that every step of the way we had trust in each other that we were going to make this happen and get it to a large audience. As Tor mentioned, we stepped into a really hard time in documentaries to get one out into the world and make an impact through film. I think we just trusted at every step of the process that we were going to figure this out. Being able to do that and show it in person in Lake Placid and Minneapolis has been such an incredible experience.
TB: Going off of that, it felt like we were in such a unique position to tell this story. I am so proud of those POV shots we got on skis with the athletes. Again, that is the one percent of all the shots we did. But it is a crazy feeling, in a really crowded documentary landscape, to be one of a handful of people in the U.S., maybe even in the world, who can hold a cinema camera while going 30 miles an hour and pull focus and get that shot. It felt like a really proud moment just being like, wow, these turned out, and they are going to make it a better film, because you sort of feel like you are skiing with them.
Lars, left, and Torsten Brinkema working the roller ski loop at the Park City camp, with the two Sony bodies that shot the season. (Photo: Willie Maahs)
MV: What was it like working with FIS? Those rights can be really muddy.
TB: It was definitely a headache to navigate Infront, basically a huge Italian conglomerate that controls a lot of these rights. We had a lot of negotiation with them, because we did want the context of the broadcast footage to feed into the intensity of the race segments. We wanted the tracker of kilometers to go. We wanted Chad and Kikkan announcing, which is so special and I think really leads the film in a way, because Lars and I never really wanted our voices narrating any of this. So we relied on the broadcast to be that context and the hype. It was an absolute pain in the ass, and that is kind of all that I will say.
MV: What is next?
LB: In line with Threshold, it was really special to bring something that is a subject matter so personal to us, skiing and mental health. So I think we will continue to create stories that are close to home. We are working on a film that will be set in Minnesota. It was such an incredible experience to show our city and our race course on the big screen.
TB: We are excited to push our own limits again, and I think this round that will be writing a script, so not a documentary for the next one. But we still definitely want to work together, because having this balance of brother filmmakers, we rely on each other for the things we do not know or that we are not good at. Again, feeling that itch to both tell a story about home and push our comfort zones, which this project definitely did.
Where to watch:Threshold is available to rent on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube in the United States and Canada. It premiered on Peacock in February, and a European release is planned for later this year.
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Torsten Brinkema at the foot of the Alpe Cermis final climb in Val di Fiemme, holding Jessie Diggins’ Tour de Ski trophy in January 2024. (Photo: Leann Bentley)
A classic sprint for the line at the Candy Cane Cup in December 2025. (Photo: Rob Smith)
The series, taking place in Gatineau, Quebec (near Ottawa), kicks off with the Canadian World Junior and U23 Championship trials, Dec. 18-21, and concludes with the Eastern Canadian Championships, Feb. 5-7. These FIS races, organized by Évènements Nordiques Gatineau Nordic Events (ENGNE), take place at Nakkertok Ski Club with the support of Ville de Gatineau and Tourisme Outaouais, longtime sponsors of the events and of skiing in the region.
Nakkertok is known for its excellent grooming and for race trails supported by an extensive snowmaking system, and for a very experienced organizing committee (nakkertok.ca).
A racer leaves the start gate at the Candy Cane Cup in Gatineau, December 2025. (Photo: Rob Smith)
The Candy Cane Cup
The December races, also known as the Candy Cane Cup, will feature Canada’s best Junior and U23 athletes as they battle for positions on the Canadian team at the FIS Championships in Otepää, Estonia. The Candy Cane Cup is also the second Nordiq Canada NorAm event of the 2026-2027 season, identifying senior athletes for the Period 3 FIS World Cups. Winners in the Open class will claim $500 per race, with the overall winner receiving an additional $1,000 as a Hall Mark of Excellence (HME) Award. Junior race winners will receive $200 per race and $500 overall. Additional prize money will be awarded for other placings and categories, including ParaNordic events, with racers selected for the Canadian teams receiving an additional cash bonus.
A chase group tucks through falling snow at the 2026 Eastern Canadian Championships. (Photo: Rob Smith)
The Eastern Canadian Championships
February’s Eastern Canadian Championships start the Friday following the NorAm and SuperTour races in Lake Placid, 2.5 hours “up the road,” and have a similar prize structure. Athletes who participate in both events will be eligible for the additional $2,700 in HME prize money for overall performances.
Hall Mark of Excellence checks for $2,000, $1,000 and $500 presented at the 2026 Eastern Canadian Championships, made out to Olivier Léveillé, Ricardo Izquierdo-Bernier and Parker Courte-Rathwell, respectively. (Photo: Rob Smith)
The Hall Mark of Excellence Award
The Hall Mark of Excellence Award program, founded by Marty and Kathy Hall, has provided over $70,000 of prize money at ENGNE events over the last six years, providing much needed financial support to athletes. As Kathy Hall described, “The intent of our program is to inspire and reward skiers, ultimately to enable them to continue to develop their potential and pursue their success at whatever level of skiing they choose.”
For the 2026-27 season events the HME is contributing $18,000, with an additional $17,000 provided by ENGNE and $8,600 by Nordiq Canada for the NorAm event.
“Nordiq Canada is pleased to contribute financially toward the December NorAm at Nakkertok and to work alongside ENGNE and the local organizing team to deliver a strong competition opportunity for Canada’s athletes,” said Beckie Scott, CEO of Nordiq Canada. “Investing in our domestic competition calendar is an important part of creating a high-quality pathway for athletes to develop, compete and prepare for international racing. We’re grateful to ENGNE and its partners for continuing to raise the standard of racing in the Ottawa-Gatineau region and for their commitment to supporting Canadian athletes.”
The field double-poles over a small climb early in the 2026 Eastern Canadian Championships. (Photo: Rob Smith)
A Record Year at Nakkertok
ENGNE has been organizing races in the Ottawa/Gatineau area since being formed to run the 2016 World Cup event as part of Ski Tour Canada. “A larger prize purse was important to us this season: it helps ease the financial load for athletes heading to World Championships,” said John Halvorsen, ENGNE President. “With the support of Nordiq Canada and Kathy Hall, we’ve set a record year for prize money at Nakkertok Nordic Ski Club, cementing its place as eastern Canada’s hub for world-class ski racing.”
As well as the Nakkertok trails, the Ottawa/Gatineau area has over 200 kilometres of ski trails, including Gatineau Park, home of the Gatineau Loppet, and an extensive urban trail system. It is a great area in which to train, explore and relax. We look forward to welcoming you to our winter ski home.
The mass start rolls out at the 2026 Eastern Canadian Championships. (Photo: Rob Smith)
Publishing press releases is a service we offer to the ski community, so please note these articles are not written by FasterSkier and therefore do not necessarily represent our thoughts and standards.
Skiers outside the Nordic Center at YMCA of the Rockies Snow Mountain Ranch. (Photo: YMCA of the Rockies)
YMCA of the Rockies Snow Mountain Ranch and SNØ Racing are joining forces, with Snow Mountain Ranch serving as the Presenting Sponsor of SNØ Racing.
The partnership connects a professional cross-country ski team committed to advancing the sport with one of Colorado’s favorite Nordic destinations. Together, SNØ Racing and Snow Mountain Ranch aim to welcome more people into Nordic skiing, support athletes and the broader ski community, and celebrate a sport built around snowy trails, hard work and the outdoors.
The Stampede mass start at Snow Mountain Ranch in early March. (Photo: YMCA of the Rockies)
What the Partnership Covers
“Snow Mountain Ranch has long been a place where people can experience Nordic skiing at their own pace, whether that means learning to ski for the first time, training for a race, or putting in serious Ks,” said Jeff Paulson, Nordic Director at YMCA of the Rockies Snow Mountain Ranch. “Partnering with SNØ Racing gives us an opportunity to support athletes competing at the highest levels while helping more people see that there is a place for them in this sport, too.”
As Presenting Sponsor, Snow Mountain Ranch will be featured across SNØ Racing’s public-facing team materials and marketing throughout the season. The partnership will also help introduce SNØ Racing’s community of athletes, coaches, clubs, juniors, masters, and recreational skiers to Snow Mountain Ranch as a destination for Nordic training, camps, events, lodging, meals, trail access and meeting space.
Based in Minneapolis, SNØ Racing is a professional cross-country ski team with athletes competing at the FIS World Cup, U.S. SuperTour, and regional levels. The team is focused on advancing skiing in the Central Region while promoting athlete development, partnership, and community engagement.
“Snow Mountain Ranch understands that Nordic skiing is bigger than race day. It’s about the people you ski with, the places that challenge you, the experiences that create lifelong memories, and the community that keeps you coming back. We’re proud to have them alongside our team this season,” said Yuriy Gusev, Chair of the Board of Trustees of SNØ Racing.
The Nordic Center grooms more than 80 kilometers of trail across 5,100 acres at Snow Mountain Ranch. (Photo: YMCA of the Rockies)
Eighty Kilometers at Snow Mountain Ranch
At Snow Mountain Ranch, that community has plenty of room to ski. The Snow Mountain Ranch Nordic Center offers over 80 kilometers of groomed trails across 5,100 acres of terrain, with routes winding through pine and aspen forests, open meadows and challenging climbs with expansive views of the Rocky Mountains. The trail system welcomes skiers across ages and ability levels, from first timers learning classic or skate techniques to experienced athletes looking for big training days.
The partnership also creates an opportunity to connect the Nordic community with the broader mission of YMCA of the Rockies. Snow Mountain Ranch is built around belonging, time together, outdoor experiences, and making the mountains accessible to more people. For both organizations, that shared sense of community is what makes the partnership a natural fit.
“Nordic skiing has a wonderful way of bringing people together,” said Paulson. “You can be chasing a podium or simply chasing a good glide on a bluebird morning. Either way, you belong on the trail. We’re excited to support SNØ Racing and grow that community together. And, stay tuned for the announcement of an exciting new event at Snow Mountain Ranch!”
To learn more about SNØ Racing and follow the team this season, visit snoracing.org. To explore Nordic skiing, lodging, lessons and winter experiences at YMCA of the Rockies Snow Mountain Ranch, visit ymcarockies.org.
Alongside the Nordic Center, Snow Mountain Ranch offers lodging, dining and meeting space. (Photo: YMCA of the Rockies)
Publishing press releases is a service we offer to the ski community, so please note these articles are not written by FasterSkier and therefore do not necessarily represent our thoughts and standards.
