As many of you know, we lost a vital ambassador and supporter of North American cross-country skiing earlier this week. For those of you who might not be aware, Marty Hall was a lot more than the person, along with his wife Kathy, who supported our World Cup coverage. Marty was a friend.
As a younger man, Marty had been a football player, nordic skier, and track star at the University of New Hampshire before becoming the US Ski Team’s first full-time coach, where he worked with some of our most legendary American skiers.
Marty revolutionized training methodologies, trail grooming, and race formats, leaving an enduring impact on the sport. He was instrumental in the development of the Birkie Trails in Wisconsin, home to the American Birkebeiner.
Kathy and he eventually moved to Canada so he could take on head coaching duties with the Canadian team.
After his coaching career, Marty and Kathy were passionate supporters of UNH skiing, the New England Nordic Ski Association (NENSA), the Birkie Trails, Nakkertok Nordic in Ontario, and of course, the Halls have been the presenting sponsor of FasterSkier’s World Cup coverage for many years now. Their generosity and dedication strengthened the sport at all levels.
Many of us at FasterSkier have had the privilege of spending a lot of meaningful time with Marty and Kathy: Matt also skied for UNH and has spent many hours on the phone and in person with the Halls, Nat skied for Marty at Bowdoin College, his final coaching stop, and so many of Marty’s former athletes and friends have reached out to us to share stories over the last few days, which we hope to compile soon, but we thought it might be best to share the words and memories from the FasterSkier team member who Marty had the most significant impact on.
Marty Hall, as our Devon Kershaw remembers:
Marty was a real firecracker and a passionate advocate of the merits of competitive cross-country ski racing. Was he brash at times? Irritating? Of course, he was, but he was always unapologetically himself, a paramount quality if one wants to compete at the upper echelons of anything.
Marty taught his athletes, whom he worked closely with, to get the most out of themselves. They were part of historic teams and achieved results in the USA and Canada. Some of the photos from that iconic era are legendary—as were his eyebrows.
Later, when he was done coaching at the highest level, he was never afraid to speak his mind—a through-line of his life. He was always ‘no holds barred’ with his opinions of what he thought teams or individuals should be doing, and nobody was safe. Not Beckie Scott, not me, not anyone. It was amusing when you weren’t involved and/or racing well enough to have his criticisms or opinions wash over you like water off the back of an otter’s soaked coat. Still, it could be irritating to be receiving his unsolicited advice—especially when things weren’t going so well on the ski tracks. Yet, he always stood by his opinions, and that ‘tough love’ aspect was just so ‘Marty.’ He just wanted—always did—for athletes to get the most out of themselves. There’s no better quality in a mentor, coach, or sparring partner.
He was persuasive, too. This story is funny and perhaps hyperbolic, but I may have never been a cross-country ski racer at the highest level without Marty.
I recall that Dave Wood and Marty came by my house – in Sudbury, ON (I still don’t understand why, haha – I wouldn’t go to Sudbury willingly), most likely on their way to some event somewhere in Northern Ontario. We sat in our family room, and Marty peppered me with questions. At the time, I was very on the fence between giving up top-level skiing – accepting instead a running scholarship, of which I had many offers to run in the NCAA – and, of course, Marty was having none of it. Tried as I might to explain how I loved both sports and that running was a more ‘pure’ competition with fewer variables, he turned it all on its head, educating me (preaching in pure Marty style) in the facts that those plethora of variables are what allow Canadians to win at the highest level. Mind you, no Canadian at that time had won anything in cross-country skiing for a very long time. It was over a decade since Pierre Harvey—the only Canadian to win then—did so in 1988. But he was able to beat me down to accept the reality that the chance to be the best in the world on a day was more realistic in cross-country skiing when compared to distance running as a young Canadian (I recall him being very stubborn about this—something like, “there’s no way you can be the world’s best at 5000m as a Canadian” or something like that, haha).
Then came the war stories. Marty was a great storyteller, and the evening was filled with him and Dave—mostly Marty (there was not enough oxygen in the room for others)—telling anecdotes of the World Cup, the Olympics, the World Championships, and everything that life entailed. I drank it all up. I sat there on my sofa, totally quiet, and listened.
I finished my cross-country running season that autumn of that visit – and it was successful. The transition for me between running and skiing was always abrupt and violent. I had no upper body strength, and racing in November (when we still did that in Silver Star) was as challenging as always. I was a 2nd year Junior Boy, a club skier for a scrappy club that trained in some horrendous training conditions in a rough Northern town in the middle of nowhere. But we were driven and trained hard. A few months later, our club – Laurentian Nordic – was in Val Cartier, QC, for that year’s World Junior Trials. I had no illusions of making the team, I hadn’t even traveled to Quebec with my passport – it lay safely back in Sudbury. I barely even knew what ‘World Juniors’ was, if I’m honest. I knew that a club teammate had competed at the World Juniors a few years earlier in Canmore (Pirkko Penttila). In that first race, a 30km classic competition, I finished third, shockingly. I explicitly told my club coach, Dave Battison – that there must have been a mistake and coerced him to check with the timing staff to ensure the results were correct. There was no mistake with the results; I had finished 3rd and was now in the running to make the team. All I needed was one more good race in the 10km skate – a race that was, at best, scattershot for me (distance skating – then throughout my career, was sometimes great, other times a disaster). Shockingly, I also finished 3rd in that competition, making my first World Junior team less than a month after turning 17.
My mom drove home to Sudbury directly after that 10km skate, over 10 hours, and couriered my passport to me in Mont Ste Anne, where we were staying for a short ‘pre-camp’ before flying to Europe. I didn’t even have running shoes (why would someone run in the winter?!), and I came to those championships with three pairs of skis (one skate, two classic), all different brands (Fischer skate skis, Atomic and Madshus classic).To say I was green would be an understatement.
That trip changed my life. I had never been to Europe before and fell in love with the exoticness of it all—the different foods, cars, architecture, and mountains. I always loved the mountains more than anything, and we had a pre-camp in Lavaze Pass, just above Val di Fiemme. That is still one of my favorite places to cross-country ski. The alpenglow on the Dolomites is something to experience.
It was also the first time I had competed in an international competition, and we even did a time trial in the infamous Val di Fiemme stadium, where a few years later, as a first-year senior, I would compete in my first World Sr. Championships. The adventure of it all, the camaraderie with the other athletes (all were last year juniors), and representing Canada internationally was both an honor and addictive. It lit a fire in me to want more. I hated to lose and really hated to get my ass kicked. I vowed to come back stronger, to do what I could to be the best I could be – like Marty was ranting about that autumn evening in one of Canada’s worst cities – Sudbury, ON. To say I believed fully would be a lie, but I fell in love with chasing a ridiculous dream.
That spring, I gave up on running competitively – or ‘training’ for running. One dream faded into the mists while the other became clearer. It wasn’t an easy journey. As some might know, I lost my girlfriend in a tragic cycling accident in June of 2001- as I was graduating from high school – and left Northern Ontario hating everything that Sudbury represented. I resented the countless training sessions where things were thrown at me out of truck windows, and the countless times I’d been run off the road by jackasses came to have a new meaning. Three weeks after the accident, I moved west to Canmore, a shattered version of myself. Canmore saved my life. That community was, and is, so phenomenal. I will forever be grateful to the people there who lifted me out of a deep, deep sadness and pit of despair. I tried to race for Sofie, even writing DIFS on the tips of all my skis (Do it for Sofie). I shattered myself in training, using hard training to distract me from the sadness that overcame me – when my pulse got over a certain threshold or the training session became long enough, I wouldn’t think. After a really disappointing season, I almost gave up on skiing again that spring after using training as a ‘therapy’ method left me crushed. But that spring, I used wax remover to wipe away “DIFS” and came to Spring Series in the US to race for myself. Of course, it went phenomenally well, and the results were fantastic; I was in the top 3 in the senior category.
Where am I going with this?
Marty reached out and congratulated me for making that first World Juniors Team – even though I got my ass kicked in Slovakia back in 2000. Alain Parent (then the junior national team coach) couldn’t believe I showed up with no passport, no running shoes and not even a pair of ‘warm-up skate skis’ to a World Championship.
As a young senior, when I finally broke out and hit my first World Cup podium 3 months after turning 23 years old, again, Marty reached out. He reminded me that I had made the right choice – shockingly recalling his visit to Sudbury- but also reminded me that I wasn’t the best in the world just yet. 3rd was good, but it’s not 1st. It would take another 4.5 years before I crossed the line first – beating both Petter Northug and Dario Cologna in Toblach, ITA in early January of 2011.
Tough love was part of Marty’s whole deal, but he was always honest and always believed. No excuses. Hard work over time gives results, but you have to believe. That American swagger, no doubt. As the years ticked by, he probably didn’t even remember that afternoon/evening on that dark sofa in some nondescript living room, with a skinny running kid hanging on his every word. But I do. It greatly impacted my career and life as I sit here in Norway. All of it is unimaginable for a young 16-year-old back then in Nickel City.
Marty will be missed. There was no one quite like him. May his fire and passion never be extinguished, and may the next leaders of Canadian skiing inspire tomorrow’s skiing greats to take a chance, not give a shit what others think, and offer no respect to the international competitors. Because to channel Marty, God dammit, Canadians can and have won in this European-dominated sport we all love and devote our life to pursuing.
From all of us at FasterSkier, Marty, you will be missed, and Kathy, we send you our love and support. Please know we are always here for you.
