Two Degrees, One Dream: How a Future Teacher Found Her Way to the World Cup

The Hill That Got Easier

On an ordinary winter afternoon in Fairbanks, before NCAA titles and World Cup bibs and FIS profiles, there was just a loop—eight hundred meters of snow and one long, unforgiving hill.

Middle-school Kendall Kramer skied it after class, day after day, with her dad. Birch Hill. Blue Loop. One big climb, same as yesterday, same as tomorrow. What changed was how it felt.

“We would just go for, like, 30 minutes after middle school every day,” she remembers. “And I remember really liking the feeling of this specific loop in Fairbanks at Birch Hill called Blue Loop. It’s like 800 meters, but it has this really big, steep, long hill. And we would do that every day. And I became really addicted to feeling like the hill was easier to get up every single day.”

Kramer didn’t start as the kid who loved hard things. She started as the kid who had to be bribed—stickers, money, chocolate, extra iPad time—just to go outside with her very active dad, a former Washington State runner who picked up skiing when he moved back home to Fairbanks.

“I really didn’t like hard things. I didn’t like pushing myself. I didn’t like going outside. I didn’t like athleticism,” she says now, half amused, half incredulous. “I was into theater, and I went to art camps, and I went to fashion designing and sewing camps, and I was just doing a bunch of art stuff until seventh grade.”

The shift did not come from some early, noble desire to maximize her potential. It came from middle-school social dynamics: her best friend and the “cool, funny kids” were in the local ski club, FXC. They were getting strong; she wanted in.

“All of the cool, funny kids, and my best friend, were on the ski club FXC,” she says. “I noticed that she was getting really muscular. And, I want to get muscular too. That was literally my motivation. I wanted to spend more time with my friends.”

So she flipped the script. The kid who once needed bribing was suddenly begging to ski. “In middle school, I asked [my dad] to take me skiing every day,” she says. “I liked the feeling of the work I was putting in quantifying to something. You don’t get that with everything in life.”

That tiny addiction—to feeling the hill get easier—would quietly rewire the course of her life.

Running Into an Identity

Before she thought of herself as an athlete, there was one race that hinted at what might be possible: a local 5K in eighth grade.

“There was this one race,” she says. “There was this local 5K, and I won that. And I beat a UAF girl. And I was in eighth grade. And so then I thought, oh, I could start training for another level at this.”

It’s a funny hinge moment: a middle-schooler passing a college athlete on a random Fairbanks course—”I think it was the Chena River Run 5K”—and suddenly reevaluating what “participation” might mean.

From there, skiing and running braided together. Everyone in her circle seemed to do both—cross-country in the fall, cross-country skiing in the winter, track in the spring. The sports gave structure to adolescence. They also gave her a first glimpse of what high-level results feel like: she made Junior Nationals, then Junior Worlds, and at 16, in her first year there, she finished fourth.

It looked, from the outside, like a linear rise.

It wasn’t.

Burnout at the Top of the Podium

The breakout year rolled into something heavier. Right as college coaches were calling and scholarships were appearing, Kramer’s relationship with skiing began to fracture.

“After my breakout year, I went through a large burnout of skiing,” she says. “Looking back, maybe kind of predicted with how huge a jump it was… but I went through a huge burnout that happened to coincide with my senior year of high school.”

She was in the rare position of being heavily recruited and deeply ambivalent about the thing doing the recruiting.

“I didn’t want to do any athletics,” she says. “I wanted to go to school. I just wanted to do academics. I only applied to Ivy League colleges, [but] I didn’t get into them.”

The plan, as she saw it then, was to walk away from elite sport altogether. No more ski clubs, no more interval sessions, no more World Juniors. She would be a student, full stop.

But mid-winter, another pivot arrived. Running, with its promise of a single daily practice and a more contained lifestyle, began to look like a compromise.

“I was like, I’ll run,” she recalls. “I really feel like I could have a balanced life if I just ran in college. I might as well do something athletic.” She started talking “very seriously” with Northwestern—”for quite a few months,” she says, laughing at how she kept mixing it up with Northeastern.

Still, skiing lurked in the background. Friends were planning official visits. There were trips to New England—Dartmouth, UVM—to meet both ski and running coaches. “We worked out a plan for me,” she says of Dartmouth, “like what days I would go to running practice, what days I’d go to ski practice, how I would do all of that.”

In those conversations, UAF—her hometown university in Fairbanks—barely registered as a serious option. If anything, it was the anti-option.

“There’s a FasterSkier article where [Jason Albert] interviewed me my senior year of high school,” she says. “I did say, ‘Oh, I’m definitely not going to UAF.’ Because I need to get away. Just like every high school senior.”

The only reason she even agreed to visit was for social reasons. “I had a bunch of friends at that time… they were also going on an official visit, and I wanted to hang out with them at UAF for that weekend,” she says. “I was like, ugh, okay, fine, I’ll go to UAF for the weekend.”

That reluctant trip changed everything.

Choosing the “Wrong” School

UAF did not look like the kind of program that impresses strangers in an Instagram bio. It looked like something else: a coherent life.

Kramer noticed first what happened away from intervals and wax benches.

“The team I felt really… not only got along just at practice, and practice was fun, but they chose to hang out with each other as people outside,” she says. “They really felt genuine about it. They are really friends with each other. They actually care about each other. They’re having fun. They’re all a little bit weird.”

The second revelation was structural. At UAF, running and skiing weren’t two programs negotiating over a dual-sport athlete’s time. They were one.

“At UAF, it’s literally one program,” she says. “We share a locker room and a team room, and the coaches have their offices in the same room. Like, it’s really the same program, cross-country running and skiing.” While coaches at other schools were willing to coordinate, the Fairbanks setup was seamless. “I barely had to, like, go out of my way. I didn’t have to change my training at all with UAF, and that was really valuable.”

There was also something less tangible: the sense that staying close to home might be protective at a time when she was “really… sensitive mentally.”

“This is really a tumultuous time for me,“ she recalls thinking. “I can stay close to home. I don’t have to change too much while I’m in this mental state. I can see my family every single week. I think that would be a really good move for me.“

From the outside, it didn’t fit the script; hometown program, Div. II running, and a school she had publicly ruled out. She knew people would talk.

“Of course, people, you know, judge me for staying in my hometown,“ she says now. “People still are like, ah, you needed to finally leave Fairbanks. You need to get out. But I know that didn’t sound the best, that I’m going to UAF, because it’s not ‘the‘ program. But I’m really glad that I let what things ‘sound like‘ go, because it gave me a lot of happiness, and it made me feel like it was my choice.“

Reverse Podiums and the Slow Build Back

UAF didn’t magically solve everything. Her first years there were heavy.

“My first two years, not only was I recovering from burnout and not wanting to go to practice at all and really trying to get back into sport my whole freshman year of college,“ she says, “I was also super overtrained, and I could not go fast for the life of me. I think that I was getting a ‘reverse podium’ in my Western college races.“

The COVID year wiped out her first NCAA running season entirely—”there’s just no running races held,“ she notes. In skiing, she salvaged an All-American by the end of winter, but the trajectory felt nothing like her high-school ascent.

If her junior years had been a rocket ship, college was more like a slow climb back onto the trail.

“Luckily, I feel like one of my strengths athletically, besides that, blip, is consistency,“ she says. “I did feel like it was a gradual buildup leading up to my last year at UAF, where both [sports] were progressing from that low burnout point.“

On the running side, her NCAA results tell the story: 170th in her first nationals, then 8th—”because it was cold and super late, so I was already in ski form”—then 20th, then runner-up in Sacramento. She says, simply, “That was really cool.”

In skiing, she went from anonymous trips to the NCAA Championship to a national title. Before that win, she says, “I don’t think I got better than seventh at other NCAAs.“ Last March, she finally broke through and won.

It wasn’t a straight line. But it was, in its own way, a larger version of the Blue Loop lesson: keep showing up, let the hill get fractionally easier, trust that one day you crest the top.

Two Degrees, One Classroom

Through all of this, Kramer was not just an athlete. She was building an intellectual life, too.

“Yes. Biology, specifically, arctic ecology, which was cool. And psychology,“ she says, almost offhand, when asked about her majors.

The combination sounds eclectic until she explains her real career ambition.

“It seems unrelated to both of them,“ she says, “but it is actually related to both of them, as I want to teach.” She’s not yet sure about age group—”I am leaning towards high school”—but the vision is clear: “I want to teach high school science and high school psychology. I think [that] is a way to be still involved with both of my subjects.“

This is not a vague, post-sport idea. She’s already testing it. This year, while racing and training out of Anchorage, Kramer has been substitute teaching.

“I’ve been substitute teaching, actually, this year in Anchorage,“ she says. “That’s been really cool. That’s exposed me to that, and I have really confirmed that it’s something that I enjoy going into, and I feel fulfilled after I do the job, and I really enjoy it, and it’s something new every day.“

The logistics fit surprisingly well with elite training. Kramer logs into the Anchorage School District’s database, looks a week ahead, and drops half-days into the white space between sessions.

“You can go into the online database every week,“ she explains. “You’re like, oh, I don’t have training Monday, and it’s on your own Wednesday, and we have our afternoons off on Thursdays, so I could do all those days. And then you just sign up for what you can do.“ Elementaries offer half-days—”like 11:30 to 2:30″—which sit perfectly between morning and afternoon workouts. “It’s really good pay,“ she adds, “and that’s completely in between the two sessions, so it’s really been perfect.“

There is also a deeper satisfaction. “I think it’s a really respectable career,“ she says of teaching. “I think that it’s… one of the pillars of society. And so I would feel really fulfilled every day doing that.“

It makes the future feel less contingent on a result sheet.

“In my personal life aspect,“ she says, “to know that I have a career available for me at any time that I want to take it, that I really am passionate and excited about, not just something that pays a bill… I’d be perfectly fine if I were doing that.“

The Type-A Gap Year

Kramer did not grow up assuming she would ski professionally.

“I still am… it was a surprise to me that I am even skiing past college,“ she says. “I really was planning on, you know, doing my absolute best through college, but ending on a high note.“

This season, now that she’s graduated, is something different: “an experimental year in the first place of just trying out professional skiing, giving myself, like, a gap year of sorts and seeing how it plays out.“

She is grateful that the experiment is optional, not existential.

“I’m really grateful to have some educational and career stuff that I really am also passionate and fulfilled by to fall back on,“ she says. “If along the lines [skiing] becomes not what I’m enjoying anymore… I really am enjoying it right now, so that’s what I’m finding in my gap year, I guess. But yeah, I really am taking it year by year.“

It’s an outlook that sits a little oddly with the logistics of the World Cup, where you can’t plan a life too far in advance. Her personality wants spreadsheets; the selection system gives you “we’ll tell you Sunday.“

“I’m extremely Type-A,“ she says, laughing at herself. “I packed my ski bag for this Europe trip, like, two weeks before I left. And everyone I was asking what skis they’re bringing, they’re like, ‘I haven’t even thought about it.‘ I like to plan months in advance for things.“

Right now, as she races into mid-winter, that Type-A planner is bumping against the uncertainty of World Cup selection. Tour de Ski rosters, for example, are announced three days after Davos.

“I haven’t necessarily done something that makes it, like, super obvious that I’m going to Tour de Ski,“ she admits. “I haven’t gotten a top 30 or 20 or whatever. And so I’m actually completely unsure. I’m definitely having a freak-out situation where on Sunday night, when I finish my Davos race, I don’t know where I’m going.“

She’d love to do the Tour—”I would take the opportunity… if it’s granted to me”—but she’s honest that she hasn’t hit the automatic criteria, and that there may be Lake Placid nationals in her near future instead. “There are no bad options,“ she says, sounding like someone who has practiced this perspective.

Racing in the Deep End

On paper, her World Cup results this year might make casual fans nervous: numbers in the 30s and 40s, no breakthrough into the top 20—yet. From inside the bib, it feels very different.

“I feel like I have done really good races,“ she says. “I felt like I could push every second. I feel like I’m recovering really fast. I feel strong in my skiing. I’m really liking how I’m taking the races, and I’m going absolutely as hard as I can.“

What’s changed, she says, is her understanding of context.

“I think that it’s opened my eyes to… how things look on paper on a ski race,“ she says. “People back home have maybe been watching, and they’ve seen placement numbers near my name that they haven’t seen before… And I don’t think that people understand the context of the strength of these athletes that we’re against here.“

Everyone is there in Period 1. Everyone is fit. Everyone is fighting for the same 0.3 seconds.

“Even though we are strong and fast as well,“ she says, “that’s just where we’re ending up in this pool of really… the strongest and fastest in the world.“

Still, the goals are clear. “I definitely go into any World Cup wanting a top 30,“ she says. “That opens a lot of doors for the national team… I have reached that level before,“ she adds, noting her 18th in a World Cup 10K skate last year. “Top 30 is a pretty sweet spot.“

She is also honest about the practical stakes. “Top 30s will get you nominations for more things,“ she says. “That’s a really good number.“

On the Olympic question, she doesn’t dodge.

“Yeah,“ she says when asked if making the team is a big goal. Then she pauses. “I’m trying to… so far, I could just take it weekend by weekend. I really hope that by doing my best every single time and making the correct decisions, it can build up to that, and I can do well enough to earn a spot there. But I’m not going to define if my season was worthwhile or if I’m a talented athlete or whatnot on that.“

It’s not that she doesn’t care. It’s that she refuses to let a quadrennial selection meeting be the sole judge of her life.

Process Over Podiums

If you want to understand how she’s trying to get there, you don’t look at the results sheet. You look at the small, specific things she’s attacking.

“I’m trying to be braver on downhills,“ she says. “I’ve always been very cautious because I think I’ve just had too many instances where I’ve tried to be crazy on something, and then I break something, and it ends up costing more time than if I just skittered a little bit.“

She’s working on classic technique so she doesn’t feel like she’s “just flailing around and fighting my kick all the time.” She’s learning to lean into the brutality of World Cup individual starts, where a tenth of a second can be the difference between important FIS points she is chasing.

She is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an individual-start partisan. Mass starts have burned her before.

“In every Junior World mass start race, I’ve had somebody knock into me and break my pole, and then I’m out of it,“ she says. “Or I fall, and I’m out of it… Your race was defined by someone else.“ On the World Cup, she loves that an individual start feels like “how I ski the course against how other people ski the course, as opposed to if you’re in the right place at the right time.“

She also wants something simpler: volume.

“I really want to take every opportunity presented to me,“ she says. “I really like to race, and I like being in the thick of race season. I want to race a lot, and I feel like I’ve built up now a tolerance to building on a lot of races.“ For the first time, she’s planning to carry a full season through the SuperTour Finals. “I want to have a real ski season like the rest of the skiers who start racing in December instead of August… and keep myself together through the end of Spring Series.“

It’s a small, quiet ambition. It’s also a radical one in a sport where so many seasons end in March with more relief than joy.

The Hill, Again

These days, Kramer spends more time on World Cup courses than on the Blue Loop. The hills are longer now. The stakes are higher. There are TV cameras, FIS points, and spreadsheets full of criteria that will determine who gets a call before the Olympics.

But if you strip all of that away—if you put her on a snowy climb and ask what she’s chasing—it doesn’t sound all that different from the middle-schooler trying to make it to the top without stopping.

“I like the feeling of bettering myself,“ she said of those first, shaky loops at Birch Hill.

This fall, between substitute teaching shifts and Type-A packing lists, and this winter between Tour de Ski uncertainties and top-30 dreams, she is still chasing that feeling: the knowledge that the hill is getting a little easier, and that the life she’s building, with two degrees, one dream, and a classroom waiting, makes sense no matter what the result sheet says.

 

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