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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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