FasterSkier

Tag: school

  • After a Summer at School, Caitlin Gregg is ‘Tearing Through Fall,’ Eyeing Canadian World Cups

    Caitlin Gregg (CXC) free skating into the stadium on her way to third place in the 10 k skate at 2012 U.S. Nationals. Photo: Flying Point Road.

    Caitlin Gregg’s 2012 season couldn’t be considered a disappointment – she finished second in the American Birkebeiner by just 0.4 seconds to her friend Holly Brooks, notched four SuperTour wins, landed third in the overall standings, and twice stood on the podium at U.S. Nationals.

    And yet the 2010 Olympican, 2011 Birkie winner, and 2007 SuperTour leader found herself considering life after skiing come spring, when roster and coaching changes rocked her CXC team. As of early May, her status with the squad was uncertain.

    These days, she’s very much on board, but rather than focus on training all summer like she has so many times before, Gregg decided to go back to school.

    “I wanted to start taking classes and focusing on the next phase of my life,” Gregg said in an interview earlier this week. “CXC was fantastic in allowing me to do school. It had been eight years since I graduated college and 13 since I had taken a science class, and I really felt that I needed to be in daily classes in a classroom with a professor to really maximize my potential there.”

    The anatomy and physiology classes are part of a schedule of prerequisites that Gregg needs for the next phase of her education; having now completed a few blocks of five-week intensive courses, she’s free to move into the realm of online classes, which can fit more easily with the rest of her schedule.

    And what a schedule it was this summer. School wasn’t the only thing Gregg found to keep herself busy.

    Gregg in the skate sprint at 2012 Nationals. Photo: Toko.

    “Brian [Gregg, her husband] and myself also work for In The Arena,” Gregg explained. “So that’s another passion and direction that we put a lot of our time towards. I was coaching at Loppet Nordic Racing, I was working with children for In the Arena, and I was also going to school. And I do other clinics for sponsors and other groups, and private coaching. I was pretty busy.”

    While most elite athletes don’t fill quite so much of their time with things that aren’t training, Gregg said it worked out well, and definitely didn’t see it as a detriment to the rest of her year as a skier.

    “For sure the summer was a time for me to take some time off from completely focused training, where I was kind of going after it every single day, and really take a step back and experience a different schedule,” she said. “I think it worked out great.”

    After eight years of training since college, Gregg said, she knew that she needed something different – and it wasn’t because CXC wasn’t working for her. She just needed to get out of the daily grind. As it turned out, she now appreciates her athletic routine even more.

    “To be honest, sitting in a classroom for four months and watching the mornings go by – some of my classes were sort of early and those are the best times of the day to train,” she laughed. “So I’d think how it was going to be so hot later and I wasn’t going to want to do anything, and I’d rather be outside biking or something right now. It kind of refreshed me.

    “You forget how awesome your lifestyle is until you’re told to sit in this classroom all day,” Gregg continued. “Then you think, oh my God, it’s so awesome to be an athlete. So if anything it totally inspired me in a different way, which I think is always good. It was a good kind of break from traditional summer training.”

    Winter Goals: The World Stage

    After more or less missing out on international racing since the 2010 season, Gregg has her sights set on making the World Cup races in Quebec and Canmore this December.

    “Now I’m tearing through this fall and things are going great,” she said. “The Canadian World Cups are a huge goal. I’m really excited about those being on the calendar this year.”

    After that, she would like to make her return to the World Championships, where she last competed in 2009 in Liberec, Czech Republic. In 2011, she was not selected for the championships in Oslo despite being near the top of the National Ranking List; at the time she said that she hadn’t trained as well that season and that other women were indeed more deserving of their spots.

    This season, with just one year to go before the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Gregg is surely hoping for a different outcome.

    “I think that for a lot of us who are skiing and training full-time, the World Championships is always a huge goal,” Gregg said. “So seeing how the beginning of the year goes and those World Cups will be a huge focus to qualify for and then perform in, and then sort of seeing how things lay out after that.”

    There’s only one thing to slightly dampen her enthusiasm about the potential trip to Val di Fiemme, Italy, and it has to do with one of her favorite races, the Birkie. Like in many other years, the country’s biggest ski marathon is scheduled to overlap with World Championships.

    “It’s such a fun race, and one of my favorite events of the year both because of the people I get to see and the whole environment,” Gregg lamented. “But it coincides with World Championships and so it’s one or the other. I wish I could say that both of them are on the schedule.”

    CXC Regroups, Retools

    To help her get back on the world stage, Gregg is relying on her two usual support networks: CXC, and Twin Cities coach Piotr Bednarski, who now coaches at Loppet Nordic Racing (for more on Bednarski, tune in on Monday).

    And despite the loss of Jason Cork and Gus Kaeding from the coaching staff, and Jessie Diggins from the athlete roster, Gregg says that CXC is doing just fine, thanks.

    “We’ve got a really motivated group,” she explained. “Igor [Badamshin], who took over as the head coach, had been working with the juniors in the past, and he is probably one of the most qualified coaches in the country. You can see his passion in what he is doing and how he has coached the juniors in the past. And he’s transferring that knowledge and excitement to the seniors. I think it’s going to continue to be a strong program this year.”

    As part of its restructuring, CXC combined its elite senior team with its junior development program for this year; it’s all one big CXC team. Gregg, who was able to go to training camps on the weekends this summer before heading back down to the Twin Cities for class, said that she has been enjoying the change.

    “There’s a great opportunity for some of the older elite athletes to join up with the CXC juniors,” she said. “So that was really fun because they were more incorporated into our workouts.”

    After finishing her last class in August, she flew out to Telluride, Colorado, to do a high-elevation camp with the CXC team – and all those youngsters.

    “It was a huge camp with a lot of athletes, and a lot of the younger, up-and-coming athletes were there,” Gregg said. “For me it was a great experience after being in the cities all summer to get out and do something new.”

  • Exclusive Interview: Maurice Manificat, Skier and Student, ‘Able to Manage the Two, and Do So Very Well’

    Maurice Manificat of France competing in the 15 k pursuit at World Cup Finals in March in Falun, Sweden.

    As Vincent Vittoz’s career drew to a close in the late 2000’s, French skiing needed a breath of life – and it found it in a group of young racers led by Maurice Manificat. A several-time junior national champion and a member of the bronze-medal relay at 2005 World Junior Championships, Manificat stepped up to earn another bronze medal in the U23 30 k in 2008 and his first World Cup podium a year later.

    Since then he has been constantly hovering near the top of the World Cup, with one win, six other podiums, and similar results in the Tour de Ski and mini-tours; he has also finished sixth in both the Olympics and World Championships. In 2012, Manificat finished the World Cup season ranked eighth overall. For the upcoming season he has said that his biggest focus is the World Championships in Val di Fiemme, specifically the 15 k skate race.

    But skiing isn’t the only thing on the Frenchman’s plate: he’s also a student, currently enrolled in a Masters program in biology at the University of Grenoble. After taking five years to complete his License (the equivalent of an American bachelor’s degree), Manificat is working through a new program called Inter’Val, which is designed specifically for high-level skiers of various disciplines. Not only does it feature a schedule optimized for “asynchronous” student-athletes, it also specializes with tutoring and distance learning courses. Inter’Val currently has about 40 students, all of whom are required to compete at the highest level of international sport in order to qualify for the program.

    Manificat in the prologue at World Cup Finals.

    FasterSkier snagged Manificat for an interview over e-mail about what it’s like to be a French skier and how he balances school with a successful athletic career. The following has been translated and condensed.

    FasterSkier: You were very successful at the junior level. After that, did the national team offer you a place, or how did you decide what to do?

    Maurice Manificat: I basically finished as the top junior in France and I won the junior classification of the OPA Cup, so I obtained a place on the French “B” team for the 2006-2007 Continental Cup season. I was unfortunately the only first-year senior in the national team group that year. I was a freshman at the University during my last season as a junior, having made my return in September 2005 after passing my baccalaureate.

    FS: Did other top skiers go to University? What did other skiers and coaches think of that decision?

    MM: I wasn’t the first skier at University. Most of my fellow junior racers entered University like other people our age. For several years at the University of Annency there had already been a class specially arranged for top-level skiers and snowboarders, but it was a specialized DUT in the beginning. [Note: DUT is a Diplôme Universitaire Technologique, an intense, two-year degree that can be quite selective and involve more lectures than a normal university course.]

    At Premanon, there were correspondence classes. But at Grenoble, in the faculty of science, there wasn’t any special arrangement for skiers. I was the first cross country skier to be able to benefit from having the courses arranged as they were with Inter’Val. Specifically at Grenoble, we have face-to-face courses where we saw the professors. I integrated into the Université Joseph Fourier for the Licence Sciences et Technologies program along with an alpine skier who had gone to the same ski academy as me. The program wasn’t as significant then – this is just the second year since “Inter’Val” began. Now, other cross country skiers followed as well.

    Manificat at the Tour de Ski.

    Certain skiers thought I was crazy. The coaches thought it was good to be able to take advantage of the new program.

    FS: When you went to University, did you have a coach there? Were there other skiers for you to train with?

    MM: There aren’t coaches at the University. Our trainers are the national team coaches, but they aren’t at the University. Most of the skiers there are autonomous, and each has his own training plan made with national team coaches. Each of the student-skiers has a different course to follow, and different teachers, so the schedules and time constraints are different. As a consequence, we train alone, but in the past few years more and more students were grouped into the same year and the same course, so they can train together. For my part I often train alone. I like to train alone because when I am with the national team, we train together.

    FS: How much time did you actually spend at the university from 2006 to 2011, when you were getting your bachelors degree? You must not have had the same calendar as other students.

    MM: I’m at school from the beginning of September to the beginning of November, just before the first World Cups. Then from April to the beginning of June. So I am free for the summer training period, which is very intense, and for the winter competition season. It’s an arrangement “à la carte.”

    FS: Did your professors understand what you wanted to do, or was it difficult to explain to them why you weren’t always there?

    MM: It’s always complicated to clearly explain to professors how I train and my constraints. Despite that, the majority were understanding. After all, the faculty members themselves have very busy schedules, so we understand each other. We often actually find them to be lions of sympathy. Because we have private lessons, we have more time to be casual with them and to talk about what we are doing, them about their research and us about our sport. It’s very enriching for both sides.

    FS: When you began competing on the World Cup, or for instance when the Olympics were approaching, did you have to change your study plans or even reconsider your path? Did any of the national team staff suggest that you leave your studies?

    MM: None of the coaches or the federal staff asked me to quit University. They saw that I was able to manage the two, and more than that to do so very well. Moreover, in the year of a big event like the Olympics or the World Championships, I try to alleviate my University commitments. Basically, when we are planning my course at the university with the professors and tutors, the main focus is my sport. So in the years of the Olympics or the World Championships I take a lighter course load.

    FS: Today, are you completely with the national team, or do you have a personal trainer?

    MM: My coaches are the national team coaches; it’s with them that I make my training plan, and select what areas I work on. And more than that, as I accumulate years of experience I know what I have to do. Sometimes I do ask the advice of my club coach or other trainers that I have had in the past. But I’m mostly someone who likes my independence.

    FS: How does the national team work – do you only train together at camps?

    MM: At a camp, we train together, that’s the point: so that each one progresses, and can push his limits while inspiring his teammates. On the other hand, we don’t all live in the same place, and when we aren’t at a camp we train alone or with other skiers who live nearby.

    FS: Why a masters degree – what are you hoping to do when you finish with sports?

    MM: My masters is the next logical step after my License (a Bachelors in America, I think). I don’t want to stop my studies and a License won’t open very many doors down the road. When I finish my athletic career, I’m still not quite sure what I will do. It’s whether that I will join the operational service of French Customs (who is my actual employer now) in a capacity that corresponds to by studies in biology, for example in the Customs laboratories, or whether I will become a national team coach, whether I will work in a laboratory as an extension of my studies in biology, or some other career in biology.

    FS: In the U.S., one must complete a “thesis” for their masters, which is more research-oriented and less classes. Is this the same in France? Will this be easier or more difficult to coordinate with your athletic schedule?

    MM: In France, a masters is two years: mostly courses in the first year with a seven-week stage at the end of the year; the second year there are courses in the first half, and then six months in which you can effectively do a research project (depending on what kind of masters, “pro” or “recherche”, you choose); at the end you must make a report and pass an oral defense. I’m in the first year of my masters right now so I’m not confronting this problem yet, but it will be difficult to arrange. It’s in discussion with the teaching staff.

    FS: How do you finance your career? Is there much funding through the national team, or must the athletes provide their own support?

    MM: I’ve been employed by French Customs as part of the Customs Team of France since 2009. Thus I have the salary of a Customs officer which permits me to contribute to my retirement, because in France high-level sports is not recognized like that. To that I’ve added contacts for with companies for skis (Fischer), poles and gloves (Swix), glasses (Uvex), and my ski station (Grand Massif-Agy). As for the budget of the national team, the budget isn’t sufficient, we have the bare minimum to function professionally, but we are clearly lacking in money. For example: this summer, we didn’t have the benefit of a physiotherapist at our camps, which was very detrimental to our recover and injuries if we had any.

    FS: So what do you have to do with Customs, and how to you balance that with your training? Are many skiers part of Customs or maybe the military?

    MM: As I said, my contract with Customs allows me to have a salary so that I can be autonomous, since until 2009 it was my parents who financed the majority of my career and gave me some financial aid. On the other hand, I’m completely detached so that I can practice my sport and not the job of a Customs officer, just like in the military. Sometimes the administration asks us to be present at events with our bosses, like in Paris, but it’s rare. These contracts with the French administration are a real support for athletes on the national team in the nordic disciplines. Almost all of the athletes have a contract with either Customs or the Army. It is very important for us and a point of pride.

    FS: Finally, for North American fans, will you compete in the World Cups in Canada? How does a trip across the Atlantic fit into your goals for the season, the Tour de Ski, World Championships, etc?

    MM: In effect you have asked a question for which I don’t have a response. The calendar is again very complicated this year. I would love to return to Canada, the last time I was there was for the Olympics, but I still don’t know Canmore or Quebec. I would love to be able to race with our “cousins” from across the Atlantic. But unfortunately the calendar of races over there is not very advantageous with the Tour de Ski just afterwards. Jet lag is something that is hard to digest, the distance races were placed at the end of the race block, and thus it is complex. But I haven’t decided anything yet. Val di Fiemme is much later in the season, and it’s the big goal.

    Manificat in the final climb up the Alpe Cermis, 2012 Tour de Ski.

  • A Veteran At Age 24, Spector Calls It Quits On Biathlon, Focuses on Academics

    Laura Spector warming up for a race in 2009. Photo courtesy of U.S. Biathlon Association.

    HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE – When Laura Spector left the East and drove to Bozeman, Montana, this spring, she knew she was headed for school, but she wasn’t sure what was going to happen after that.

    The 2010 Olympian and national team biathlete had finished up her first full year of training and racing since graduating from Dartmouth College, and it wasn’t what she had been hoping for. After starting the early-season World Cups she struggled, ending up overtrained and trying to rest up while simultaneously competing on the second-tier IBU Cup.

    At the time, Spector told FasterSkier that she would “plan to not ever in the future be just solely an athlete,” but remaining in her sport was still a very real possibility. Despite moving to Bozeman to do an intensive summer course of organic chemistry at Montana State University, Spector brought all of her training gear with her and thought she might rejoin the team in some capacity in the fall.

    After a few more months, her plans have solidified, and biathlon isn’t in them. Spector has a job working in a biology lab here in Hanover.

    “I’m not planning to compete this year,” Spector told FasterSkier. “I’m not going to have time because I’ll be working full-time for a whole year, so biathlon is not in the plan for this winter. Except maybe for fun if there’s something local.”

    Instead of skating her way around Europe and knocking down targets with a .22-caliber rifle, Spector will be working for Dr. Sharon Bickel, a Dartmouth College professor, looking at DNA replication and meiosis in fruitflies.

    “I am really excited,” Spector said. “It should be a lot of fun. I finally get to do something with my degree, and it’s something I’m really interested in. It will keep me busy most of the time. So I’m very excited to have it.”

    Just Getting Started

    Laura Spector racing to 19th place in the World Cup sprint in Oberhof, Germany, in 2011. Photo: nordicfocus.com courtesy of USBA.

    For U.S. Biathlon, Spector’s decision leaves the women’s team down a veteran competitor.

    “As a team, for sure it’s a big loss,” U.S. women’s coach Jonne Kahkonen said in an interview. “Two years ago she made a couple of mass starts already and was on her way up. And I can definitely see that there’s more there. But that’s just the way life goes – not everybody can do this forever, or even until the next Olympics. So that’s just part of this game.”

    Spector, who will turn 25 this fall, grew up in Lennox, Massachusetts, and skied the state’s high school circuit as well as NENSA’s Eastern Cups for several years before moving to the Green Mountain Valley School in Waitsfield, Vermont. Under the tutelage of Jon Arne Enevoldsen, she made her first trip to biathlon’s World Junior Championships in 2005.

    The following year, she enrolled at Dartmouth, where she competed in a few college races and finished third at the Williams College carnival. But she also kept going in biathlon, making another trip to World Junior Championships and finishing ninth in the sprint. After that season, Spector turned to biathlon fully, making two more trips to the junior races and qualifying for senior World Championships in 2008. The next year, she spent about half the season on the World Cup.

    Although she made the Vancouver Olympic team, her performances there didn’t knock anyone’s socks off – it wasn’t until the next season that she had her big breakthrough, scoring a World Cup top-20 in Oberhof, Germany, and competing in several of the prestigious 30-woman mass starts, which an American had last done six years before.

    That 2010-2011 season was Kahkonen’s first on the U.S. staff, and he remembers Spector’s performances as having allowed the U.S. women to build towards higher and higher levels of success.

    “That was just the ball rolling in the right direction, and a lot of times that’s something that the team needs,” Kahkonen said. “The work is there, the potential is there, but you need someone who can actually get the results, or at least a little taste of the results, and then the others realize that it’s possible, that it’s out there. And for sure Laura was a big part of that.”

    And that’s what Spector is leaving behind: despite a subpar string of results in 2012, everyone at the U.S. Biathlon Association (USBA) was certain that the team’s young veteran could return to the sport’s biggest stage, and be shooting alongside the world’s best in Europe.

    “We will miss her on the team, but we wish her well,” USBA President Max Cobb wrote in an e-mail. “We were of course sorry to hear the that she would not continue to train and compete, but these are the hard choices every athlete has to make.”

    For Spector, it wasn’t as hard of a choice as she might have imagined.

    “I’m sure I’ll miss the race season a little bit,” she admitted. “It will be weird to know that my teammates are competing and I’m not. But I’m also really excited about the choice I’ve made and I’m very happy, so I don’t have any regrets about it.”

    Back to School

    Spector’s insistence on finishing up at Dartmouth rather than focusing on biathlon full-time was sometimes a frustration for her coaches on the national team. And Spector, the consummate multi-tasker, needed something else to occupy her mind after she graduated. In her only year as a full-time resident at Lake Placid’s Olympic Training Center, she wanted more – and coaches could tell.

    Laura Spector in a sprint in Atholz, Italy, in 2011. Photo: nordicfocus.com courtesy of USBA.

    “It’s kind of a surprise, but not really,” Kahkonen said of Spector’s decision. “Just talking to Laura, she was not quite there, exactly – not to say that she was not motivated, or not fit, but I could tell last winter that something was a little off, so maybe it was in the back of her head that she wanted to go on and take some more school and pursue that. So by then I could tell that she wanted to figure some other things out in her life.”

    In meetings this spring, the two tried to work through their plans for Spector’s career.

    “I said that to me, as a coach, I want results, and I want from the athletes 100 percent commitment,” Kahkonen said. “If you’re not sure about it, then you should take some time off and figure out whether this is what you really want to do. So that was the discussion at the meetings in the spring. I didn’t know if I should say it.”

    Spector took that idea and ran all the way to Bozeman with it. In part because of her busy schedule as a biathlete when she was at Dartmouth, she had skipped a few classes that are traditionally required before graduate school, and she wanted to fill out her coursework so that she could get another degree in the future. She also wanted to test out going back to school.

    “It was very fast-paced because it was two terms of organic chemistry in twelve weeks, but I did really well and I enjoyed being able to study again and keeping my mind busy,” Spector said. “And I was also working part-time in a fly lab, studying fruitflies, and that was my first lab experience – and I really liked it. So I was hoping that would work out and it would be a step towards taking a job in a lab for a full year.”

    Now certain that school and biology are the right route, Spector knows that she needed to gain more experience in the lab. She plans to apply to graduate school at the end of the fall and begin next September. Until then, she’ll be working with fruitflies.

    The door is still open, however, if Spector changes her mind – or finishes school.

    “In a way, I think it’s good, because if she decides that she wants to come back and start competing again, when that’s all done, she can have a full focus on biathlon,” Kahkonen said.

    And Spector, a notoriously hard worker, isn’t exactly slacking. If she decides to return to the sport, she’ll definitely be fit.

    “I’m still biking and running every day,” she said. “I’m still really active, especially in Bozeman because it’s a really great place to do all that, and I still plan to be working out every single day.”

    What she’ll miss most about her sport, she said, is her team.

    “I’m planning to go watch the rollerski nationals [in Jericho, Vermont], and I’m really excited to see everybody and say hello,” Spector said. “We’re all practically a family and I really want to see them and talk to them face to face, and really let them know what I’m doing. It will be good, because I’ll be out East for a while when they are, so maybe we’ll cross paths a little bit more.”

    And as for her coach? There seem to be no hard feelings.

    “She’s going to be in Jericho, and I said that if she brought her rifle, I’d zero her,” Kahkonen laughed.

     

    Laura Spector all by herself toward the top of Whiteface Mountain en route to winning the Climb to the Castle rollerski race in 2010.