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.
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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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)
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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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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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.
Tim Donahue racing at the 2020 Winter World Masters Games in Seefeld, Austria. Jim Galanes argues that the training masters skiers cut first is often the training that protects what aging takes away fastest. (Photo: Garrott Kuzzy / Lumi Experiences)
There are two common problems I see in the masters athletes I consult with or coach. The first is the same problem we see with athletes of all ages: they tend to train “half hard” every day. Half hard, Zone 1 quickly drifts into Zone 2 or 3. The second is more specific to masters athletes. They try to follow a training plan that is basically a dumbed-down version of an elite athlete’s program.
The first problem is relatively straightforward to address. Determine appropriate training zones and control the intensity of training more accurately.
The second is more complicated. We need to determine the volume of training an athlete can recover from, adapt to and maintain consistently. Then we need to organize that training around the physiological capacities that are most likely to decline as we age.
There is truth behind the conventional advice given to masters athletes. Recovery does change with age. Simply repeating the training we did at 25 or 30, or copying the program of an elite athlete, is never the best approach at 50, 60 or 70.
But there is a problem with how we sometimes respond to that reality. Many of the training components we tend to remove as athletes age are exactly the components that address the physiological capacities declining most rapidly.
The challenge of training as a masters skier isn’t simply figuring out how to recover better. It is figuring out how to provide enough training stimulus to maintain and improve the capacities that are naturally declining with age while still recovering sufficiently to adapt to the volume of training.
A masters field on the climb at the 2014 Masters World Championship in Asiago, Italy. Endurance performance declines with age, but the individual components of performance do not decline at the same rate. (Courtesy photo)
What Actually Changes with Age?
We know endurance performance declines with age, but the individual components of performance do not decline at the same rate.
One of the largest physiological changes is generally VO2max. Maximum heart rate declines. Muscle mass and maximal strength decline, both of which are important to maintaining aerobic capacity and skiing performance. Type II muscle fibers and explosive power become increasingly difficult to maintain.
Meanwhile, exercise economy and the ability to sustain a relatively high percentage of VO2max can be reasonably well maintained in highly trained older athletes. That should tell us something about training.
If these capacities decline at different rates, it doesn’t make much sense to treat them equally in training.
There is a temptation as we age to gravitate toward the training we tolerate best. The problem is that the capacities we tolerate best may also be the capacities we are already preserving reasonably well.
Training should not simply reflect what aging makes easiest to do. It must continue to address what aging is taking away. If VO2max, strength and power are among the capacities most vulnerable to aging, eliminating high-intensity and strength training in the name of increasing recovery may solve one problem while creating another.
Ahvo Taipale during a Vakava training session. Consistently accumulated aerobic volume remains one of the primary drivers of endurance adaptation, and one of the best defenses a masters skier has. (Photo: Finn Sisu)
Maintain the Aerobic Volume
There has been considerable emphasis in endurance training recently on large volumes of low-intensity training combined with substantial amounts of threshold and sub-threshold work.
There are good reasons for that approach, particularly among highly trained elite athletes. But simply transferring that model to masters athletes can overlook the capacities most threatened by aging, particularly VO2max, strength and power.
So how much Zone 1? How much threshold? How much VO2max?
Those are important questions, but they can obscure something more fundamental.
Consistently accumulated training volume remains one of the primary drivers of endurance adaptation. Masters athletes sometimes respond to aging by progressively reducing volume and attempting to compensate with intensity. There are limits to that strategy.
Mitochondrial development, capillarization, fat oxidation, durability and the ability to maintain performance over long races are built largely through accumulated aerobic work. A two-hour easy ski is not interchangeable with a hard interval workout simply because the interval session produces more acute physiological stress.
For a masters skier who has trained for decades, maintaining as much sustainable aerobic volume as possible may therefore be one of the most important defenses against declining endurance capacity.
The key words are sustainable and consistent training.
The volume has to be performed at the right intensity. It has to be something we can recover from day after day and, most importantly, adapt to over weeks and months.
As we have written previously, occasional hero weeks followed by heavy fatigue and a subsequent reduction in training for recovery are less effective than weeks and months of consistent training at a sustainable level.
UVM’s Fin Bailey drives up a climb on the Craftsbury Outdoor Center track. The answer to aging is not necessarily more high-intensity training, but keeping the frequency of the stimulus while controlling the dose. (Photo: Phillip Belena)
Don’t Abandon Intensity
The opposite mistake is maintaining plenty of volume while gradually eliminating the hard training. This is understandable, particularly for those who enjoy the “half hard” training.
When we stop performing high-intensity training consistently, we lose some of our adaptation to that capacity. Every subsequent interval workout or race is then harder than it used to be, and recovery takes longer, because we have eroded that capacity. That can reinforce the idea that high intensity itself is the problem.
But VO2max is also one of the physiological qualities most strongly affected by aging. So the training stimulus we may most need to maintain becomes increasingly difficult to perform and recover from. The answer isn’t necessarily more high-intensity training. It is maintaining the frequency of the stimulus while controlling the dose.
That may mean less high-intensity work in an individual session, but performing it consistently throughout the year. Fifteen to twenty productive minutes near VO2max may provide a better stimulus than turning every interval workout into a contest to see how much we can do. For many masters skiers, one or two genuinely hard aerobic sessions every seven to ten days may accomplish more than two or three mediocre high-intensity sessions every week.
The appropriate frequency depends on training history, age, fitness and recovery ability, not on a predetermined seven-day formula.
Gunnar Knapp finishes the Engadin Skimarathon. Threshold and sub-threshold training allow considerably more work to be accumulated at a high aerobic rate. (Photo: Garrott Kuzzy / Lumi Experiences)
Threshold Has a Different Job
Threshold training shouldn’t simply become the safer substitute for VO2max training. It is not. In fact, the metabolic and neuromuscular cost of a typical threshold session may be greater than that of a typical controlled VO2max session.
VO2max training provides a powerful stimulus to central aerobic capacity, cardiac output and the ability to deliver and utilize large amounts of oxygen. Threshold and sub-threshold training allow considerably more work to be accumulated at a high aerobic rate while developing the ability to sustain that rate economically.
One of the important considerations in deciding how much emphasis to place on each is fractional utilization: the percentage of VO2max an athlete can sustain for a prolonged period. An athlete with a relatively low VO2max but already high fractional utilization may gain relatively little by continually emphasizing the quality that is already strong while allowing the aerobic ceiling above it to decline.
Conversely, an athlete with a large aerobic capacity but relatively poor ability to sustain a high percentage of it may have considerably more to gain from threshold and sub-threshold training.
This becomes particularly important in highly trained skiers. The speeds elite skiers can maintain at threshold or just below it can be quite close to actual race velocities. That speed and the muscular demands associated with sustaining it are part of what makes the training effective.
For cross-country skiers, both qualities matter.
A skier may have an excellent VO2max but lack the muscular endurance to translate that capacity into sustained double poling or climbing. Another skier may have excellent threshold durability but gradually lose the aerobic ceiling above it.
The question isn’t whether threshold or VO2max training is better. The question is which physiological limitation we are trying to change.
Hailey Swirbul during a strength session at a U.S. Ski Team camp in Park City, Utah. Research in cross-country skiers has shown that maximal-strength training can improve double-poling performance and economy. (Photo: Reese Brown)
Strength Becomes More Important, Not Less
Perhaps the clearest change in training priorities with age should be strength.
Cross-country skiing has become increasingly dependent on upper-body force, whole-body strength and power. At the same time, aging progressively reduces muscle mass, maximal strength and particularly fast-twitch muscle function.
Research in cross-country skiers has shown that maximal-strength training can improve double-poling performance and economy. One likely explanation is relatively simple. If every pole stroke represents a smaller percentage of your maximum force, repeatedly producing that force becomes less metabolically costly.
For masters skiers, developing and preserving maximal strength is particularly valuable because it provides reserve capacity. The goal is maintaining the ability to produce force.
That generally suggests relatively heavy resistance, good technique, low-to-moderate repetition ranges and sufficient recovery, rather than endless circuits of light weights.
Ian Torchia, right, leads bounding intervals up Stratton Mountain. Power tends to decline particularly rapidly with age, and short, fast work preserves it without requiring a large amount of metabolic stress. (Photo: Courtesy Stratton Mountain School)
Power Is the Forgotten Quality
Strength and power are not identical. Strength is how much force we can produce. Power is how fast we can produce it. Power tends to decline particularly rapidly with age.
Acceleration over the top of a hill, changing gears on a climb, responding to an attack, generating force quickly through the poles and maintaining technique at race speed all depend on the ability to produce force quickly.
Masters athletes therefore shouldn’t eliminate every fast movement from training. Short hill accelerations, controlled bounding, short ski sprints and explosive strength exercises can provide a neuromuscular stimulus without requiring a large amount of metabolic stress.
The dosage doesn’t need to be large. What matters is the peak stimulus.
But, as with nearly every aspect of training, consistency matters.
Fresh tracks on the Masters World Cup course in Alberta. Recovery is essential because adaptation occurs between workouts, but maximizing recovery is not the goal. (Photo: GibsonPictures)
Recovery Serves Adaptation
This brings us back to recovery. Recovery is essential because adaptation occurs between workouts. But maximizing recovery is not the goal of an athlete.
Maximizing adaptation is.
The masters athlete must solve a more complicated equation:
Stimulus + Recovery = Adaptation
Too much stimulus accumulated over days and weeks and we fail to recover sufficiently. Without recovery, we fail to adapt. The common theme in underperformance and overtraining is accumulating fatigue and a failure to adapt.
Sometimes the better solution is reorganizing the training. Instead of a pattern of hard, hard, easy, hard, easy, hard, exhausted, rest over seven days, a masters skier might organize training so the important sessions are separated sufficiently to perform them well and adapt to them.
The objective isn’t necessarily fewer quality sessions over the course of a month. It is enough recovery between those sessions to allow the athlete to absorb them.
The coaches behind the masters performance group at Crested Butte Nordic in Colorado: from left, Rachel Bachman Perkins, Murray Banks, Cam Smith and Woody Martineau. Fitness is not created by individual workouts. (Courtesy photo)
Consistency Beats Heroic Training
For masters athletes, we need to adjust our perspective. Fitness is not created by individual workouts. It is created by the consistent implementation of easy endurance work, high-intensity aerobic training, strength, power and appropriate recovery.
One big interval session does relatively little. One big training week does relatively little. Forty or fifty good weeks stacked together can produce remarkable fitness.
That changes the definition of a successful workout.
The question is no longer: How much training can I survive today?
It becomes: What training can I absorb today that allows me to continue training tomorrow, next week and next month?
That doesn’t mean avoiding hard work. It means implementing both easy and hard training in a way that provides adequate space for recovery and adaptation.
Murray Banks at the Alley Loop in Crested Butte, Colorado. Chronological age alone doesn’t tell us enough: training history, injury history, available time, sleep, nutrition and life stress all matter. (Photo: Xavier Fane / Crested Butte Nordic)
The Masters Training Equation
Training, of necessity, must be individualized for athletes of every age. A highly trained 60-year-old with forty years of endurance training may tolerate workloads that would overwhelm a recreational 45-year-old who started skiing five years ago.
Chronological age alone doesn’t tell us enough. Training history, injury history, available time, sleep, nutrition, life stress and individual recovery all matter. But the physiological objectives remain surprisingly familiar.
Maintain aerobic volume.
Maintain VO2max.
Develop threshold and muscular endurance.
Preserve maximal strength.
Preserve power.
Maintain ski-specific technique and economy.
Then organize recovery around accomplishing those objectives. That is fundamentally different from starting with recovery and removing training until the athlete can tolerate what remains.
Masters athletes don’t need a watered-down version of elite training. Nor do they simply need more recovery. They need training organized around the physiological capacities most threatened by aging, with enough stimulus to preserve and improve those capacities and enough recovery to adapt to that stimulus.
Aging changes how we assemble the training. It doesn’t change what makes an endurance athlete fast.
The great opportunity of masters sport is discovering how much performance we can preserve, and in many cases still improve, by continuing to give the body both the stimulus and the time and space it needs to adapt.
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When I asked Matt Whitcomb what surprised him about Threshold, the head coach of the Stifel U.S. Cross-Country Ski Team started by admitting he was tempted to make something up.
“This is the hardest question for me to answer, … but I haven’t watched it. I know it’s life-changing, but I don’t want to go back to that winter,” Whitcomb said. “I did my best as a coach, we all did, and it wasn’t good enough, and I’ve come to terms with my personal experience with it all.”
The winter in question is 2023-24, the season Torsten and Lars Brinkema spent inside the American team with two Sony cinema cameras, a drone, and no feature film credits between them. What came out of it is a documentary about Jessie Diggins and her eating disorder that premiered on Peacock in February and, as of last Friday, is available to rent on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube in the United States and Canada. A European release is planned for later this year.
Whitcomb is the person who let the cameras in. He is also, by his own account, the film’s loudest advocate.
“I know from the response that the film is excellent, and I know it’s changing people’s lives and is being featured in college curricula. I recommend it to everyone I speak to,” he said. “I’m very proud of Torsten and Lars and am grateful for the film. I support it completely.”
Lars Brinkema skiing with a cinema camera at a U.S. Ski Team camp in Bend, Oregon, chasing Jack Young on the trail. The brothers had done these workouts themselves, which is why it never occurred to them to ask an athlete to run one again for a better take. (Photo: Patrick Conroy)
“A couple of brothers got a camera for Christmas”
His first answer was no.
“I figured a couple of brothers got a camera for Christmas, had a couple beers, and then came up with a fun way to spend a year,” Whitcomb said. “I normally would’ve erred on the safe side and told them to take a hike, but Ben doesn’t toss around ideas lightly and so I followed up to hear more.”
Ben is Ben Ogden, who raced against Torsten in college on the EISA circuit and had watched him work at the World Cup in Norway that spring. Torsten had gotten there on a shoestring, having talked the Loppet Foundation, the Minneapolis club he and Lars grew up in, into sending him to shoot promotional material ahead of the 2024 World Cup at Theodore Wirth Park.
“I think they were kind of surprised to have an American photographer out there with them,” Torsten said, “just because they aren’t getting much coverage once they leave.”
Ogden pitched Whitcomb on inviting the brothers to the team’s Bend, Oregon camp that summer. The brothers bought cinema cameras and showed up.
What they had in mind at that point was not a film about an eating disorder. It was a film about a sport nobody in America watches, made in the shape of the niche-sport documentaries that had broken through elsewhere.
“We could probably do something like that with skiing,” Torsten said of the pitch they were making to themselves. “Make it look really cool.”
They had one asset that mattered more than the cameras, which is that they were skiers. Diggins had been through the alternative, brand shoots that treated an interval session as something you could run again for a better take.
“This is just something that would never even cross Lars and my mind, to alter the workout, because we know how intense they are,” Torsten said. “We know the workouts. We’ve done them before.”
Lars, left, and Torsten Brinkema at the U.S. Ski Team’s Park City camp. On the road the athletes called them Larry and Toasty. (Photo: Willie Maahs)
Toasty, Larry, and a problem with FIS
Whitcomb’s worry was culture, which he describes as something you protect rather than something you have.
The brothers had promised the arrangement would run both ways, that athletes would get usable footage of themselves out of it, and Whitcomb says they delivered. They also collected nicknames. Torsten became Toasty. Lars became Larry, or Lawrence in formal settings.
“These guys were ghosts at times where they would disappear for the day and nobody would see them,” Whitcomb said. “And then we’d see them at dinner and they’d be showing athletes their incredible footage of the team training or racing together.”
They washed dishes. They helped with wax testing. Whitcomb says everyone came to regard them as an addition to the team environment rather than a cost of doing business.
It was not frictionless. At the first race of the season in Finland, Whitcomb watched one of the brothers get chewed out in the finish area by a FIS official for filming in a zone reserved for the television production company. Later, on course in Toblach, he got a text from FIS with a screenshot attached.
“Larry running through the pines, keeping pace in his flatbrim hat and knit sweater, filming the lead pack. He was prominently within the TV feed,” Whitcomb said. “They asked if I could kindly remove him from the world feed. And you know what happened? Nothing. These guys said they were sorry and got a hand slap in each instance. Everyone likes them. They say things like thank you and sorry.”
The rights question got more expensive than a hand slap when it came time to actually build the film. The brothers wanted broadcast footage in the race sequences, the kilometer counters and the commentary, partly because they had decided early that they would never narrate the film themselves. That meant negotiating with Infront, which controls FIS media rights.
“It was an absolute pain in the ass, and that’s kind of all that I’ll say,” Torsten said. “Very expensive.”
The money came from nowhere institutional. The brothers paid their own way through the season and kept fundraising as they went, working through the list of private donors who already keep the U.S. team on the road. The Emily Program, which sponsors Diggins, came in later during the edit and is now bringing the film into treatment centers and educational screenings.
The Hollywood end of it started with a question the brothers asked Diggins at a training camp between the Tour de Ski and the next World Cup stop. They had no connections in that world and needed someone who did. Did she know anybody.
She remembered that Patrick Dempsey had supported the ski team before, and sent him an Instagram message. He answered immediately and told her to send Torsten to his house in Maine, where Dempsey grew up skiing. A couple of months later Torsten showed up at the door and pitched him.
“We have no films to our name. We have a couple short projects that nobody has seen,” Torsten said. “And so we’re asking someone with the credits that he has to trust us with nothing to see for it.”
Dempsey signed on as an executive producer and, by the brothers’ account, became a real voice in shaping the cut. Whitcomb offers it as a character reference. “I mean, Patrick Dempsey signed on with these guys. That should tell you something.”
Filming an interview with Johannes Høsflot Klæbo in Park City in October 2023. The brothers came home from the season with roughly 500 hours of footage and interviews across several national teams. (Photo: Daniel Sannum Lauten)
The pivot happened the following summer
This is the part Whitcomb wanted on the record, because he thinks people have the sequence backward.
“From the start, this movie was meant to highlight the entire team, and not just Jessie,” he said. “Months after the winter concluded, I think the Brinkema brothers realized that the film needed to hone in on the topic of mental health to have a clear storyline. I understood and supported that pivot, but the point is that the winter filming was not targeted at just Jessie. That filming happened the next summer.”
The brothers describe the same thing from inside the edit. They came home with roughly 500 hours of footage and interviews with athletes across several national teams, including Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, Emma Ribom and Federico Pellegrino. Their editor, Yaniv Elani, had never cross-country skied, which they now regard as the reason the film works.
Elani is also the one who made them cut the northern lights. The brothers had stood out in the Arctic Circle for two hours in the cold to get a time lapse they were proud of.
“It’s not serving the story. You got to cut it,” Torsten remembers him saying.
Then came the screenings for film industry people in Los Angeles and New York, where the brothers went in hoping to learn what a non-skiing audience would care about.
“People just kept saying, Jessie, Jessie, we want more Jessie,” Torsten said.
Matt Whitcomb during an interview with the Brinkema brothers in Burke, Vermont. “We missed the mark on supportive team culture as an entire team,” he said of the winter the film covers. (Photo: Brinkema Brothers)
“Our culture was at a 15 or 20-year low that winter”
Whitcomb does not soften the season the film covers.
“For anyone who has seen the movie, I think it’s no secret that our culture was at a 15 or 20-year low that winter. We had major struggles,” he said. He has thought about whether the presence of a film crew contributed to that, and concluded it did not.
He is also insistent that the winter was not one athlete’s crisis with everyone else watching. “It was one of the hardest times for several other athletes and coaches, too. This wasn’t just a Jessie issue. We missed the mark on supportive team culture as an entire team.”
Asked how he handled protecting Diggins against letting the story be told honestly, he rejected the premise.
“I never felt like I had to protect Jessie from the film. She was a part of the team-wide decision to allow the Brinkema brothers into the team for the year, and that was the main gate we kept,” he said. When the brothers asked him whether they could film something sensitive, a one-on-one meeting for instance, he sent them back to the athlete. “I would usually just tell them to ask Jessie what she was comfortable with.”
He watched her closely all the same, and says that had nothing to do with coaching. “That’s just because she’s a close friend, and friends look out for each other. But I had 100% trust in these guys, which is saying something because Lars was 19.”
Torsten Brinkema and Leann Bentley at the World Cup finals in Falun, Sweden, in March 2024. Bentley handles press for the cross-country and Para Nordic teams and appears in the film mostly doing her job in the background of somebody else’s scene. (Photo: Brinkema Brothers)
The person in the hotel room
Leann Bentley is the U.S. Ski & Snowboard communications manager who handles press for the cross country and Para Nordic teams, and she is in the film, mostly doing her job in the background of somebody else’s scene.
She was in the room when the coaching staff decided whether to say yes, and she remembers it being straightforward. Here were two people willing to spend a year telling a story she could not tell herself, and one of them had raced against these athletes in college.
The question she was asked for this story was how she decided where to draw the line once the film’s center became Diggins’ mental health. Her answer was that the question does not describe what happened.
“Short answer, no, I never had to tell them no,” Bentley said. “Long answer is I of course will always protect my athletes. But at the same time, they’re protecting themselves. And throughout this entire process, Jessie was protecting herself. She knew what she wanted to give, and she knew maybe what she didn’t, but she was in charge of it from the very start. And so were all the athletes.”
The scene she keeps coming back to is a hotel room in Ruka before the press conference where Diggins told the assembled media she was dealing with her eating disorder again. Bentley says it was one of the most heavily attended press conferences she has run with her.
“There was a scene where I told her that it’s okay to be vulnerable. And I don’t remember saying that to her,” she said. “It really goes to show that when I work with these athletes, I’m working with them as people, and I’m really glad that came across in the film.”
Most of her season is not spent in hotel rooms in Finland. It is spent in Salt Lake City, awake in the middle of the night, watching the same feed as everybody else and then turning it into the clips and quotes that hundreds of thousands of people see, for twelve teams and more than 240 athletes.
Asked what the film got right about the parts of team life that press coverage never reaches, she was blunt about why the question has an easy answer.
“It got everything right because it was showing exactly what was happening,” Bentley said. Athletes race for a few minutes at a time, a few times a weekend. The rest of it is chess and cards and laundry and going for a run. “I don’t think a lot of people understand that being a professional athlete, you train so hard mentally and physically for what you do on the weekends during a race. And then that race ends and you have, I don’t know, ten more hours of the day left.”
Both she and the brothers land in the same place when asked for a favorite corner of that life, which is the wax truck, known on the road as Yolanda. Torsten’s version involves showing up on dark nights with nothing to do, music playing, occasionally a shot of Jägermeister, and a group of technicians who had been living this way for a decade or more and had stories nobody had ever asked them for.
I interviewed the American wax techs last winter in the lead-up to the Olympics, and they remain the most enjoyable conversations I have had for this site, so I will just agree with him.
Torsten Brinkema, left, and Lars Brinkema, right, filming Jessie Diggins, coach Jason Cork and Renae Anderson during a roller ski session at the Park City camp. (Photo: Willie Maahs)
What actually changed
The most concrete thing to come out of that winter is not on screen.
Whitcomb describes an Athlete Wellness Passport, a monitoring system covering roughly eight health areas for every athlete on the team, men and women, including bone density, blood panels, caloric balance assessment, menstrual health and a mental health questionnaire. The team dietitian tracks each category for each athlete, and a licensed professional is brought in when a category calls for it.
“It’s a safety net for the whole team,” he said.
What that system did not have in 2023-24 was a ceiling.
“What we were missing in the winter of 2023-24 was a plan for what happens when an athlete’s issue, like an eating disorder, advances beyond the qualifications of our professionals,” Whitcomb said. “In this case, we needed an eating disorder specialist MD on call, and we didn’t have one. We’ve debriefed on the experience extensively and have brought in the person we wish we already had in place going into that winter.”
For coaches who watch the film and want something to do on Monday, his answer starts with an assumption rather than a policy.
“If you coach a team of athletes, you likely coach some athletes who struggle with disordered eating, and you may never know who they are,” he said. He has had male and female athletes tell him about it years after they finished competing.
On his team the practical version is a conversation about meals, held once a year, in which everyone agrees to treat mealtime as a place where safety matters more than opinions.
“Everyone’s plate looks different, and everyone’s dietary needs and goals are different, and many of us are insecure, so the environment is ripe to be judgy and toxic,” Whitcomb said. “Talking it out isn’t perfect, but it helps.”
He got there by getting it wrong first, and he tells that story without cushioning it.
“As a young coach I used to think I could talk openly with athletes about their challenges with eating, body image, and weight. Then I learned from a parent that a comment I made to them regarding weight was harmful. Yeah, I know, duh. But I was 23 and some of you are now, too.”
His correction was to stop talking about any of it and refer everything to professionals, which he now says was better but too absolute. The current version is that he will talk with an athlete who wants to talk, if the trust is there, while being honest about where his expertise ends and activating someone qualified.
Lars Brinkema, Torsten Brinkema and Andrew Peterson take questions after a private screening of Threshold in Minneapolis in January. Diggins has asked teams to treat the film as “a visual book club.” (Photo: Sawyer Brice)
What Diggins wants out of it
Diggins raced her last World Cup in Lake Placid in March. She did not do a new interview for this piece, but she wrote at length on Instagram when the film went back out on Friday, and the argument she made was that the documentary is not really about her.
Her request to teams, high school through professional, was that they treat it as “a visual book club.” Watch it, then talk about it. What pressure does this sport put on you. What kind of team do you want to be. And for coaches, find out now where you would send an athlete who comes to you, before one does.
She also made a point the film cannot make on its own, which is that the recovery in it happened in hundreds of hours of therapy and clinical work that were never filmed and could not have been.
Torsten Brinkema, left, Jessie Diggins and Lars Brinkema in the finish area in Falun, Sweden, in March 2024, after Diggins wrapped up the overall World Cup title. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
When the film premiered in February, she put the goal simply in a U.S. Ski & Snowboard release: “I wanted to help others feel less alone.”
The brothers are working on a scripted film now, set in Minnesota, still as a duo.
Whitcomb, meanwhile, is not planning to watch. He described where the last two years have left him without much interest in tidying it up.
“We’ve made improvements to our system because of lessons from that winter, and we became better coaches and teammates. I’m moving forward as an improved coach.”
And then the part that sounded most like a coaching philosophy: “Your coaches and staff must truly care about the human condition. That’s your foundation. Get rid of the ones who don’t and add more who do.”
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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Cross-country skiers rarely travel light. For the Broken Arrow Skyrace, however, Kendall Kramer’s entire racing kit amounted to one pair of shoes and one outfit, both tucked into a carry-on. But after a winter ruled by equipment and logistics, simplicity was part of the point.
The self-funded trip to California with her mother was supposed to be, in Kramer’s words, “a fun little side quest.” She had watched Jessie Diggins race at Broken Arrow in previous summers and submitted an elite application in February, when the event was already sold out. If the organizers accepted her, Kramer decided, she would take it as a sign to go. They did, and four months later the side quest sent her home with a place on another U.S. national team.
Kramer completed the June 19 Ascent in 48 minutes, 14 seconds, finishing 11th among women in an international field and fourth in the separate USATF Uphill Mountain Running Championships. The latter result earned the 2026 Olympian one of four women’s spots on the U.S. team headed to the World Mountain Running Association (WMRA) World Cup Finale in Quebec this October.
Kramer climbing at the Cirque Series race at Alta, Utah, in 2025. Summer mountain races have been part of her calendar for years. (Photo: Austin Elliott Photography)
A Race Within the Race
The Broken Arrow Ascent rises 2,840 feet over 3.61 miles at Palisades Tahoe, ending near 9,000 feet on Washeshu Peak. The course offered Kramer a familiar kind of discomfort. Skiers spend plenty of summer training sessions running uphill, and she has raced mountains throughout her life in Alaska. She was also drawn to an uphill-only event, where she could attack the climb without risking the pounding, falls and injuries that can accompany a technical descent.
The altitude complicated the effort. An ascent race can feel like a sprint, Kramer said, because its short length allows runners to push rather than settle into prolonged power hiking. Near 9,000 feet, that approach requires more restraint. Still, years of ski racing and training at elevation gave her a sense of how to manage those obstacles.
Kramer had entered with a tangible goal: finish in the top 10 and earn prize money. The field was strong enough that doing so, she felt, would also establish her among other serious mountain runners.
She started picking off competitors as the course climbed and found another surge near the end, when a cluster of women remained within reach. Kramer lost track of her exact position amid the passes but knew she was close. She crossed two seconds behind 10th place.
“I was like, ‘Oh darn,’” Kramer said. “At least it was a good effort race.”
Weeks earlier, the elite runners had been told that the Ascent would double as the USATF uphill championship and a qualifier for the World Cup Finale. Kramer bought a USATF membership and entered that competition, too, mostly because there was no reason not to. She skimmed the qualification information without giving it much thought.
“This field is crazy,” she remembered thinking. “That’s not really going to be me.”
After the race, Kramer and her mother began walking from the summit toward the tram. She checked the overall results first. Then she noticed a separate view for the USATF championship, which removed athletes who were not entered in the national race. Kramer had nearly forgotten about the competition within the competition.
Her name was listed in fourth, and the top four qualified.
“I totally didn’t factor myself into that,” Kramer said. “It was definitely a surprise. I was really proud that I could make a team like that.”
Kramer may not have expected the qualification, but it drew on years spent building the aerobic engine and uphill strength that mountain racing rewards. She simply had not imagined that an ability maintained partly for balance and enjoyment would carry her onto another international team.
Kramer came to athletics through running before she found skiing. Both of her parents are runners. (Courtesy photo)
A Runner First
Running has never felt like a secondary sport to Kramer, even as skiing became her profession.
“Running was always my main sport, in the sense that that’s what I got into when I got into athletics,” she said.
Both of her parents are runners, and running shaped the athletic culture of her family in Fairbanks. She tried soccer and baseball, but she liked the directness of a sport in which her work and her result felt closely connected. Skiing came later because, as she put it, it was “what all the cool kids did.”
The two sports eventually became inseparable. At the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Kramer competed in both throughout college. She won three straight Great Northwest Athletic Conference cross-country titles and finished second at the 2024 NCAA Division II Cross-Country Championships. Four months later, in the final ski race of her collegiate career, she won the 20-kilometer freestyle at the NCAA Skiing Championships.
Kramer’s skiing has since reached a new level. She made her Olympic debut in Italy in February and placed ninth in the World Cup skiathlon in Falun in March, her first top-10 World Cup result. Yet running still supplies something that skiing cannot.
“If I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t be able to handle all of the skiing that I do,” Kramer said. “I like feeling like I have another athletic outlet to keep me happy, because skiing can be fleeting and have all sorts of disappointments with equipment and stuff. Running feels more in control.”
That control is physical, but it is also logistical. A ski race can hinge on wax, snow, weather and the work of moving equipment from one place to another. Running asks much less before the gun goes off. On a running trip, Kramer said, there is more space to enjoy the people and the place around the competition.
“It feels like it adds to your life,” she said. “It’s so manageable.”
The harder question came when her college cross-country career ended. Kramer loved the sport’s courses, team culture and changing terrain, but there is no obvious post-collegiate version of NCAA cross-country. Track and road racing did not offer the same pull, and she was not ready to build her running life around marathons on pavement.
Mountain racing offered another route. In Alaska, it had never felt like a separate niche so much as part of the local calendar. Races such as Mount Marathon and the Cirque Series became summer traditions, with familiar faces returning to familiar mountains each year. Two weeks after Broken Arrow, Kramer placed seventh at Mount Marathon in 52:53.
“I loved running cross-country and being in the woods and going along a course that has different aspects,” Kramer said. “You have an uphill and downhill, and you have to change, just like skiing.”
Mountain racing preserved the parts of running Kramer loved and opened a path to international competition she never expected to enter.
Kramer on her way to a career-best ninth in the World Cup skiathlon in Falun, Sweden, in March. She argues that summer racing is part of what makes winter results like that possible. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
Keeping a Pulse on Racing
For Kramer, racing in the summer is not a diversion from ski training. It is one of the ways she makes that training more useful.
An occasional race does interrupt a perfectly planned week. She may back off for a few days beforehand, then need time to recover afterward. Some skiers see that as lost volume. Kramer believes the costs are outweighed by the chance to revisit sensations that ordinary training cannot reproduce.
“Racing is very different from training,” she said. “At least I think so, and I think it should be different from training.”
Kramer likes to race roughly once a month during the offseason. Each start provides a checkpoint on her fitness, pacing and ability to summon focus when a result matters. Those reminders make the first ski races of winter feel less abrupt; she arrives with recent evidence of how her body and mind respond in competition.
Races also make weaknesses harder to ignore. A disappointing moment can become the direction for the next training block rather than a problem discovered after the ski season begins.
“Sometimes you don’t get an idea of where you’re lacking and where your strengths are if you don’t tap into that throughout the summer,” Kramer said.
At Broken Arrow, the crossover was all around her. Olympic ski mountaineer Anna Gibson won the Ascent and the U.S. uphill title in 43:15. Diggins completed all three races, a total of 75 kilometers with more than 16,000 feet of climbing, and finished fourth in the Triple Crown standings. Sophia Laukli has built an elite trail-running career alongside cross-country skiing, winning the 2023 Golden Trail World Series. In August, Gibson placed sixth among women at Switzerland’s Sierre-Zinal, while the recently retired Diggins finished 37th.
Those examples helped Kramer recognize that mountain running can be more than incidental cross-training. The sport has international races, sponsors and prize money, particularly in Europe. Its U.S. elite pool remains relatively small, and a skier who already possesses a strong aerobic base can become competitive quickly. That does not make the crossover effortless.
“I’m not going to act like I’m couch-to-mountain-running,” she said. “I’m definitely trying, and I’m also not downplaying the girls who do train for it. But I am saying that ski training works for it, and getting fit in general works for it.”
The larger benefit may be less measurable than fitness. Elite skiers live by periodized plans: intervals on one day, over-distance training on another, each block designed to build toward winter. Kramer believes athletes can become so protective of that structure that they miss the value of occasionally disrupting it.
“People are really scared to break away from that,” she said. “But I think you can be a really adaptable athlete and build skills that a regimented training plan can never get you.”
Her confidence in that approach has been earned over years of combining running and skiing without sacrificing results in either. That history has also built trust with her coaches. An unplanned race or an imperfect training week does not look like recklessness when the larger pattern shows that she understands how to make the two sports work together.
The mental return matters as much as the physiological one. A summer race provides the competitive charge that long weeks of training can lack and asks an athlete to solve problems in real time: exactly what winter racing eventually demands.
Kramer on a run in the Alaska mountains. Her next start comes Oct. 10 at Mont-Sainte-Anne in Quebec. (Courtesy photo)
The Next Side Quest
Kramer’s next test comes Oct. 10 at Mont-Sainte-Anne in Quebec, where the circuit will make its first visit to Canada. The current course listing calls for five kilometers and roughly 800 meters of climbing. It will begin far below the altitude Kramer encountered at Broken Arrow, removing one variable while preserving a steep uphill challenge.
She wants to finish in the top 10. Broken Arrow showed that she can stay close to that range in a deep international field, and the chance to race without a near-9,000-foot finish has left her curious about what more she can do.
Beyond Quebec, Kramer would consider mountain races in Europe if a sponsor or U.S. team opportunity made the travel possible. She is not mapping out a second full professional calendar yet. The appeal lies partly in leaving room for opportunities to appear, then being fit and adaptable enough to take them.
“I would love to look back and see that I took those opportunities,” Kramer said. “Running has never hurt me in the past. I’ve always been able to juggle both.”
Kramer does not argue that every skier should copy her schedule. She wants more athletes to leave room for the experiences that may not fit perfectly into a training plan but help them handle everything racing asks of them.
“It can make you a better skier in ways that maybe aren’t the best training on paper,” Kramer said. “But it makes you a good athlete, which comes in handy when you least expect it.”
At Broken Arrow, that lesson was waiting in a second set of results she had nearly forgotten to check.
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Kramer racing cross-country for Alaska Fairbanks. She won three straight GNAC titles and finished second at the 2024 NCAA Division II championships. (Courtesy photo)
Author’s note: From the PT: a Look at Chronic Exertional Compartment Syndrome is a good introduction to the current article and includes a more detailed description of the anatomy, pathophysiology, and associated research. Since it was published on FasterSkier in 2022, that article has served as a resource for the Nordic skiing community, and I have fielded multiple requests for guidance from skiers around the world with CECS. In that article, I suggested that conservative treatment has potential; however, I was still more optimistic about surgical intervention based on the available research. The published research hasn’t changed, but my experience has, and now I’d like to make the case for non-surgical treatment of CECS. As with any medical information found on the internet, this article should be taken as the opinion of the author and not a replacement for direct consultation with a medical provider.
The start of the women’s 10-kilometer mass start free during Stage 3 of the 2021/22 Tour de Ski in Oberstdorf, Germany. (Photo: NordicFocus)
The primary symptoms of Chronic Exertional Compartment Syndrome (CECS) include pain, weakness, and/or numbness that only occurs with exertion. These characteristics are fairly distinct, although there can be enough overlap with other soft tissue disorders, namely tendinopathies, that CECS remains a diagnosis of exclusion when everything else has been ruled out. In Nordic skiers, symptoms affect the anterior, lateral, and/or posterior compartments of the lower legs and are most common with (often exclusive to) skating. Typically, or at least initially, these skiers will be symptomatic with high-intensity skating, but will be asymptomatic with classic skiing and running even at the same intensity.
The physiology is relatively straightforward: our muscles are wrapped in a thin layer of connective tissue called fascia. As muscles repeatedly contract, especially at high intensities, they become enlarged; however, fascia is not elastic and does not stretch. If the muscle size exceeds the volume of the fascial compartment, blood flow is constricted, oxygen delivery is decreased, and the muscle gets strangled. This hypoxia in the muscle triggers a pain response, which is usually a good defense mechanism to make us stop doing something that the body perceives as harmful.
The why is far more complex: some theorize that the fascia is just wrapped too tightly. Others suspect that the muscles are too big for the fascia. In either case, the common solution is a surgical fasciotomy where an incision is made in the fascia to increase the size of the compartment and decrease its stranglehold on the muscle.
The why with skiing is even more complex. With CECS occurring with skate vs. classic, the initial theories centered around the ski retrieval phase. This makes sense with the work being done by the tibialis anterior muscle, which dorsiflexes the ankle while the ski is brought back to its glide phase position. Except that CECS can affect other lower leg muscles/fascial compartments which would not be active during the retrieval phase. Arguably the biggest difference between skate and classic techniques, at least as far as the muscles of the lower leg are concerned, is the stability demand of balancing on the gliding ski: the muscles must work much harder with skating.
A dense field of men’s skiers during Saturday’s 15 k mass start classic in Falun, Sweden. (Photo: NordicFocus)
A case study
The patient in our story is an 18-year-old male skier. He is a very competitive skier regionally and would have qualified for Junior Nationals had his skate races not been disrupted by leg pain. We had our initial physical therapy visit in mid-January, mid-race season. He reported pain, progressing to numbness, in both shins, which only occurred during high-intensity skate skiing. Symptoms were first noticed the previous winter during a skate race in icy conditions, but he didn’t have any additional episodes for the remainder of that season or during the summer. In October, however, symptoms returned during a skate interval session, persisted with any high-intensity skating, and got progressively worse through the race season. He was unable to finish his last skate race due to severe pain.
In physical therapy exams and diagnostics, we are keen on reproducing patients’ symptoms. If we can do this in specific ways, we can begin to rule in or rule out anatomical structures which may be involved. For better or worse, I was unable to reproduce the patient’s symptoms in the clinic. This would likely rule out a muscle strain or tendinopathy, both of which tend to be painful with resisted tests (assuming we can make the tests both hard enough and specific enough). Differential diagnosis still included lumbar radiculopathy (nerve irritation at the spine leading to symptoms in the leg) or a bone stress injury (a.k.a. stress fracture), but neither of these fit the picture of symptoms being exclusive to high-intensity skating and absent at rest or especially with other modes of exercise. The symptoms really fit the pattern of CECS. To confirm, the gold-standard diagnostic would be compartment pressure testing; however, this testing is quite painful, fairly inconvenient (unless you have a rollerski treadmill in the clinic), and primarily aimed at determining if the patient is a candidate for surgery. Since this patient was looking to salvage his race season and avoid, or at least delay, surgery, we opted to skip the pressure testing but assumed that he was dealing with CECS.
The remainder of the physical exam focused on ski technique, or at least the static components we could observe in the clinic: hip strength (fair), balance (compensated with lateral trunk lean), ankle dorsiflexion range of motion (appropriate), and foot stability (notable flexibility and forefoot varus). These findings were significant enough to suspect that the patient’s lower leg muscles were working very hard to maintain balance on his glide ski. The hip weakness and compensated single-leg balance made me suspect that if he was lacking stability from the top down, then he was having to work much harder from the bottom up, thus overloading the muscles at the ankle and leading to CECS.
The root cause of any musculoskeletal symptoms can be described as an imbalance between load being placed on the body and the body’s ability to tolerate that load. In physical therapy, we are looking to balance that equation. Sure, we can decrease load by telling patients not to do things that are painful, and some of that may be required in the short term, but we’re not in the business of telling people to stop doing fun things. Thus, much of the work we do is aimed at improving the patient’s ability to tolerate load. The trick becomes sorting out where there is room for improvement and how to get there.
His first round of exercises focused on balance without compensation (single-leg stance with a Pallof press and lateral hops to balance on one leg) and hip strength (side plank variants and fire hydrants). On the load mitigation side, we discussed using more supportive insoles, which he had only recently acquired, and training modifications with skating limited to short bouts of low-intensity skating and all high-intensity work done in the classic tracks.
At his second PT appointment, we were very fortunate to have the involvement of his ski coach who attended the visit with the patient. We continued exercise progressions for balance and hip strength; but we also got much more technique specific, identifying areas for improvement and providing corresponding cues: “heel down” (when asked to stand as if he was balancing on the glide ski, he was over-exaggerating the very common “hips forward” cue and shifting his weight so far forward that his heel was no longer on the floor. Arguably this is okay on steep terrain but not in this context), “tripod foot” (equal pressure on the inside, outside, and heel of the foot), and “weight shift with the hips” (get the center of mass over the glide ski via the pelvis vs. leaning to the side). He and his coach then took these cues to technique sessions and eventually higher intensity intervals.
At our next appointment a few weeks later, the patient reported zero symptoms with hard L4 skate intervals. Unfortunately, the rapid melt-off of snow in the West ended the race season before he could fully test the effectiveness of the intervention. However, as of the time of this writing, he has been skiing and training for five months without symptoms.
The critical reader (and all readers should be critical) might point out that we have a false sense of accomplishment because he hasn’t raced. I would argue that he has had plenty of pain-free training sessions that would have previously been symptomatic. The reader might say that this is simply a case study and an N=1 is pretty weak research. That is certainly true. A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study with a very large population would be ideal. But a case study is not nothing. Not all skiers with CECS are going to respond to the same intervention. But if we have seen that it is possible to effectively treat CECS without surgery, then we might want to consider exhausting our non-invasive options first. The reader might further pick holes by saying that without compartment testing, we don’t even know for sure if this skier had CECS. That is also very true and should be acknowledged. In the name of science, I should have subjected the patient to the very unpleasant testing before and after our intervention to both establish a baseline and to prove that he was cured. But in the name of practicality and the patient’s well-being (along with the patient’s and family’s input), I declined.
Again, the story of one skier’s ability to overcome CECS without surgery does not mean that all skiers with CECS will have the same success. But it’s very much worth a try. If you are reading this article because you are a skier with CECS, I would encourage you to take a very detailed look at your skating technique and be very specific about your approach to changing it. This likely means working on the component parts in a low-complexity setting (not on skis) and progressing to technique sessions on skis with a heavy emphasis on the cues that you and your support team (coach, PT, trainer, etc.) have identified. Hopefully this can be a path back to fun, fast, and pain-free skiing.
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Wilmington, Vermont’s Luke Rizio rollerskiing with the University of Vermont at Craftsbury last fall. Jim Galanes argues that a training year should change the dose of each quality, never remove one of them entirely. (Photo: Phillip Belena/EISA)
One of the biggest misconceptions in endurance training is that we should train one physiological capacity at a time. The traditional model usually follows the same progression. First build an aerobic base, lots of easy endurance training. Then add “threshold” training in the middle of the summer. Then, as we move into the pre-competition period, shift the emphasis toward VO2max and race specific intensity.
The emphasis certainly should change throughout the season. But this approach often leads coaches and athletes to unintentionally neglect important physiological systems for weeks or even months. The problem is that the human body doesn’t work that way.
Aerobic performance is not determined by one physiological system. It emerges from the interaction of multiple systems, each supporting the development of the others. When one begins to decline, it limits the effectiveness of the entire system.
The goal of periodization is not to sequentially build individual physiological systems. It is to continually maintain every important system while changing the emphasis toward the adaptations that offer the greatest opportunity for improvement.
Every Workout Sends a Different Signal
Training isn’t simply stress. Every workout sends a unique physiological signal for adaptation.
Long aerobic training stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis, capillary development, fat oxidation, plasma volume expansion, and cardiac remodeling.
“Threshold” training improves the ability to sustain a high fraction of aerobic power by increasing oxidative capacity, metabolic stability, and lactate transport. It should be noted, in spite of the current buzz, that “threshold” training is not a magic solution. Some athletes may need a heavier focus on VO2max training. Usually “threshold” type training is best for those doing high volumes and with an already high fractional utilization.
(Note: while I use the common term “threshold” here, there is ample evidence that no threshold actually exists and that it is a vastly misleading term. There is also no consensus on what this so-called threshold is. Depending on which of the many methods you use to define it, the speed or intensity at these various definitions can differ by 40 to 50 percent.)
VO2max intervals place the greatest demand on oxygen delivery, stimulating central cardiovascular adaptations while also improving mitochondrial function, the oxidative capacity of Type II fibers, lactate transport, and the speed or power that can be sustained at VO2max.
Sprint training recruits high-threshold motor units, preserves neuromuscular coordination, maintains the oxidative capacity of fast-twitch fibers, and develops the ability to rapidly produce force.
Strength training increases maximal force production, improves movement economy, enhances tendon stiffness, and helps reduce injury risk.
These are not interchangeable adaptations. Each contributes something different to developing aerobic fitness and performance.
The Systems Support Each Other
These systems work synergistically. The mistake is assuming the adaptations are simply additive. They are not. They interact, and the combined effect on aerobic fitness is larger than the sum of the parts.
A larger aerobic system allows the athlete to recover more quickly between hard sessions and to produce an increasing proportion of energy aerobically.
Better “threshold” capacity allows more quality work to be performed with less fatigue. Greater maximal aerobic power raises the ceiling from which “threshold” speed or power can improve.
Improved strength reduces the relative force required for every stride.
Sprint training preserves the neuromuscular qualities that improve efficiency even during submaximal exercise. At every intensity, we can move faster and more efficiently.
Aerobic volume, “threshold” work, VO2max intervals, speed and strength each do something the others cannot, and each raises the ceiling on its neighbors. (Illustration: FasterSkier)
What Happens When One System Is Ignored?
Every physiological adaptation has a maintenance requirement. Remove the stimulus long enough and that adaptation begins to decline. An athlete who abandons speed training gradually loses neuromuscular recruitment and maximal power. An athlete who eliminates heavy strength training slowly loses force production and movement economy.
When an athlete reduces aerobic endurance training, they don’t simply lose endurance. They lose the physiological foundation that supports every other adaptation.
An athlete who removes VO2max work for extended periods may maintain excellent endurance while gradually losing the central cardiovascular adaptations that support maximal aerobic performance.
These changes are rarely dramatic at first. What we see instead are the symptoms of overtraining. Performance in training declines. Interval sessions become harder. Race pace plateaus or drops.
Many coaches respond by adding more volume or more intensity. Neither is the likely answer. The solution is to restore the balance between the physiological systems that support performance.
Through the training year the dose and density of each quality moves, but no quality drops to zero. Concept illustration of Galanes’ argument, not a prescribed distribution. (Illustration: FasterSkier)University of Vermont skiers work up a climb during a fall dryland session at Craftsbury, Vermont. (Photo: Phillip Belena/EISA)
Why High-Intensity Training Belongs in the Base Period
One of the most common statements heard during base training is: “We shouldn’t do any hard training yet.”
Current evidence suggests otherwise. High-intensity training during the base period is not about maximizing anaerobic fitness. It is about maintaining the physiological systems that complement the full development of aerobic capacity.
Appropriately dosed high-intensity training helps preserve central cardiovascular function, maintains high-threshold motor unit recruitment, supports the oxidative capacity of fast-twitch muscle fibers, reinforces movement economy at higher speeds, and prepares the athlete for the demands of future training. Just as importantly, these adaptations support aerobic development rather than detract from it.
A stronger cardiovascular system allows greater oxygen delivery during long aerobic sessions. Maintaining fast oxidative fibers improves the ability to perform “threshold” work later in the season. Preserving movement economy reduces the energy cost of every stride. Maintaining maximal aerobic capacity raises the ceiling from which “threshold” performance can continue to improve.
High intensity doesn’t compete with aerobic development when it is properly dosed. It enhances it. This is why elite endurance athletes rarely eliminate intensity completely. They change the dose and the density. Not the presence.
I often hear athletes say their first interval session or time trial in late July felt terribly slow, or metabolically challenged. Of course it did. That should come as no surprise. If high-intensity work has been absent for weeks or months, the physiological systems required to perform it have detrained. The athlete now has to rebuild those systems before meaningful race-specific adaptations can occur.
Emphasis Is Not Elimination
This doesn’t mean every quality deserves equal attention every week. Training emphasis should absolutely change throughout the year. An aerobic development phase should contain more aerobic volume. The pre-competition period should emphasize “threshold” and race-specific intensity. The competition season should prioritize race performance and recovery.
But changing emphasis is very different from abandoning a physiological system. Even during an aerobic block, athletes should continue performing some high-intensity work, sprint training, and strength training.
During race season, aerobic volume remains essential. While emphasizing VO2max development, “threshold” training still supports the ability to perform quality work.
The dose and density change. The physiological adaptation remains.
There Is No Optimal Intensity Distribution
One of the most common questions in endurance sports is: “What is the optimal training intensity distribution?”
The question assumes there is one correct percentage of easy, “threshold”, and hard training. There isn’t. The optimal distribution depends on the athlete’s training background and on which physiological system currently limits performance. Those limiting factors change throughout an athlete’s development.
Early in a career, building aerobic capacity may deserve the greatest emphasis. Later, improving sustainable race pace may become the priority. Still later, improving neuromuscular power, force production, or movement economy may produce the greatest gains.
As those priorities change, training distribution changes with them. Not because the principles change. Because the athlete changes.
The coach’s responsibility is to continually adjust aerobic volume, “threshold” training, VO2max work, sprint training, and strength training so that each enhances the adaptations produced by the others while minimizing interference.
There is no universal training formula. There is only the continual process of identifying the athlete’s current limiter, maintaining every important physiological system, and emphasizing the adaptations that will produce the greatest improvement.
Great coaching is not about prescribing the perfect intensity distribution. It is about continually identifying the athlete’s current physiological limiter while maintaining every system that supports performance. As the athlete changes, the emphasis changes, but the physiology never disappears.
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UVM coach Patrick Weaver talks with first year Hanna Koch of St. Paul, Minnesota, during a fall session at Craftsbury. Identifying an athlete’s current limiter, Galanes writes, is the coach’s central job. (Photo: Phillip Belena/EISA)
U.S. Biathlon’s board votes Wednesday on a formal operating alliance with U.S. Ski & Snowboard. Supporters call it the stability the sport has always lacked. Skeptics call it a surrender of independence. Both are working from the same set of facts. Here is what the deal actually says, and what it would and would not change.
The U.S. Biathlon board of directors is scheduled to meet tomorrow, Wednesday, July 29, at 4 p.m. Eastern. This account is based on interviews conducted by FasterSkier with the chief executives of both organizations, a U.S. Biathlon athlete representative, the U.S. Biathlon head physiology coach, a written statement from the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, and a review of the alliance term sheet, three community working-group reports, and correspondence circulated by members opposed to the deal. All of these documents were posted publicly by U.S. Biathlon or provided to FasterSkier.
Campbell Wright (USA) during the biathlon sprint at the XXV Olympic Winter Games in Antholz (ITA). (Photo: Thibaut/NordicFocus)
Every winter, for a few weeks in February, cross-country skiing and biathlon stop being niche pursuits in the United States. During the last Olympic period, FasterSkier drew more than 180,000 unique readers in a single February, most of them people who do not know the sport’s governance history and have never heard of the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act. On Wednesday afternoon, a board most of those readers could not name will vote on a decision that could reshape how one of their sports is run for the rest of the decade and beyond.
The question in front of the U.S. Biathlon board is whether to enter a “Strategic Operating Alliance” with U.S. Ski & Snowboard, the far larger national governing body that oversees Olympic and Paralympic skiing and snowboarding. Under the proposal, U.S. Biathlon would remain a legally separate organization and the recognized governing body for the sport, but would hand much of its day-to-day operation to U.S. Ski & Snowboard under a services agreement. To its architects, it is a way to give a chronically under-resourced sport the stability and commercial muscle it has never had. To its critics, it is the moment a proud, independent program stops steering its own ship.
The two sides do not disagree much about the facts. They disagree about what the facts mean.
What is actually being proposed
Strip away the temperature of the debate and the structure is specific, and it has changed meaningfully since the idea first surfaced publicly in the spring. The current terms, which U.S. Biathlon posted for its members on July 27, describe an alliance rather than a merger in the dictionary sense. No organization dissolves.
Under the agreement summary, U.S. Biathlon “will remain a separate legal entity,” keeping “its own corporate existence, financials, and independent audit.” It stays the governing body recognized by the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee under the Ted Stevens Act, and keeps its membership in the International Biathlon Union, the sport’s world federation. Its name, logo, and trademarks remain owned by U.S. Biathlon and are licensed to U.S. Ski & Snowboard.
What changes is who runs the operation. Under a services, or operating, agreement, U.S. Ski & Snowboard would take over “staffing, programs, events, and administration for biathlon,” giving the smaller sport access to a chief financial officer, general counsel, marketing and revenue staff, medical and sport-science support, and technology infrastructure it cannot afford on its own. U.S. Biathlon’s own staff, its leaders say, would remain responsible for running the sport itself. A new Biathlon Sport Committee would be created inside U.S. Ski & Snowboard, mirroring the structure the larger body already uses for cross-country and its other disciplines.
Jack Gierhart, U.S. Biathlon’s president and chief executive, described the mechanism plainly in an interview. “The mechanics of this are like an operating agreement between U.S. Biathlon and Ski and Snowboard where they take over operations,” he said. “That’s how we’re honoring and satisfying the Ted Stevens Act.”
Sophie Goldschmidt, president and chief executive of U.S. Ski & Snowboard, framed the same structure around what biathlon keeps. “We would keep the biathlon entity. In fact, we keep the biathlon name, the biathlon logo,” she told FasterSkier. “From a legal perspective, it would also have its own entity. With that, it would have its own board. So very much operating like it does today, but sitting within a larger framework so that it can benefit from the other resources and shared knowledge, extra funding that we can provide.”
That phrase, “operating like it does today,” sits at the center of the argument, because a great deal depends on how much a board that has delegated its operations still actually decides.
USBA CEO Jack Gierhart poses with Max Cobb (IBU Secretary General) (l-r) at the IBU World Cup in Annecy-Le Grand Bornand (FRA) last December. (Photo: Manzoni/NordicFocus)
How the sport got here
By the account of the people who built it, this did not begin as a takeover. It began, Gierhart said, as an attempt to solve a problem every small Olympic sport shares.
Gierhart arrived at U.S. Biathlon in September 2022, as longtime leader Max Cobb was leaving for the IBU. The organization was early in a strategic plan aimed at growing the sport, and a central piece of that plan was working more closely with the cross-country community, since most American biathletes come from skiing. “From my experience being in sport for 25 years, when you offer people more options, more pathways, you increase retention and you grow the pie,” he said. “It’s like, this should be a no-brainer, but then you run into the cultures and communities.”
Those conversations, Gierhart said, drew in the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, which oversees and funds the country’s Olympic sports. “The USOPC started to suggest, hey, we’ve got a lot of these small NGBs, why don’t you guys think about something a little more formal?” he said. That was roughly a year and a half ago. The organizations sketched the basic terms, paused through the Olympic and Paralympic Games so as not to distract athletes, then brought the concept to a wider audience in the spring.
Goldschmidt described the same arc and made the case for why her organization wants biathlon at all. U.S. Ski & Snowboard already runs multiple sports under one roof, she said, which means it can absorb the compliance and administrative costs that crush small governing bodies. “The central costs can really be absorbed and be a real cost saving for those organizations,” she said. “Legal, finance, safe sport compliance, all of that, which is quite a big burden, especially on some smaller NGBs. We can absorb that quite easily without having to increase the cost base, which means practically more money is going directly to the athletes.”
The rollout did not land smoothly. After town-hall meetings drew pointed questions, the two organizations convened three joint working groups, on governance, sport development, and high performance, that met through the back half of July. Twenty-eight to twenty-nine participants, including athletes, coaches, club leaders, and staff, spent two weeks documenting what a successful alliance would require and what worried them. Their reports, posted publicly, have become some of the most revealing documents in the whole debate, in part because they capture both the community’s hopes for closer collaboration and its doubts, in the community’s own words.
Sophie Goldschmidt speaking at the Alpine World Cup in Killington, Vermont in 2024. (Photo: U.S. Ski & Snowboard)
The money, and the question at the center of it
Almost everyone involved agrees that money is the engine of this deal. What they do not agree on is how to describe the pressure behind it.
The clearest number comes from Gierhart. For the coming season, he said, the USOPC reduced U.S. Biathlon’s grant by 22 percent. The reason, in his telling, has less to do with the alliance than with a shift in how the USOPC allocates money. Roughly three years ago, he said, the committee created an investment framework weighted toward medal potential. “They told us a couple of years ago, you guys are one of the highest funded sports, you haven’t delivered medals,” Gierhart said. “There’s a good probability you’re going to get a cut. And that’s what happened. They cut us,” a reduction he put at 22 percent for this year.
Crucially, Gierhart rejected the idea that the cut is a lever to force the alliance. “It hasn’t been like, if you don’t do it, we’re taking away money,” he said. “It was, we’re taking away money because you’re over-resourced from our model standpoint and you’re not delivering. But if you go in this direction, which we believe will be beneficial in the long term, we want to help you do that.” Asked directly in a later FasterSkier interview whether it was a threat, he drew the distinction again. “They gave us our grant for this year, and it’s the 22 percent reduction. But they said that if we move in this direction with this alliance, they want to invest more in us. And they will find a way to do that,” bringing biathlon “back to where we were.”
Goldschmidt, in interviews with FasterSkier, likewise described the reduction as reversible if the alliance proceeds, and tied it to the USOPC’s belief that a more efficient biathlon can compete for medals.
The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, asked to confirm the figures and to say whether restoration of the funding is contingent on the alliance being approved, declined to address specifics. In a written statement, spokesman Jon Mason said the committee “is aware of and engaged in the discussions between U.S. Biathlon and U.S. Ski & Snowboard, and we support them taking a deliberate, transparent, fact-based approach to exploring a future relationship that complies with the Ted Stevens Olympic & Amateur Sports Act.” The committee, he added, is “supportive of outcomes that can build long-term stability and create opportunities for current and future generations of athletes.” The statement did not confirm the size of the cut, and it framed compliance with the Act as a goal the parties must meet rather than a settled fact.
What the alliance would add is documented. According to the high-performance working group’s summary, biathlon “would receive a ~$600k increase from current FY27 revenue projections” in the first year, with U.S. Ski & Snowboard guaranteeing an increase “from this year-one level through year 4.” Gierhart put the combined total, new revenue and shared-services savings together, at “at least” $3.3 million over four years. That money, in principle, flows back into programs.
Set against U.S. Biathlon’s roughly $3.5 million in annual revenue, those are not small numbers. And they arrive alongside a promise that biathlon’s existing money stays biathlon’s. Under the agreement, “all funding designated for biathlon, including IBU and USOPC support, existing sponsorship contributions, charitable donations, and other biathlon-specific revenue, will remain ring-fenced and used exclusively to support biathlon.”
Here Goldschmidt was careful to correct what she called a misunderstanding. The ring-fence, she said, is permanent, not a four-year arrangement. “All of the money that they generate that is ring-fenced for biathlon will continue to go to that program. That will be a contractual commitment,” she said. “Some people have got confused that we’re only committing to four years to ring-fence and provide them funding. That’s not accurate.” The four-year commitment, she clarified, applies to the additional commercial funding U.S. Ski & Snowboard brings to the table, which depends on the sponsorship deals it can renew.
Gierhart described the same two-part structure, and pushed back on the idea that biathlon falls off a cliff when the four years are up. “This gives us a platform for four years of sort of guaranteed increased revenue to build momentum and to implement the things that we know are going to help us,” he said. “Without that, we’re going to live year to year, and we’re already in maintenance mode as opposed to growth mode.” In four years, he argued, biathlon would be “in no different a situation than we are today. In fact, we’ll be better, because we’ll have a lot more resources to work with over the next four years.”
That distinction defines exactly where the community’s deepest financial fear lives. The money biathlon already raises is protected by contract. The new money, the actual growth case, is guaranteed for one Olympic cycle, through 2030, and after that depends on the USOPC and on sponsors, the same as it would if biathlon stood alone.
While much of the US biathlon community debates governance, the USBA’s Campbell Wright, Vincent Bonacci, and Maxime Germain (l-r) gets after their summer training in Font-Romeu (FRA). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
The Ted Stevens question
No part of the debate has generated more heat than the law. A group of members, some of whom helped establish U.S. Biathlon as an independent governing body decades ago, argue that the alliance violates the Ted Stevens Act. Their case rests on two provisions.
The first is the single-federation rule. Under 36 U.S.C. 220522, a national governing body must be “a member of no more than one international sports federation that governs a sport included on the program of the Olympic Games.” U.S. Ski & Snowboard belongs to FIS, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation. Biathlon answers to the IBU. Critics contend that if U.S. Ski & Snowboard effectively governs an IBU sport, the arrangement collides with that rule.
The second is autonomy. The same statute requires a governing body to be autonomous, in that it “independently decides and controls all matters central to governance” and “does not delegate decision-making and control of matters central to governance.” Arthur Stegen, a former U.S. Biathlon board member and part of a group called Team Independent Biathlon, laid out the objection in correspondence circulated to other members and shared with FasterSkier: a services agreement that assigns operational responsibility to U.S. Ski & Snowboard, he argues, is by definition a delegation of control, and reducing the biathlon board to a sport committee “would appear to relinquish its governance responsibilities to another organization.” Stegen wrote that he is “completely against this potential merger.”
The written terms were plainly built to answer that challenge. The agreement summary includes a section titled “Reserved Governance Authorities,” which states that “notwithstanding any operational responsibilities delegated to U.S. Ski & Snowboard,” U.S. Biathlon “will retain sole authority over all matters required by the Ted Stevens Act or otherwise reserved to the National Governing Body,” including “oversight of the organization, approval of the biathlon budget, and all authorities reserved to the NGB.” In other words, the deal’s authors say operations are delegated while governance is reserved.
Goldschmidt said the structure was designed to align with the statute from the start. “We’ve worked with the USOPC and others to ensure it fits all of those criteria, which it does,” she said. Gierhart said U.S. Biathlon has already received an opinion on the point. “We’ve gotten the opinion from the USOPC’s legal counsel on the terms as they’re written now, and their opinion is that it meets the requirements and is in compliance with the Ted Stevens Act,” he said.
He was also clear about sequence, and described it as the normal way such deals come together. Wednesday’s vote is on the foundational terms, the fundamentals both sides have agreed to. “You’ve got to agree on the fundamentals, and then that’s what’s going to drive the detailed operating agreement,” he said. That more extensive agreement, covering licensing of the biathlon trademarks, the function of the board, and the bylaws, would be drafted next, “vetted by independent counsel” to confirm it complies with the Act, and then brought back to the U.S. Biathlon board, athlete representatives included, for a separate vote to approve it.
That staging is itself contested ground. Supporters see a standard process: agree on principles, then build and independently vet the detailed contract. Skeptics see a board being asked to commit before the full agreement exists and before the independent legal review happens, and some argue a binding vote should wait until both are done. What Wednesday’s vote actually authorizes, the concept or a finished deal, is a distinction worth watching closely as the meeting unfolds.
The USOPC, for its part, did not put its weight behind a declaration that the current structure is legal. It said it supports the parties “exploring a future relationship that complies” with the Act, language that leaves compliance as something still to be demonstrated.
There is precedent for the skepticism, and for U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s interest in expansion. The organization previously pursued governing roles in surfing and skateboarding, efforts that critics cite as evidence of a broader ambition to build a multi-sport governing body, the very kind of concentration the Ted Stevens Act was written to prevent. Goldschmidt described those episodes as different in kind. Surfing, she said, “just got too political,” and the organization walked away; skateboarding remains “ongoing” with “no immediate decisions.” Biathlon, she argued, is a natural fit that most European countries adopted long ago. “I get asked all the time, why is biathlon not integrated within your organization,” she said. “It’s a natural fit in many ways.”
Who controls the board
Because the autonomy argument turns on control, the composition of the board is more than a technicality, and it is an area where early rumors and current terms diverge sharply.
Gierhart was emphatic that the U.S. Biathlon board does not shrink or change hands. “The board is going to continue at the same size it is by the bylaws. It’s 12 to 15 members. They’re voted on by the membership,” he said. Those voters remain biathlon’s own roughly 1,500 members, whose categories will be tracked separately even after membership systems migrate to U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s platform in the 2027-28 season. “Our board size is not going to change. The composition is not going to change,” Gierhart said.
Just as important, he said, is what that board keeps deciding. Among the authorities it retains is control of the budget and the annual plan, meaning that where biathlon’s money is spent would still be approved by the U.S. Biathlon board of directors.
The new layer is the Biathlon Sport Committee, which the agreement describes as being drawn from the existing board, “6 to 8 members,” and maintaining the 33 percent athlete representation required by USOPC bylaws. The chair of that committee and one athlete representative would sit on the U.S. Ski & Snowboard governance board, giving biathlon two seats and a direct voice in the larger organization. The arrangement runs in both directions: U.S. Ski & Snowboard would, in turn, have representation on the U.S. Biathlon board.
Athlete voice, a recurring worry, is addressed specifically. Rather than being folded into U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s athlete representation, “biathlon would still maintain its separate voice of athletes on the Team USA [Athletes’] Commission,” Gierhart said. “We’d have our own.”
Even though Jake Brown officially retired from the IBU World Cup after last season, he has played an active role as an athlete rep throughout this process. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
What changes for the athletes
For the people who actually race, the alliance is not an abstraction about governance. It is a question about who pays for the plane ticket to Europe.
U.S. Biathlon funds its athletes to a degree unusual among American winter sports. “Our athletes within biathlon are better funded and supported than in any other winter sport,” Gierhart said, noting that the program fully funds its World Cup athletes and nearly fully funds its IBU Cup athletes. Revisiting the specifics, he said U.S. Biathlon provides its athletes $48,000 in direct athlete support, $35,000 in need-based assistance, and $30,000 in performance bonuses, and secures roughly $36,000 a year for its top competitors. Cross-country, by contrast, does not pay national-team skiers to compete on the World Cup; much of that burden falls to clubs and to community fundraising.
That gap is the source of the athletes’ most concrete fear. Jake Brown, who retired from biathlon this year and sits on the U.S. Biathlon board as an athlete representative, said the worry he hears most is that biathlon’s funding model quietly converts to the ski-team model once the sports combine. He is careful to add nuance. “There’s nothing guaranteed that U.S. Biathlon will continue funding World Cups either,” he said. “The funding has to be there.” Biathlon also draws money from the IBU for each athlete who starts a race, which makes subsidizing those starts partly self-financing, and the sport has leaned into keeping athletes in the pipeline rather than cutting them early. “We can’t afford to lose them,” Brown said.
The agreement attempts to lock that model in place, but only for a defined window. The current athlete support model “will continue through the 2030 Olympic quad,” it says, with “National Team, World Cup, IBU Cup, Youth, and Junior athlete support structures” remaining “in place unless changes are jointly approved by the Biathlon Sport Director and the U.S. Biathlon Board.” As with the incremental funding, the guarantee runs one cycle. What happens after 2030 is precisely what no document can promise, though, as Gierhart notes, biathlon cannot promise that to itself every year either.
No voice in this debate has lived that risk more directly than Justin Wadsworth, the former U.S. Olympian who now is U.S. Biathlon’s Head Physiology Coach (working with both the men’s and women’s national teams) and who spent years coaching in Canada, including a stretch as a high-performance director there. Wadsworth described watching Biathlon Canada’s funding collapse. “Over the last eight to ten years, we’ve seen organizations having funded the athletes for all camps, all trips, everything, to now athletes paying for training camps, paying for trips,” he said. “That’s basically what’s really pulled Biathlon Canada down. The athletes just can’t afford to go on trips or training camps.”
The damage, he said, was not only financial. “It really changes the dynamic with the team,” Wadsworth said. “As a coach and as an organization, it’s much harder when athletes are paying for everything.” His wife, Beckie Scott, the Olympic champion who now leads Nordiq Canada, made cutting athlete fees a priority for exactly that reason. Asked what U.S. Biathlon should guard most carefully, Wadsworth did not hesitate. “The number one is just, are the athletes going to continue to be getting funded when they’re absorbed with U.S. Ski and Snowboard.”
Brown framed the same anxiety in a different register, as a question of trust. “There is a strength in independence,” he said. “You have a trust that your leader, when they put their head on the pillow every night, is trying to figure out how to make biathlon better in the country, and not trying to figure out how to prioritize what sport within a larger organization.” That, more than any statute, is the emotional core of the opposition: the fear that biathlon becomes one line item among many, advocated for by executives whose attention is divided.
The community’s own working group named the same items. The high-performance group’s report listed what “must be protected”: the centralized national team model, athlete stipends and need-based aid, the pathway that recruits skiers into biathlon, the world-class ski-service program, the Montana State University sport-science partnership, and “athlete-centered decision making.” It also warned, in writing, of the risk that unites the skeptics and the supporters, that “differences in stipends, housing, and athlete funding philosophies will be inequities across sports,” and that “the reasoning behind this must be explained well, or there is high risk of tension between sports.”
The case for
Set the fears aside and the argument for the alliance is not hard to follow, and some of its most persuasive versions come from people with no stake in the outcome.
Wadsworth, who says he has “no real skin in the game” and is “just trying to coach right now,” makes the efficiency case from painful experience. A small governing body cannot carry the overhead a large one can. “An appeal, from an athlete and the organization needs to get a lawyer for that, a single appeal can cost 30 to $50,000,” he said, “and if that’s 5 percent of your budget, that’s a big hit.” Fold biathlon into a larger organization with in-house counsel, fundraising staff, a training center, and sport scientists, he said, and those costs largely vanish. “Those efficiencies are really the positive side.”
Goldschmidt’s version is about scale on the revenue side. U.S. Ski & Snowboard, she wrote to biathlon’s members, generated “more than 900 million social media impressions and 7 billion earned media impressions last season,” counts more than a million social followers, and has “more than doubled our commercial revenue over the last four years,” with “nearly 85 percent of that revenue going directly to athletics.” Biathlon, by her argument, brings a genuinely valuable and telegenic property, the IBU World Cup is among the most-watched winter sports in Europe, that a 35,000-follower organization cannot monetize on its own. “One plus one can equal a lot more than two,” she said, “most importantly for biathlon.”
Gierhart’s case is about the limits of the status quo. “We’ve been doing the same thing for 60 years,” he said. “We’re a small sport, we have limited resources. We’ve always had a thin bench. But the formula isn’t changing. And if we’re going to try to drive transformational change, we’ve got to look at some things a little differently.”
And there is the pipeline, the argument that biathlon and cross-country are natural partners that have been kept artificially apart. Today a club that wants to offer both sports contends with two governing bodies, two memberships, two coaching-education systems, two calendars. The sport-development working group’s central recommendation was to merge those tracks, shared coach education, coordinated regional calendars, laser biathlon introduced to youth skiers, so that, in Brown’s words, the “big potential benefit comes in the sport development space.” Wadsworth added the practical constraint that enthusiasm tends to skip past: it comes down to shooting ranges. “The number one thing for biathlon is you need a range, and so that’s probably a limiting factor,” he said. “If U.S. Ski and Snowboard decides they really want to focus on the development side, they’re going to have to build more biathlon ranges. If you build it, they’ll come.”
Campbell Wright (USA), Maxime Germain (USA), Margie Freed (USA), and Deedra Irwin (USA), (l-r) after the IBU World Cup Biathlon mixed relay in Otepaeae (EST). (Photo: Manzoni/NordicFocus)
The case against, in the community’s own words
The sharpest questions about the alliance do not come from the members trading accusations online. They come from the process U.S. Biathlon itself ran. The working groups produced plenty of enthusiasm for closer collaboration, and their reports document at length the benefits participants believed an alliance could unlock. But the same reports surfaced a recurring doubt.
Across all three groups, participants returned to a single question: if the goal is collaboration between biathlon and cross-country, why does it require a formal alliance? The consolidated report notes that “several participants observed that many of these initiatives could theoretically be pursued without a formal alliance.” The sport-development group put it more bluntly in its written takeaway: “Some expressed confident progress could be made without an alliance. It is not accountability that will move this from conversation to action. It is the passion of the people involved in both sports.” (U.S. Biathlon cautions on every page that the working-group notes were “generated during meetings in which judgment was not applied” and “do not represent the decisions or strategies” of the organization.)
The governance group’s “parking lot” of unresolved issues reads like a checklist of the skeptics’ concerns: “Ted Stevens Act compliance,” “an escape path if integration fails,” “what autonomy does Sport Committee have to direct USSS operations,” and whether a replacement is needed for the athletes’ advisory council “to preserve biathlete input.” The high-performance group flagged “budget flexibility,” asked “which proposed benefits truly require an alliance, and which can already be achieved through partnership,” and wondered whether biathlon could build its own dedicated fundraising vehicle, an equivalent of the National Nordic Foundation, without merging at all.
U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s answer to the “why not just collaborate” question is that informal collaboration has been tried, and has not delivered. The alliance-alignment document U.S. Biathlon distributed argues that, while the two organizations “have collaborated successfully for many years, this formal Alliance creates a level of commitment, coordination and accountability that cannot be achieved through informal collaboration alone.” Gierhart put it more sharply. He said he disagrees “wholeheartedly” with the notion that passion alone will carry the work forward. “You need accountability,” he said, describing what he sees as a fundamental difference within the community over how things actually get done. Goldschmidt made the same point about incentives: absent a formal structure, she said, no one at a big organization is measured on whether they helped a small one. “Why would I help another sport if that’s not how I’m measured?”
Then there is the matter of process and speed, which even supportive athletes acknowledge. Brown said the spring rollout caught the community off guard. “It kind of came out in the springtime. It was a little bit surprising, and it took us some time to understand why,” he said. “Most of the membership and the athlete body, we had some catching up to do.” The working groups were themselves a response to feedback that the process had moved too fast with too little consultation, and some members continue to argue that a binding vote should wait for the final agreement and its independent legal review, both of which, by U.S. Biathlon’s own account, come after Wednesday.
The exit, and what the fine print says
If there is a single provision that will decide how much reassurance skeptics take from this deal, it is the exit. Gierhart is adamant that it is a last resort, not a trap door.
He described a defined process. Goals and key performance indicators would be set at the outset, with an assessment after the first year and a comprehensive review at the end of the quad. “If we get to a point where there’s irreconcilable differences,” he said, “then there is an option to move towards a different operating structure, which could mean that U.S. Biathlon becomes an independent operating entity again. And that is a choice that can be made by either party. It doesn’t have to be mutually agreed upon.”
He was careful to say that does not mean either side can simply walk away on a whim. The written summary describes an interim assessment after the 2026-27 season and a comprehensive review after 2029-30, and says that “should significant challenges arise that materially impair the objectives of the alliance, the organizations will first implement a corrective action plan.” Only “if substantial concerns remain unresolved after those efforts” would “alternative organizational structures, including the return of U.S. Biathlon to an independently operated organization, be considered.” That, Gierhart said, matches what he meant: a process of measuring progress against shared goals, trying to fix what is not working, and only then, if the problems prove irreconcilable, allowing either party to end the alliance without the other’s consent.
“I don’t want it to sound in any way that in four years there’s an exit ramp that’s most likely going to happen,” he said. It is less an exit ramp, in his framing, than a runaway-truck ramp: an emergency measure, rarely used, that exists only for the case where nothing else has worked. The distinction that matters, he said, is that the eventual decision does not require both sides to agree. “It would probably be the board of directors of U.S. Biathlon that would say, we can’t resolve these differences and we want to make a change. Or Ski and Snowboard would say this is not working.”
Emil Bormetti (ITA); Coach Team USA, Bjorn Westervelt (USA), Vincent Bonacci (USA), Campbell Wright (NZL), Maxime Germain (USA), Vaclav Cervenka (USA), (l-r) summer training in Font-Romeu (FRA). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
What happens Wednesday
The board meets Wednesday at 4 p.m. Eastern. By Gierhart’s account, directors received an extensive board package over the preceding weekend, and the athlete representatives, who under USOPC rules make up a third of the board, have been closely engaged.
What the vote settles may be narrower than the noise around it suggests. If the board approves the foundational terms, the more detailed operating agreement, and its independent legal review, would follow, along with a further board vote to approve it. If the board balks, or postpones, the timeline slides. Either outcome will be read as a verdict on a process that many in the community found rushed and many others found overdue.
The stakes are real in both directions, which is why the debate has been so bitter. If biathlon stays independent, it does so facing a documented funding cut and the same structural constraints that have kept it small for six decades. If it joins, it trades a measure of autonomy for stability, resources, and a commercial platform it has never had, and it does so on the promise, guaranteed for four years and asserted in perpetuity, that the sport it has built will not be diminished inside a larger one.
The people on every side of this insist they want the same thing. “Whichever way the board decides,” Brown said, “I really want to be able to take our membership with us in whichever direction we go, and maintain good relationships with our full community. Because otherwise, we lose.”
On Wednesday afternoon, fifteen people will decide which way that goes.
FasterSkier will report the outcome of Wednesday’s vote. Reporting for this article included interviews with U.S. Ski & Snowboard president and CEO Sophie Goldschmidt, U.S. Biathlon president and CEO Jack Gierhart, U.S. Biathlon athlete representative Jake Brown, and U.S. Biathlon head physiology coach Justin Wadsworth, a written statement from the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, and a review of the alliance term sheet, the July 2026 community working-group reports, and correspondence from members opposed to the deal.
Because the details of this proposal are complex, quotations attributed to U.S. Ski & Snowboard and to U.S. Biathlon were provided to each organization in advance of publication so they could verify the accuracy of their own statements and clarify technical details. FasterSkier retained full editorial control over the content, framing, and conclusions of this article.
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At this moment, we don’t know what is down the road for USA Biathlon, but hopefully we will stay a community that supports the sport and the hard work of the athletes and coaches doing their best to perform at the highest level. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
For Ben Ogden, the strangest change since taking home two medals from Milano Cortina has not been that more people started recognizing him around Vermont.
He admits he is still adjusting to the newfound fame, but that part has mostly been fun. There have been school visits, community events and moments in Burlington restaurants when strangers stop by to say they watched him at the Olympics. After the winter Ogden had just put together, with two silver medals and a historic breakthrough for American men’s cross-country skiing, the attention made sense, even if it still felt a little surreal.
What was harder to make sense of was everything that came next, which has made the last few months a bit difficult to sum up neatly. While Ogden has spent the spring and early summer being celebrated for the best season of his career, he’s also been going through the first major injury setback of his life. One part of the experience has pulled him outward, back into the local Vermont ski community that helped shape him. The other has forced him inward, into the slower world of surgery, crutches, rehab exercises, and patience.
Ben Ogden posing for a photo with a few of his fans and the closest of friends of FasterSkier at the “Medals in the Mountains” community fundraiser held at Bromley Mountain Resort in Peru, Vermont, on April 12, 2026. (Photo: Jozefiak)
A New Kind of Attention
“It’s been different in some ways and similar in other ways,” Ogden said. “There are more people around Vermont who recognize me now, which is pretty crazy and fun. I’ve been invited to a lot of events, and gotten to go to a ton of schools, and just kind of been in the community a little bit more than normal.”
That part, he said, has been one of the real joys of the post-Olympic stretch. Ogden has always championed his identity as a product of the Vermont ski world, and the last few months have given him more chances to be present in it. Not just as a skier people watched on television, but as someone who could show up, talk to kids, say yes to local events and feel the reach of what happened in Italy.
“Outside of anything athletic related, it’s always a goal of mine to take my position and try to give back to the community as much as I can,” Ogden said. “There’s been a good amount of that, which has been great.”
In some ways, he said, life still feels mostly normal. It is still a Vermont summer. Burlington is still Burlington. Richmond is still close enough to feel like a small ski-world hub. But the medals have changed the way people interact with him, even in everyday places.
“It’s never tiring having people coming up to me and saying, ‘Oh, my son loves watching you,’ or, ‘We watched you this winter,’” Ogden said. “I love that, and it really makes me feel good. People are always, especially here in Vermont, just always so kind and thoughtful with their time and my time, so it’s never overwhelming.”
Still, there is a strange adjustment that comes with being recognized more often. Ogden laughed a little while describing it, not because it is a major burden, but because it is new enough to still catch him off guard. Sitting at a restaurant one time, he said two or three people came over to say they loved watching him race. Then he remembered, in a small way, that he is moving through the world a little differently now.
“You’re in the public eye a little bit more,” Ogden said. “I think you’re constantly reminded that people here in Vermont, especially, recognize me wherever I go. Again, I have no misgivings about it, but it’s hard to escape it a little bit.”
That visibility took on a more formal shape in May, when Ogden returned to UVM for commencement. He graduated from the school in 2022 with a mechanical engineering degree, and at first, he thought the university might just want him to be present or say a few words. Little did he know he would end up as the special guest speaker in front of nearly 3,700 graduates.
“I was like, ‘All right, yeah, sounds great,’” Ogden said. “And then it eventually got like, ‘Oh, you’re going to be the guest speaker,’ and I was like, ‘Whoa.’”
Ogden was characteristically candid with his explanation of how unfamiliar that setting felt. He was not answering questions in a mixed zone, talking through race tactics or explaining what it felt like to stand on an Olympic podium. He was sitting on a stage in front of graduates, faculty and families, waiting through the first part of the ceremony with his own speech still ahead of him.
“I haven’t really learned how to do public speaking properly,” Ogden laughed. “But it was really fun. The sense of relief was just staggering,” he said. “It felt so good. It felt like one of those moments where you feel like you can do anything after finishing something that scares you, and it’s just an immensely satisfying feeling. So it was fun, and I really appreciate UVM for reaching out and thinking of me and having me. That was a really fantastic honor.”
In his address, Ogden spoke about goals, but also about the people who make them possible. It was a fitting theme for an athlete whose Olympic winter was historic on paper, but communal in feeling. The medals were his, and in the team sprint, shared with Alaska’s Gus Schumacher, but Ogden has often framed the breakthrough as something larger than one person.
Ben Ogden getting some PT on his injured knee. (Photo: courtesy photo)
One Blow After Another
That same idea has followed him through the spring. The medals gave him a larger platform in the community, while the injury reminded him how much he still depends on one.
The knee injury happened on April 10, during what Ogden described as a typical day of spring training, until it wasn’t.
“It was a moment, but it wasn’t like I rode in the ambulance,” Ogden said. “At the time it didn’t really feel like anything bad. I was just spring skiing and doing a hockey stop, kind of, to slow down. I was going pretty fast on my cross-country skis, not denying that. But I just caught some slush and tweaked my knee.”
The first signs were not too alarming. Ogden knew he had tweaked something, but he stood up, tested it and finished skiing. The next morning, though, the knee was stiff enough that he eventually went in to have it checked out. According to the doctor, all the major ligaments were intact, and the hope was that the MRI would rule out a meniscus tear.
It did not.
“At first I was a little bit spooked, but I thought it was going to maybe be a week of slowing down or something,” Ogden said. “Then after I went to the guy, he was like, ‘Oh yeah, if it’s a meniscus tear, maybe it’ll be a month or two months.’ And then it ended up being a complete meniscus tear, so I had to have it repaired, which leveled up the situation even worse.”
Ogden had surgery at the end of April and spent six weeks fully non-weight-bearing on his left leg. When he spoke with FasterSkier in late June, he was about seven weeks removed from surgery and had started a weight-bearing progression, sometimes using one crutch and sometimes none. Even with that progress, it had been a hard adjustment.
“It was a little bit like I just got one blow after another for probably a week there,” Ogden said. “I was definitely pretty down, feeling pretty bummed, especially because it happened just doing something random. It so easily could have been avoided. But then again, stuff happens.”
He’d dealt with illness and little tweaks here and there before, as most endurance athletes do over the course of a career. But this was different. It was his first surgery and the first time he had to take a major step back from the sport because of an injury.
“On the mental side, it’s definitely hard,” Ogden said. “I think that an injury of this caliber would be hard for anybody mentally, just because being on crutches is incredibly frustrating, and it limits you so much. I won’t lie and say that wasn’t hard for me. Those weeks were brutal.”
The hardest part, Ogden said, was not just the crutches. It was the way the injury stripped away the pieces of daily life that usually make him feel like himself. He could still drive, because the injury was to his left knee, so he was not fully stuck in the house. He had physical therapy almost every day, a strong group of people around him, and enough structure to keep his days from feeling completely empty. But he could not move the way he wanted. He could not train the way he was used to training. He could not go outside with teammates and friends to just disappear into the rhythm of a long session.
“The two biggest things were just that I couldn’t really move, I couldn’t really do the things that I like to do, and I also couldn’t train,” Ogden said. “As a cross-country skier, or any type of athlete, really, not being able to do what you do, you quickly start to feel like you’re losing ground. That’s a really, really hard thing.”
It’s left him in a strange middle ground, where he has been through enough seasons, enough ups and downs, to understand that a few months do not define everything. But understanding that and feeling it every day are not the same thing.
“I feel like I’m at a point in my career where I’m better equipped to deal with that than I ever have been,” Ogden said. “But it’s still really hard to sit around.”
With the helpful coaching of friend, teammate and neighbor Julia Kern. Ogden took to the water to try to maintain fitness. (Photo: courtesy photo)
Finding a Way Through
One major comfort is that he has not had to figure it out all on his own. Ogden said the U.S. Ski Team’s medical system has been well prepared to handle a knee injury like his, in part because other disciplines under the U.S. Ski & Snowboard umbrella see them more often. Alpine skiing, in particular, has no shortage of knee injuries, and Ogden joked that compared to what some alpine athletes have endured, his injury is “junior varsity.”
That has not made the recovery easy by any means, but it has made the process clearer. From the start, he had a plan, a protocol and a timeline.
“I knew the timeline on day one,” Ogden said. “That sucked, because it was a major blow knowing how long I’d be out for, but now I’ve just sort of had to work with it.”
In some ways, he said, that has been easier than dealing with an illness, where there may be no clear date or progression. A meniscus repair brought bad news, but at least that bad news came with some kind of structure.
The training itself, for now, is limited and not always exciting, but Ogden has filled the space as best he can, with swimming, upper-body strength work and more time on the SkiErg than he would probably care to count.
“I’m able to fill my days with the training modes available to me,” Ogden said. “I still get frustrated. Sitting at the SkiErg, it’s great and it’s something to do, you get the heart rate up, it feels good, but it is just horrendously boring.”
That boredom has been one of the smaller but more persistent reminders of what he is missing. For Ogden, training has never just been about the work itself. It’s about being outside, sharing those hours with friends and teammates, and feeling connected to the sport in a way rehab cannot quite replace.
“So much of what motivates me as an athlete is being outside and enjoying training with friends and teammates and all that stuff,” Ogden said. “You kind of lose it all.”
Physical Therapy has a big part of Ogden’s life since his surgery. (Photo: courtesy photo)
The Next Step
Still, he has been able to see steady progression in his recovery. At the time of the interview, Ogden was starting to walk more normally again, though he said that process itself felt almost like something he had to relearn. His left leg had lost muscle and range of motion. Once walking felt solid, he expected to add more training options, including the spin bike, then outdoor biking, then eventually rollerskiing.
He hopes to be on snow at a normal time in November, though what “normal” means for racing fitness is still unclear. This season, he said, may become more of a “train into it” year. Rather than targeting early World Cup racing in November, he could end up building toward later points in the season, perhaps after the Tour de Ski and closer to the World Championships portion of the calendar.
“I’m still hopeful,” Ogden said. “It’s a blow for sure, and somewhere unlike any I’ve ever experienced, but I don’t necessarily think it has to be a complete loss. I think I’ll get through it.”
For now, he is trying not to get too far ahead of himself. The surgeon told him to view the recovery on something closer to a year-long scale, not because he cannot train for a year, but because returning fully to where he was in strength and aerobic fitness will take time. Ogden’s hope is to beat that timeline by a few months if possible and feel like himself again by late January, February or March. That would still leave room for something meaningful to come from the season.
“I’ve tried not to put a crazy amount of thought to it,” Ogden said. “I try to just focus on the present with this as much as I can. My goals are to do what I can, try to be patient, and try to feel like I get to that top race form, or something resembling it, at some point in the season.”
That might not sound like the goal of someone who just won two Olympic silver medals. But that is the reality of the spring Ogden has been given. The medals did not make him immune to bad luck. They did not make rehab move faster. They did not make the SkiErg more interesting.
They did, however, give him a new kind of perspective on what progress can look like.
Ogden said he always likes to come out of a season with something to be proud of, something that can carry energy into the next year. This time, that “something” might look different.
“I want to find that something this season,” Ogden said. “Whether or not that’s coming back from this injury a few months ahead of what the surgeon thought I could, or getting a top 10, getting a top 15, whatever, on the World Cup despite a major setback, that’s what I need to be reinvigorated for next year.”
In the meantime, the goals are much smaller. They are also more immediate, and maybe that is what makes them useful.
Rather than sit on the couch and think about missing a year of the thing he loves most, Ogden has tried to narrow his focus. First, he could think about walking again and getting away from the crutches. Then he could think about biking outside. To do that, he needs more range of motion in the knee, more quad strength and more consistency with the everyday work.
The scale has changed, but the mindset is familiar.
“There’s always the next thing,” Ogden said. “It’s the same in ski racing, honestly. It’s the same mindset that you have to take as an athlete. Obviously, I had to take 20 steps back, where instead of trying to get that podium or get that whatever, I’m just trying to get walking. But it’s the same thing, and you still feel good about it when you accomplish something.”
That may be the simplest way to understand Ogden’s first spring as an Olympic medalist. It has been a season of celebration, community and unexpected attention, but also one that has forced him to slow down, start over in small ways and rethink what progress looks like.
The medals are still there. So is the community that helped him reach them. And now, so is the work of getting back, one smaller goal at a time.
For Ogden, the next big thing does not need to be another Olympic podium just yet. For now, getting outside for a bike ride will do.
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This is a follow-up to my last article, Speed Creates the Load, Not Intensity. Before going further, it helps to define terms. Intensity is reflected in the heart rate response. Load is the physiological stress that drives adaptation. This piece takes a different angle, using high-intensity workouts and race heart rates to assess fitness and monitor for overtraining.
Over the last two decades, much of my coaching has involved working with athletes who are underperforming, overtrained, or struggling to regain fitness. When the data is available, one of the first things I examine is the relationship between training intensity and speed across the season. I am looking for improvements in efficiency, but I am also paying close attention to what happens during races and hard workouts.
Race data is almost always the most revealing.
I recently reviewed the training of a top domestic athlete whose sustainable race heart rate fell by roughly 10 to 15 beats per minute between November and March. Why? Given the time of year, that should immediately raise concerns. A substantial decline in sustainable race heart rate during the competitive season rarely points to improved fitness. More often, it is a warning sign that the athlete is carrying excessive fatigue, is no longer capable of producing the same muscular power, or has entered a state of overtraining.
An illustrative competitive season. Sustainable race heart rate slides 13 bpm from November to March. With no gain in speed to explain it, that slide reads as a fatigue signal, not a fitness one. (Chart: FasterSkier)
A reduced race heart rate means less cardiac output unless stroke volume increases enough to compensate. In well-trained athletes, that compensation is usually very small. The result is less oxygen delivered to the working muscles, reduced oxidative metabolism, slower lactate clearance, diminished phosphocreatine resynthesis between surges, and ultimately a reduced ability to sustain high race speeds. In simple terms, the athlete cannot create the same physiological demand because the muscles are no longer capable of producing the same amount of work.
When a Lower Race Heart Rate Reflects Improved Fitness
A declining race heart rate is often misunderstood. Some physiologists and coaches suggest it reflects improved cardiovascular function. That can be true, but only if performance has clearly improved.
The critical question is simple: is the athlete racing faster?
If an athlete is producing greater speed or power at a lower heart rate, several physiological adaptations have likely occurred:
Greater stroke volume. The heart pumps more blood with each beat, allowing similar cardiac output with fewer beats.
Improved movement economy. Better technique and neuromuscular coordination reduce the oxygen cost of movement.
Greater peripheral adaptations. Increased mitochondrial density, capillary density, and oxidative enzyme activity improve oxygen extraction and utilization.
If these adaptations have occurred to a meaningful degree, performance should improve. The athlete should be racing faster while holding a similar physiological level, not racing at a lower heart rate.
In my experience, I have never seen an athlete race at a substantially lower heart rate because they became fitter or more economical. The improvement almost always shows up as increased speed or power, not as a dramatically reduced race heart rate. If race performance is unchanged, or worse, declining, a lower heart rate is unlikely to be explained by improved fitness.
This distinction matters because many coaches correctly recognize that heart rate decreases at submaximal workloads as fitness improves. That is exactly what we expect during aerobic training. Racing is different. At maximal or near-maximal effort, the goal is to maximize performance, and that rarely shows up as a lower heart rate.
Is Stroke Volume Really the Explanation?
Stroke volume is frequently cited as the reason trained athletes can race with lower heart rates. While that explanation sounds plausible, it probably accounts for only a negligible part of what we observe during maximal competition.
In trained endurance athletes:
Stroke volume reaches near-maximal values at roughly 40 to 60 percent of VO2max.
Beyond that intensity, further increases in cardiac output come primarily from increases in heart rate.
Stroke volume changes relatively little in already well-trained athletes.
Stroke volume reaches near-maximal values at roughly 40 to 60 percent of VO2max. At race intensity, it has little room left to climb, so a falling race heart rate is unlikely to be explained by rising stroke volume. (Chart: FasterSkier)
So if an athlete’s sustainable race heart rate falls from 185 to 175, it is unlikely that stroke volume has increased enough to fully maintain cardiac output. The science does not support that explanation in most well-trained athletes. Something else is going on, and extended fatigue, maladaptive training, and long-term overload are the likely causes.
The Muscles Drive the Heart
One concept that is often overlooked in endurance physiology is that heart rate responds to muscular work. It does not create it. The muscles generate the metabolic demand and the cardiovascular system responds. If neuromuscular power production declines, metabolic demand falls. The heart no longer needs to pump as rapidly because the muscles are not asking for the same amount of oxygen. This aligns closely with a concept I first wrote about nearly twenty years ago and returned to in my previous article:
Speed creates the load, not intensity.
The muscles create the demand. The heart responds. When an athlete loses the ability to generate force, speed, and power, race heart rate falls as a consequence. The cardiovascular system may be functioning normally. It simply is not being driven to the same level because the neuromuscular system has become fatigued.
When a Lower Race Heart Rate Is a Warning Sign
A falling heart rate is one of the earliest objective signs that an athlete may be accumulating excessive fatigue. When athletes become excessively fatigued, they often lose the ability to recruit muscle fibers effectively and sustain race-specific power. Because muscular demand falls, heart rate falls with it.
Rather than interpreting the lower heart rate as improved efficiency, coaches should ask whether the athlete is still capable of producing the same speed or power.
Warning signs include:
Sustainable race heart rate declines progressively over a few weeks to months. Monitoring heart rate helps catch this early, so training can be adjusted before it becomes a bigger problem.
Race performance stagnates or deteriorates despite similar perceived effort.
Legs feel flat and heavy, as if they never really warm up.
The athlete cannot respond to the demands of uphills or changes in pace.
Heart rate remains well below normal race values even during maximal effort.
Recovery between hard sessions becomes progressively slower.
Easy training may still feel normal while racing and high-intensity training become increasingly difficult.
This pattern is often described as parasympathetic overreaching, although terminology varies. Regardless of the label, suppression of maximal or sustainable race heart rate by 5 to 15 beats per minute over weeks should never be ignored. It frequently reflects excessive cumulative training load, inadequate recovery, or overtraining. Waiting until performance completely collapses is waiting too long. In many athletes, a declining race heart rate is one of the first objective indicators that recovery and adaptation to previous training were insufficient.
Coaches sometimes celebrate lower lactate values as improved aerobic fitness. During excessive fatigue, however, reduced lactate production often reflects reduced muscle recruitment rather than improved metabolic efficiency. The athlete cannot produce enough power to generate high lactate concentrations.
Chronically low glycogen availability, whether from excessive training or inadequate carbohydrate intake, can also suppress race heart rate and lactate. The athlete cannot generate the metabolic demand required to reach previous racing intensities.
The heart is reactive, not proactive. It responds to the metabolic demand created by the working muscles. When the muscles cannot produce force because of fatigue, the cardiovascular system has less work to do. A lower heart rate is therefore often the consequence of reduced performance, not the cause.
Why Elite Athletes Rarely Race at Maximal Heart Rate
Elite endurance athletes rarely spend an entire race at maximal heart rate. As performance improves, limitations increasingly shift away from the cardiovascular system and toward the muscles’ ability to generate force repeatedly while resisting fatigue.
Improvements in neuromuscular power, economy, and fatigue resistance allow athletes to sustain higher speeds without requiring proportionally higher heart rates.
As athletes become capable of producing greater speed and power, they generate a larger physiological stimulus. The cardiovascular system responds to that demand, but it is the neuromuscular system that ultimately determines how much work can be produced.
Practical Coaching Implications
Heart rate should never be interpreted in isolation. Always evaluate it alongside speed, power, performance, and perceived effort.
Reading race heart rate against performance. Green is adaptation, amber is a flag to investigate, red is accumulated fatigue until proven otherwise. (Chart: FasterSkier)
Similar heart rate plus faster performance equals positive adaptation, improved economy, and greater efficiency.
Lower heart rate plus unchanged performance equals the early stage of maladaptation to training loads.
Lower heart rate plus slower performance equals a clear indication of accumulated fatigue, inadequate recovery, illness, low energy availability, or excessive training load.
Normal heart rate plus declining performance equals a reason to consider environmental conditions, glycogen availability, illness, altitude, or reduced movement economy.
Over the course of a successful season, athletes should become capable of producing greater speed and power while maintaining similar race heart rates. When race heart rate falls substantially without a corresponding improvement in performance, assume fatigue before assuming fitness. That mindset will keep many coaches from overlooking one of the earliest objective signs of excessive training stress.
A lower heart rate should never be viewed as evidence of improved fitness on its own. If an athlete is racing faster, producing more power, and performing better, a modest reduction in heart rate may simply reflect positive adaptation. But when race heart rate falls while performance stagnates or declines, resist the temptation to credit what may actually be the earliest objective sign of excessive fatigue. The goal is to catch a falling heart rate during hard efforts early and adjust training as soon as possible. Weeks or months of inaction will greatly increase recovery time and cost additional effective training time.
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A parent once cornered Adam St. Pierre to complain that he was letting the kids play games. St. Pierre had ten-year-olds on skis running sharks and minnows, shrieking and chasing each other across the snow, and the parent was not paying club dues for that. “I want coaching and training,” the parent told him. “This is…” and you can fill in the disappointment.
St. Pierre thinks sharks and minnows on skis is one of the most effective training tools there is. He was lucky, he says, to have a parent board that backed him up in those rare confrontations, because he had no intention of stopping. Kids who are laughing are kids who come back, and kids who come back are the only kids who ever get good.
That belief sits at the center of a coach who, on paper, should be the last person preaching simplicity. St. Pierre has a master’s in exercise science, a background running lactate and VO2 tests on athletes, and a relationship with a Montana State physiology lab that has done extensive work with U.S. Biathlon on both the metabolic and biomechanical sides. He reads the research. He can talk ratios and thresholds for as long as you’ll let him. And his most strongly held convictions keep coming out disarmingly plain. Go easy most of the time. Be consistent. Make it fun enough that people stick around. The science, in his hands, mostly ends up confirming things your grandmother could have told you.
Consistency over the big block
Start with periodization, the idea that a training year should be built in escalating blocks toward a peak. St. Pierre is skeptical of the old-school version of it, and his reasons are specific. A lot of that model, he points out, traces back to weightlifting research, some of it from an era when the subjects were quietly using anabolic steroids, which is not a foundation you want under your training plan. The rest tends to come from single-event sports. “In the marathon world or the Ironman world, you’ve got one event,” he said. “You just need to be good for that one event, like on August 2nd or whatever.” Skiing is not that. A ski racer has to be good across a whole season, weekend after weekend, from November into March.
He points to a meta-analysis, published fairly recently, that looked at the day-to-day training of today’s top Norwegians. The finding was not a secret block of magic. “It really is consistency,” he said. “They’re not doing a big August and a big October. They do big weeks and recovery, and it’s just a very consistent progression.”
The metaphor he keeps coming back to is one he borrows from Marius Bakken, the former Norwegian runner he half-jokingly calls a father of the Norwegian method. Intensity, in this telling, is not the meal. It is the seasoning. “The base of the soup is your endurance training,” St. Pierre said, “and then you add in a little bit of zip here and there. But if you put in too much zip, the soup is not going to be very good.” Roughly 90 percent of the work, whether on foot, on roller skis, on snow, or on a bike, is easy volume. The intensity is the spice, and Americans, he thinks, are forever dumping in too much.
Only what’s livable
There is also a question underneath all of this that the textbooks tend to skip, which is whether any of it is actually livable. St. Pierre still remembers sitting in a USA Triathlon coaching course, listening to a periodization lecture, and asking what he thought was the obvious question. What about a working person who cannot train 24 hours a week but could manage 16? What do you do with them? The answer from the front of the room was that they should take a vacation day and get the training in. “That’s not it,” he said. “That doesn’t work.” His approach is the reverse. Figure out what someone can actually do, how many hours are genuinely available, and then fill those hours with the best workouts possible.
At MSU that math is dictated by a school calendar, and he has stopped fighting it. His athletes train before 10 a.m. so they can make a 10 o’clock class, and again in the afternoon, with nothing scheduled after 4 or 4:30. That produces a seven-day rhythm rather than the ten-day cycles some coaches prefer. Tuesday is intensity, usually threshold or VO2 work. Wednesday is a double of easy distance, with a few technique drills thrown in at the start to get the neurons firing before the athletes head out. Thursday morning is pure speed. Saturday brings intensity again, often paired with the long distance day. You cannot send skiers out for a two-hour roller ski on a Wednesday morning if they have class at ten, so you don’t. “There’s lots of ways to make a great soup,” he said, and it is not worth inducing a pile of needless stress to chase a perfect one.
Two tests without a lab
For readers without a lab down the hall, two of St. Pierre’s tools travel well. The first he calls a VT1 run, VT1 being the top of the easy zone, the hardest you can go while staying genuinely aerobic. Once a week, on flat ground, his athletes run 20 to 30 minutes at that effort and note the relationship between pace and heart rate. Flat terrain because it is the most reproducible. The point is twofold. It tracks fitness: if you run nine-minute miles at 150 beats in early summer and eight-minute miles at 150 by August, you have improved. And it works as an early-warning system. “One of the first signs of overreaching is a change in that heart rate to workload ratio,” he said. If the pace slows at the same heart rate, and it is not 105 degrees out and you are not dehydrated, it is probably time to rest. The signal can run the other way too. An athlete who normally sees 180 during intervals but suddenly cannot push the heart rate above 160 is, in his words, showing a pretty golden sign. Take some rest.
The second tool he lifted from cycling: a five-minute maximal effort, a long recovery of maybe half an hour with some refueling, then a 20-minute maximal effort. The ratio between the two tells you whether an athlete leans anaerobic and sprint-oriented or aerobic and distance-oriented, no lab required. He built a version of it into his athletes’ training plans. He is quick to add the caveat that governs all of this, in the field or in the lab. Heat, dehydration, and altitude bend every number, and even a lab lactate value shifts with hydration. “No one metric is the god metric,” he said. “You’ve always got to have that context.”
Montana State students conduct physiologic and biomechanical assessments for U.S. Biathlon. (Photo: Montana State University)
Building complete skiers
The individualization matters more now because the college game is about to change. Sprinting is coming to the NCAA Championships, a change St. Pierre cares about personally, because he wrote the proposal years ago and watched it slowly work its way toward reality. In anticipation, he is nudging the team’s intensity mix, keeping most of the hard work at threshold but adding more VO2 and anaerobic speed than a pure distance program would. One test the MSU lab ran compares an athlete’s VO2 at threshold to their VO2 max. A skier sitting well above the roughly 90 percent that is typical probably skews distance and might gain from more VO2 work to lift the ceiling. A skier down in the low numbers might benefit from more threshold. Even so, his priority is all-around development. The sprinters still do threshold. The distance skiers still do speed. He wants complete skiers, partly because a race does not always let an athlete choose its terms. If a distance race comes down to a mass sprint, a distance skier who cannot find another gear finishes 20th.
The place where St. Pierre thinks American skiing has a real and underrated advantage is strength. He knows the reputation, that Norwegians do not lift, and allows it may be true of many of them. He also knows that the Norwegians who have come through his own program found the strength work novel. As part of a university, MSU has a strength coach, Benito, a former mountain bike racer at UVM and one of the rare ones who understands endurance sport, and the two of them build a program meant to complement the skiing rather than pull against it. St. Pierre credits it for keeping his team generally healthy, and he pushes back on the notion that skiers only need core and pull-ups. “If you can produce power with your legs,” he said, “that’s necessary.”
He connects strength to a broader idea about movement economy, and here he reaches, carefully, for the Nike Oregon Project. Setting aside the doping and the scandal that eventually swallowed that program, he finds one lesson from it genuinely useful. Its coach had noticed American distance runners getting outkicked, so the group attacked the last 400 meters with sprint work, max strength, and plyometrics. The athletes did improve their finishing kick. They also got faster over the first 9,600 meters of a 10k. Better economy, it turned out, does not just help you sprint. It lets you hold a faster pace all day.
Montana State biomechanics students provide testing for para Nordic athletes. (Photo: Montana State University)
The long game
If that all sounds relentlessly optimized, it is worth returning to the sharks and minnows, because the fun is not a break from the method. It is the method. His college team plays ultimate on skis, using a ball instead of a frisbee to remove the throwing barrier, usually after a track workout, and they lobby to play more. For the youngest kids, he has long argued that the travel race is not really about the race. A ten-year-old drives across the state to ski a 1k, and the actual point is the hotel pool, the snowbanks, the hide-and-seek, the exhaustion on day two that horrifies the parents. “This is why kids get into ski racing,” he said. “It’s not the ski race. It’s hanging out with your friends in the hotel room.” Those bonds are what turn a ten-year-old into a fifteen-year-old who wants to go do a long mountain run with the same crew, and a fifteen-year-old who stays in the sport into an adult who never leaves it.
Which is finally how St. Pierre defines success, and it is not a medal count. He worries a little about the sport’s fixation on the Nations Cup, because doing well in it requires a lot of athletes racing a full season well, and he is not sure the American pipeline has that base yet. He points to Jessie Diggins as the rare skier who reached the level where she could show up week in and week out and land in the top five every time. Whether that season-long consistency cost her an Olympic medal or two is, he admits, a whole separate and unanswerable question. Finding metrics for development beyond international results is genuinely hard, which is part of why he has soft-started a PhD. The idea is to pull two decades of national points lists and track individual athletes year over year. Are American skiers actually getting better as they age, or do they wash out? The kid who was brilliant at 18 and gone by 22 is memorable, he notes, but memorable is not the same as typical. “Is that the rule or the exception? I think that’s the exception,” he said. “I’d like to have some data to back up my opinion.” The numbers are public. He just needs the time.
His personal definition is quieter. He wants his athletes to develop far enough that the door to international racing is open if they want to walk through it, and he wants the ones who don’t to keep loving skiing anyway, as coaches, as parents raising their own little skiers, or simply as people who stay active and outdoors for the rest of their lives. He tries to live it as a father, chasing his own two kids up mountains in the summer and out onto snow in the winter. “There’s so much outside of skiing,” he said, “that makes skiing great.”
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I originally wrote the following article in 2004. Twenty-two years later, I believe it remains just as relevant. To me it illustrates that while we tend to assume training has changed a great deal, in many ways it has stayed much the same. I have rewritten it here to improve clarity without changing the content.
UVM’s Fin Bailey drives up a climb on the Craftsbury Outdoor Center track last fall, generating speed through clean extension rather than grinding against the grade. (Photo: Phillip Belena)
The development of basic speed, neuromuscular power, and speed endurance is critical for high-level cross-country skiing performance. I would also argue that, once an athlete reaches a certain level of aerobic development, future improvements in aerobic capacity may become limited if the athlete cannot produce enough power to generate a sufficient training stimulus.
This article presents a concept that has influenced my coaching for many years: before continually increasing the external loads, volume, and intensity of training, athletes must first develop the ability to produce greater speed and power.
Training loads can be increased in two ways. The first is externally, by making the terrain more difficult or increasing resistance. The second is internally, by improving neuromuscular function so the athlete is capable of producing more power and therefore greater speed.
My experience has been that increasing external loads without first improving power production often yields little improvement in performance and, in some cases, little measurable gain in aerobic development. Athletes simply work harder while producing little additional external work.
We have all seen unfit or less-developed athletes walk up a steep hill while reaching near maximal heart rates. We have observed this repeatedly in junior skiers. Simply walking, skiing, or running uphill slowly can produce extremely high heart rates. Does this indicate inadequate aerobic capacity or inadequate power production? The answer is usually a combination of both.
However, in athletes whose performances have plateaued despite years of increasing training volume and intensity, this question deserves closer examination. Many continue to produce high heart rates while moving slowly. In these athletes, the limiting factor may not be the cardiovascular system itself, but rather an inability to produce enough power to create a greater demand on the aerobic capacity.
For this reason, I believe that early in an athlete’s development, and often early in each training year, speed, movement quality, efficiency, and neuromuscular power should receive significant emphasis. These qualities should not replace aerobic training, but they should develop alongside it. Improving an athlete’s ability to produce power increases the speed at which aerobic training can be performed and therefore increases the potential aerobic training stimulus.
Our observations over many years have consistently shown that athletes lacking sufficient power gradually slow during uphill skiing, running, or bounding intervals while heart rate continues to rise. The internal effort increases even as external work declines.
We have also observed athletes become overtrained despite carefully planned training programs. In many cases the common factors were excessive metabolic cost of endurance training, elevated lactate concentrations at relatively modest speeds, deteriorating movement quality, and inefficient power production.
Again, I believe the underlying issue is often inadequate neuromuscular function.
When athletes cannot produce power efficiently, every uphill carries a large metabolic cost. Heart rate and blood lactate increase rapidly even though speed remains relatively low. The athlete experiences considerable physiological stress without generating the external workload necessary to increase adaptation.
For one summer training period we emphasized extensive speed and neuromuscular training. Several athletes improved their maximal treadmill workload by as much as seven percent during a graded treadmill protocol. At the same time, blood lactate concentrations were lower at each workload stage.
Zak Ketterson doing work on the rollerski treadmill. (photo: courtesy Team Birkie)
These findings do not prove that VO2max increased. However, they strongly suggest improvements in movement economy, neuromuscular power, and the athlete’s ability to express aerobic capacity. The athletes could sustain greater workloads at the same relative physiological cost.
Although the sample size was too small to draw firm scientific conclusions, the observations were both encouraging and consistent with our coaching experience.
One useful coaching tool has been estimating the oxygen demand of uphill terrain using the Balke or ACSM treadmill equations. While these equations were developed for walking and running, not roller skiing or ski-specific movements, they provide a reasonable estimate of the external workload required to climb terrain of a given grade and speed.
Using these estimates, I evaluated athletes on both a maximal 500-meter uphill test and a 3,000-meter uphill test conducted on the same hill. Our top male skiers consistently sustained estimated oxygen demands of approximately 70 to 72 ml·kg⁻¹·min⁻¹ during the 3,000-meter effort. During the 500-meter test, estimated oxygen demands ranged from approximately 83 to over 90 ml·kg⁻¹·min⁻¹. These values represent estimated metabolic demand rather than directly measured oxygen consumption.
The athletes who consistently produced the highest estimated workload during the 500-meter test were also our best performers. The shorter test reflected the athlete’s ability to produce high neuromuscular power. The longer test reflected how much of that capacity could be sustained aerobically.
During summer testing, the best athletes generally sustained only about 80 to 85 percent of their maximal estimated workload during the longer effort, leaving room for further improvement as fitness and skiing specificity increased during the competitive season.
Several practical conclusions emerged from these observations.
Ian Torchia, far right, leads bounding intervals up Stratton Mountain in summer 2021. Ski bounding remains one of the most direct ways to build the neuromuscular power Galanes describes, with the athlete loading and driving off each step. (photo: courtesy SMS)
Maximal power production establishes the athlete’s aerobic potential.
The estimated workload achieved during the 500-meter test reflects the athlete’s ability to produce power. If this value is too low, it becomes increasingly difficult to create a training stimulus large enough to maximize aerobic development, because the athlete cannot sustain sufficient speed.
Small differences between maximal and sustainable power may indicate a different limitation.
If the athlete’s maximal 500-meter workload is only slightly greater than the workload sustained over longer efforts, further improvements in aerobic capacity may be limited until maximal power production improves.
Lower-level athletes often need speed before more intensity or volume.
Many developing athletes have maximal power values only five to ten percent higher than their longer uphill performances. These athletes often benefit more from improving neuromuscular function, movement quality, and speed than from simply adding more difficult interval training.
Hard uphill intervals are not always the answer.
If athletes lack sufficient power to increase speed, making the terrain steeper or simply asking them to work harder often produces more fatigue than adaptation. Increasing the load without increasing movement quality seldom solves the underlying problem.
Sustainable aerobic power is not enough.
Athletes capable of sustaining a very high percentage of their aerobic capacity but possessing relatively low maximal power often plateau. They may already be performing close to their physiological ceiling and will likely require improvements in neuromuscular power before further performance gains occur.
Youth skiers during a Skinouk Roller Ski Race. Galanes argues these athletes often gain more from speed and movement quality than from steeper terrain or harder intervals.
Speed should create the load.
Uphill training remains essential in cross-country skiing. However, I believe the primary driver of training should be generated through efficient movement rather than terrain alone.
Whether athletes are performing distance training or intervals, movement should remain clean, crisp, coordinated, and quick. If technique deteriorates and speed slows simply because the terrain is harder, the athlete is no longer training optimal movement. They are merely increasing physiological stress.
Ultimately, endurance performance depends upon the interaction between physiology and movement. The aerobic system can only respond to the workload the neuromuscular system is capable of producing.
For that reason, coaches should devote as much attention to developing speed, power, and movement quality as they do to increasing training volume and intensity. In the long term, improving an athlete’s ability to generate external workload may be one of the most effective ways to unlock further aerobic development and higher performance.
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UVM’s Benon Brattebo rollerskiing on the Craftsbury Outdoor Center track last fall. Galanes argues that speed and neuromuscular power, not just harder terrain, should create the training load. (Photo: Phillip Belena)
Adam Coaching at US Nationals in Alaska. (Photo: Tobias Albrigtsen)
Adam St. Pierre finished second to last in the first cross-country ski race of his life. The one skier he beat had crashed into a tree.
He was a sophomore at Fall Mountain Regional High School, a rural school in Charlestown, New Hampshire, and he tells the story with the flat delivery of a man who has told it before and enjoys it every time. “Charlestown doesn’t really have a claim to fame,” he said. Forty-five minutes due south of Hanover, close enough to know Dartmouth was up the road, far enough that the world of club skiing might as well have been on another continent. He had never heard of it. What he knew was soccer, basketball, and track, in roughly that order, and he had no intention of adding a fourth sport that involved falling down in the cold.
Then his freshman year fell apart. He hurt his knee playing soccer. He slogged through a basketball season he had come to hate. And in the spring, his track coach, who happened to also coach the ski team, made him an offer that sounded reasonable at the time. Come out for skiing next winter, the coach said. It will get you in better shape for soccer and track.
So he showed up. That first race was a classic race, and he had only ever skated. He survived it, barely, ahead of the kid who met the tree, and somewhere in the weeks after, the thing that has kept a lot of people in this sport quietly got its hooks into him.
Fall Mountain was not a fancy place, and that turns out to be central to the story. It was a working rural school with a barn, animal husbandry classes, agricultural mechanics, a metal shop, and forestry classes that maintained the trails and tapped the maple trees where the team ran and skied. The ski coach was the metal shop teacher. When the program needed grooming, the metal shop and ag-mechanics kids bought an old PistonBully and kept it running themselves. St. Pierre came up through a program held together by shop-class ingenuity and a snowbank at the edge of the football field, and he has never once been snobbish about it.
“I have a high respect for high school skiing, because it is an entry point,” he said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have found the sport.”
A team that needed a fifth man
He nearly didn’t find the next part either. Right before he graduated, his coach, Larry Sayers, told him that Colby College’s ski team wasn’t very good and that St. Pierre could probably walk on. He filed it away and didn’t think much of it. He had his sights on soccer and track. But once he got to Colby and started running into the skiers at various events around campus, something clicked, and it had nothing to do with the skiing.
“These are the kind of people I like,” he remembered thinking.
The timing was almost comically good. The coach, then Tracey Theyerl, now Tracey Cote, was 29 and in her second year running the team. She had just cut most of the upperclassmen, which left her with four men and an opening. St. Pierre walked on as the fifth. His introduction to roller skiing came shortly after, when Cote put him on a pair of classic roller skis and sent him out for a time trial. “I survived,” he said. From that point on, he was in, and again, the pull was the people as much as the training.
Adam St. Pierre (left) and former Bowdoin skier and BNJRT coach Sam Shaheen at the start of the 2019 American Birke. (Photo: courtesy Adam St. Pierre)
From the lab to the wax room
He majored in physics at Colby and minored in biochemistry, and when he graduated, he had no clear idea what came next. He looked at teaching jobs. Nothing landed. Then a skier friend from high school told him about a graduate program at the University of New Hampshire where, as St. Pierre understood it, they paid you to study exercise. That sounded like a good deal. He enrolled in a master’s program in kinesiology and exercise science, working under a UNH physiologist whose research centered on hydration and thirst. His thesis was, in his words, pretty brutal to run: sensations of thirst in dehydrated subjects in cold versus ambient environments. “A little bit of everything when it comes to making people uncomfortable,” he said.
It was during those UNH years that the sport handed him his first coaching job, and it did so in the roundabout, relational way that his whole career seems to follow. He had started dating a Bowdoin College skier while he was at Colby. She was a year behind him, still racing, and he was driving up to Brunswick most weekends to see her. Her coach was Marty Hall.
Anyone who knows North American skiing knows the name, yet St. Pierre’s version of a Marty Hall story is smaller and more human, and it starts with the legend sizing up the kid who kept turning up in his wax room.
“I need an assistant coach,” St. Pierre remembers Hall telling him, and he does a passable Marty voice when he gets there. “And you’re up here every weekend anyway. You want the job?”
He took it. He thinks he was paid around 1,500 dollars total, which covered the gas. He coached under Hall for two years, and it confirmed something he had already begun to suspect: he wanted to spend his life doing this.
Adam and his family out for a ski.
Building from the bottom in Boulder
When his wife got into law school at the University of Colorado, the two of them moved to Boulder, and St. Pierre walked into the next accident of his career. He had been hired to be the head coach of the Boulder Nordic Junior Racing Team, replacing Eric Pepper. Then Pepper decided to stay. Rather than lose St. Pierre, the club invented a role for him and made him its first development coach, responsible for the youngest kids, the u14s and u12s, or as they were then called, the j3s and j4s. Many of them were the little siblings of the older racers. His whole job was to grow the program from the bottom.
Boulder Nordic Junior Racing Team athletes prepare for the start of a 3,000 kilometer running time trial on the track in 2013. (Photo: Adam St. Pierre)
He did. When Pepper eventually moved on and St. Pierre took over as head coach and program director, he watched the club climb from 15 or 20 kids to nearly 70 at its peak, in a place he is quick to say is a genuinely hard town to be a skier. There is no snow in Boulder itself. You drive for it, and it is expensive, and the parents who commit anyway earn their real respect.
One of those little kids was Lauren Jortberg. St. Pierre started working with her when she was six or seven, and he coached her through high school. She was, by his telling, agonizingly consistent at exactly the wrong number: four straight Junior National Championships and 11th place in what felt like every race. “All she wanted was that top 10,” he said. She had setbacks. She stuck it out.
Years earlier, in his first season of coaching in Boulder, St. Pierre had said out loud that one of his goals was to someday coach a kid who would reach the Olympics. This past February, Jortberg made the U.S. team for the Milano-Cortina Games and qualified for the quarterfinals of the Olympic sprint, the culmination of a long and interrupted road that ran through back surgery, ankle surgery, and a lost senior season at Dartmouth. St. Pierre is careful not to claim more than his share.
“I can’t take responsibility for much,” he said, and then, a beat later, “Goosebumps. Proud of her.”
Boulder was where the rest of his professional life took shape, too. He worked at the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine as a clinical physiologist, running lactate thresholds and VO2 max tests and metabolic evaluations, and working alongside physical therapists on running biomechanics, teaching and reteaching people how to run without breaking. He got into ultrarunning and knocked off a number of 100-mile races, mostly for the pleasure of being out in the mountains all day. Around 2016 or 2017, he left the Boulder Nordic team and hung out his own shingle as an online coach. The flexibility made sense with two young kids and a wife commuting to Denver. But he missed the in-person part, the standing-in-the-snow part, more than he expected to.
Adam repping the MSU team flag in Houghton, Michigan. (Photo: Tobias Albrigtsen)
The job he had been aiming at
He had known for a long time where he wanted to end up. College coaching had been the goal since around 2009. The appeal was simple: at the junior level, a coach spends a lot of energy convincing kids they might want to be ski racers, keeping every other door open in case they choose running or mountain biking instead. At the college level, the athletes have already decided. “They’ve decided they are cross-country ski racers,” he said. “I wanted to coach ski racers.”
The Montana State job had come open once before, in 2015, and he had applied and been the runner-up. When it opened again during the strange fall of 2020, he jumped. He was hired that November and moved to Bozeman alone that winter while his wife and kids finished out the year in Boulder, riding out the online-school chaos he credits her with surviving. The family joined him the following June. Bozeman had been near the top of the short list of places they wanted to live anyway, a real ski town with snow in town, Crosscut 20 minutes up the road, and Bridger Bowl close enough to grab powder runs before cross-country skiing in the afternoon.
Which is to say, the kid who finished second to last, who backed into the sport to get in shape for soccer, who took a coaching job largely because he was already driving to Brunswick every weekend, ended up exactly where he had been quietly aiming for a decade. The path was accidental in its particulars and not accidental at all in its direction. He kept following the people, and the people kept turning out to be skiers.
What he does with those skiers once he has them, and why he thinks so much of American training gets the easy days wrong, is its own story. That is part two.
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Rosie Brennan (USA) celebrates in Ruka (FIN) in 2023 after finishing 2nd in Saturday’s 10 k classic race. The result was Brennan’s first classic World Cup podium of her career. (Photo: Nordic Focus)
Rosie Brennan has stepped away from the World Cup, though she’s still figuring out exactly how to define the next chapter in her life.
Retirement is the easy word, and in some ways, the accurate one. She is done with the World Cup. She is done with the version of cross-country skiing that demands five months in Europe, constant travel, start lists, team schedules, narrow margins and the unrelenting pressure of measuring a career in seconds.
After more than a decade with the U.S. Ski Team, three Olympic appearances, hundreds of World Cup starts, two World Cup wins and a place among the best all-around skiers the United States has produced, Brennan has stepped away from the highest level of the sport.
But if retirement is supposed to mean the end of something, Brennan is not quite sure the word fits.
“Retirement has been a tough word for me,” Brennan said. “It feels very black and white.”
“One of my friends and older teammates called it rewiring.”
To Brennan, that seems closer. She’s not walking away from skiing so much as trying to build a new relationship with it. The shape of her days may change, and her focus will no longer be “110 percent” on racing, but skiing itself remains too central, too familiar and too joyful to simply leave behind.
“I love skiing and ski racing,” Brennan said. “I want to continue to be able to use my body in ways that challenge and push me in the world of skiing and competition again at some point, maybe sooner than later.”
“Skiing is just not that for me,” Brennan said of the idea of retiring and never doing the thing again. “It’s something that I hope to do till the day I die, honestly.”
The first uploaded image of Rosie Brennan in the FasterSkier archives after she won both EISA women’s races in Feb. 2009 (Photo: Ruff Patterson)
A Career Built on Perseverance
When Brennan looks back now, the first thing she points to is not a specific race, podium or result sheet, but rather the belief in herself that made all of those things possible.
“I’m really proud of, I guess, the perseverance of my career,” Brennan said. “It takes perseverance to have longevity in a career, to weather the inevitable obstacles that appear throughout a long career, and to find belief when things aren’t going your way.”
That perseverance became the throughline of a career that took time to reveal itself. Brennan was not a teenage prodigy who moved smoothly from junior success to World Cup podiums. She came to skiing later than many of her peers, waited longer for the biggest results and had to weather the doubts that creep in when progress slows, injuries interrupt momentum and other paths begin to look more practical. Then when the results did arrive, those earlier years felt even more meaningful.
In a career defined by patience and progress, one of the things Brennan says she is most proud of is not just that she reached the top level, but that she continued to expand what she could do once she got there. She never settled into one lane as only a distance skier or only a classic specialist. Instead, she kept working to become more complete, finding reward in the challenge of improving across formats, distances and techniques.
“I’m also proud of the range that I maintained throughout my career,” Brennan said. “Continuing to be an all-arounder throughout my career and finding some success in all the disciplines and both techniques throughout — that was something that was just, I don’t know, I guess a personal challenge that I found a lot of reward in.”
That sense of progress extended beyond Brennan’s own results. Her career also unfolded during the strongest era in the history of American women’s cross-country skiing, and as the U.S. team continued to raise its standard internationally, Brennan came to see herself as part of something larger than her own race days.
“I’m proud to have been part of a really amazing wave of American women skiing,” Brennan said, “and to have done my best to carry that wave forward and to help push things forward and pass things on to future generations as well.”
APU’s Rosie Brennan (r) embraces close friend and APU teammate, Becca Rorabaugh (l), after they finish first and second, respectively, in the Women’s 1.5 k Classic Sprint at the 2015 U.S. Cross Country Championships in Houghton, Mich.
Starting Late, Staying Long Enough
Brennan started skiing at 14, late by the standards of an international sport where many athletes first step onto a set of fish scales as young children. But she never saw her development as a simple matter of being behind.
“I was older when I kind of found top-level success in podiums on the World Cup,” Brennan said. “But because I started skiing so late, I guess I never really saw it that way.”
In her mind, the clock did not start with age, but when she first found herself on a pair of skis.
“If you look at when I started at 14 to when I had success, those accumulated hours of skiing and training are probably actually fairly equivalent to somebody who started at eight,” Brennan said. “So I always just chose to look at it that way, as if it was just going to take time to learn those skills, and it was fine that I started late.”
“I’m not good at being patient,” Brennan said.
But skiing gave her little choice. It took time to develop the specific strengths required of the sport, to learn how to race and to absorb the small skills that many skiers pick up almost without realizing it when they start young. Brennan had to build the engine and the instincts at the same time.
There were moments when she wondered whether it was worth it. In college, after injuries and difficult stretches, she decided she was done with skiing when she graduated. She looked toward other paths. At times, she quit, or at least tried to. But the sport kept pulling her back.
“I think what I enjoyed the most that made me keep coming back was just the challenge of it,” Brennan said. “Waking up every day with some purpose to get a little bit better, and to have the challenge of seeing if it was possible.”
Eventually, that challenge became a way of life.
“I just learned to really enjoy and thrive and love the lifestyle of skiing,” Brennan said. “And so that made it a lot easier to just keep coming back.”
Brennan is quick to point out that she did not do that alone. The support systems around her mattered. At Dartmouth and later at Alaska Pacific University, she found teams and coaches that helped her keep believing when she could not quite do it herself.
“There were definitely moments that it’s easy to question, and it’s hard to keep going,” Brennan said. “I was really fortunate to be part of some really, really amazing groups, and have coaches that fostered that belief in me, and made me see things in myself that I couldn’t see on my own.”
Rosie Brennan celebrates her victory and first World Cup podium after the freestyle sprint in Davos, Switzerland. Photo: NordicFocus
When the World Was Put on Notice
For years, Brennan’s career was a slow and steady build, but then came that famous weekend in Davos.
In December of 2020, during a World Cup season shaped by the uncertainty of the pandemic, Brennan won twice in two days in Switzerland. On Saturday, she claimed her first career World Cup victory, in a freestyle sprint, and then the very next day, she won again in the 10-kilometer freestyle.
From the outside, it looked like a breakthrough and a historic moment for U.S. skiing. Brennan does not dispute that. She says what stays with her the most now is not only the winning, but everything she had to manage in order to ski that way.
“Davos 2020 was definitely a breakthrough moment for me,” Brennan said. “That year was challenging for the whole world, and being a ski racer during that time certainly had its challenges too.”
The uncertainty of that season weighed heavily. Rules changed, travel was complicated and athletes did not always know whether races would happen. The risk of illness carried not just health concerns, but career implications for athletes whose bodies were their livelihoods.
Taking the victory and the sled, Rosie Brennan stands atop the podium in Davos, Switzerland. (Left to right) Anamarija Lampic (SLO) 2nd, Brennan (USA) 1st, Natalia Nepryaeva (RUS) 3rd.
“I really struggled with the anxiety of it all,” Brennan said. “Just never knowing — traveling in foreign countries, where the rules were changing all the time, and you didn’t know what would happen if you got sick.”
Hence why Davos still means something more than two entries on a results page. Brennan was proud of the wins, of course, but she was even more proud of how she managed everything around them.
“It definitely showed me what I was capable of,” Brennan said, “and that I could manage these really high-stress environments and all the uncertainty and thrive in that setting.”
That weekend did not just give Brennan her first World Cup wins. It helped confirm the range she had been building toward for years. Later that season, she became the first American to hold the overall World Cup leader’s bib, sprint leader’s bib and distance leader’s bib at the same time. Which was both a major accomplishment and also a fitting reward for all the work she had put in to become a more complete racer.
Jonna Sundling (SWE), with a commanding victory in the 2022 Olympic individual freestyle sprint, comes to the finish with Rosie Brennan (USA) in the background on her way to fourth. (Photo: NordicFocus)
What the Career Adds Up To
Brennan will take a step back from her professional career after amassing quite the résumé, representing the United States at the 2018, 2022 and 2026 Winter Olympics. She finished fourth in the freestyle sprint at the Beijing Olympics in 2022, the kind of result that can feel both extraordinary and excruciating, by missing out on an Olympic podium by a single place. She reached World Cup podiums across seasons and disciplines. She became a two-time World Cup winner, a fixture in the American women’s team and one of the athletes who helped move the U.S. from occasional contender to regular presence near the front of international races.
But Brennan’s own accounting of her career is not limited to the results she garnered over the years. She is proud of showing up. Proud of learning. Proud of becoming competitive in every event. Proud of the people who helped her and the younger athletes she helped in return. Proud that a career that could have ended several times kept expanding instead.
That may just be why the end of her World Cup career does not feel like a true breakup. For Brennan, skiing was never just a job. It provided her with structure, challenges, community, identity and gave her something to work toward every day and a way to test what was possible. Even now, when she is no longer organizing her life around World Cup racing, she says she’s not suddenly becoming someone else.
“When you train that many years, it’s hard,” Brennan said. “I’m still going out twice a day most days, because it just feels so normal to me.”
That may change when she starts school again and other commitments begin to fill the space skiing once occupied. Brennan says she plans to pursue new interests and give attention to parts of herself that the World Cup lifestyle did not always allow. But the habits of a skier are not easy to unwind, and she does not seem especially eager to unwind all of them.
“I definitely hope to bring forward a lifestyle that’s active, that treats your body well, that’s also willing to push yourself and see where the limits are,” Brennan said.
Rosie Brennan (USA) during the individual sprint qualification at the final World Cup weekend this past March in Lake Placid, New York. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
Rewiring, Not Retiring
That is why “rewiring” works. Brennan is not flipping a switch. She is just rearranging the circuitry.
There will be no more full World Cup campaign, no more life built entirely around the next race weekend. But there will still be skiing, there will still be movement and there will still be competition. The habits and lessons of her career that she built through years of resilience and patience are not things Brennan expects to leave behind.
“I’m sure there are countless skills, probably most of the skills I’ve learned in my adult life, that I will have to lean on in any of the various careers that I may pursue, and in my studying as well,” Brennan said. “The lessons that I’ve learned will undoubtedly come with me, along with the character and strength that I’ve built throughout my career.”
Those lessons were built through the less tidy parts of Brennan’s career, from the late start and the years before the podiums to the injuries and doubts that forced her to keep adjusting. But the same career that asked so much of her also gave her something lasting. Skiing was more than a pursuit or a profession, it was the driving rhythm of her adult life, and one she still feels lucky to have followed for so long.
“It’s definitely an incredible lifestyle to be a ski racer,” Brennan said. “I feel insanely lucky to have called that my career, and to have done so for so long.”
That gratitude does not make the transition simple. After so many years of organizing life around training, racing and the rhythm of the World Cup, stepping back from that structure means more than changing a schedule. It means figuring out what skiing looks like when it is no longer the center around which everything else has to turn.
Rosie Brennan (USA) during her final World Cup of her career — the 20 k Freestyle Mass Start in Lake Placid (USA). (Photo: Thibaut/NordicFocus)
But there is also freedom in that. Brennan no longer has to prove she belongs. She already did. And now, instead of defining skiing only through the World Cup, she gets to decide what parts of it she wants to keep.
Maybe that means races. Maybe it means long days outside. Maybe it means testing herself in new settings, with new stakes, away from the circuit that shaped so much of her adult life. Maybe it means all of that.
What seems clear is that Brennan is not disappearing from the sport. She is stepping out of one version of it and into another.
She is retired, if that is the word people want to use. But it is not the sunset kind. Not the final-page kind.
For Rosie Brennan, skiing will always be there, just not in the all-consuming way it once was. Now, she gets the chance to redefine her relationship with the sport as something woven into the life she is building next.
“It’s truly been a dream,” Brennan said.
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Brennan’s U.S. teammates wait at the line to greet her after her final World Cup race, a 20-kilometer start in Lake Placid on March 22. (Photo: NordicFocus)
