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Wednesday Workout: Developing an Annual Rollerski Time Trial with USA NoCo

From late June into early July, U.S. Nordic Combined hosted a major training camp in Steamboat Springs, Colo. Among the sessions was the Fish Creek Time Trial, a skate rollerski race first held in 2007. That year, Johnny Spillane set down the first in a series of course records that would be improved by different athletes in the next decade. The time trial is 8 kilometers and gains 885 feet of elevation, starting just south of...

What Predicts Nordic Combined Success? Study Finds Out

What are the physiological capacities of nordic-combined athletes and can laboratory tests predict performance capabilities on the World Cup? Those are the questions that a team of Norwegian researchers set out to answer by testing 12 competitors from eight different countries before a 2015 World Cup competition in Trondheim, Norway. The study, led by Vegard Rasdal of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the Norwegian Olympic Sports Center, was recently published in the...

Norwegians Sweep Sprints; Newell Out in Quarterfinal on Last Day of Blink

The fans in the well-filled stands of the 1-kilometer rollerski city course in Sandnes, Norway, had many reasons to cheer loudly on Saturday, as their local heroes claimed victories in all four sprint events that concluded the 2017 Blink Skifestivalen (Ski Festival). In the final race of the day, the men’s cross-country sprint was decided by the length of a rollerski, with Norway’s Sindre Bjørnestad Skar crossing first, just 0.1 seconds ahead of Sweden’s Teodor...

Ustiugov, Bjørgen Rule Mass Start; Newell 18th After Breaking Pole

In the men’s 15-kilometer freestyle rollerski mass start on the third day of the 2017 Blink Ski Festival in the coastal town of Sandnes in the southwest of Norway, U.S. Ski Team (USST) member Andy Newell constantly held a position in the first group, staying within a few seconds of the leaders. With two laps to go, he was in sixth place, less than two seconds back. “I felt good about the race,” Newell reflected...

Kalla Cranks Out Win in Blink’s Lysebotn Opp; Stephen 6th

There’s a little more than six months to go until the opening ceremony of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics. For the recently turned 30-year-old 2014 champion,Stephen finished sixth overall (+3:35.7) on Thursday, after  Norway’s Ragnhild Haga in fourth (+2:43.4) and Pärmäkoski in fifth (+2:47.0). Prior to winning three years ago, Stephen also placed third in the famous rollerski hill climb in 2012 (the Lysebotn Opp was Women |

Summer Success for Sundby, Wins First Race of Blink Festival

Stands crowded with 50,000 cheering spectators. Bibbed athletes clad in shorts and T-shirts clicking by on rollerskis. Competitors representing various countries dousing themselves with bottled water as they cross the finish line. These were among the sights and sounds of the world’s largest summer rollerski-race series, Norway’sjust 10 women.  Slind took the win in a time of 2:20:04.2, while fellow Norwegian Kari Vikhagen Gjeitnes claimed second, 2:11.1 minutes back. Belarus’s Yulia Tikhonova completed the women’s...

We’re Not Invincible: More Heart Arrhythmias in Endurance Athletes (Book Review)

When I heard that there was a new book coming out about heart arrhythmias in endurance athletes, I was interested. Several years ago, I read some of the research papers that the book’s authors refer to. One was a cohort study on participants in the Vasaloppet, the 90-kilometer ski marathon in Sweden. Those researchers found that skiers who competed in more Vasaloppets had more heart arrhythmias – as did those who finished the race the...

Race of Truth: Husain, Lawson Win App Gap Challenge

FAYSTON, Vt. — This past Sunday, July 23, Kam Husain and Alex Lawson won the 2017 App Gap Challenge and set some of the fastest times on the grueling course in the process. Husain, a 19-year-old Vermont native and former Stratton Mountain School skier, set a new men’s course record of 30 minutes, 28 seconds. Lawson, a Craftsbury Nordic skier coming off her senior year at St. Johnsbury Academy, was the second-fastest woman ever on the...

“I think if you’re a nordic skier in New England, you should definitely be alarmed.” “That’s one of the main take-homes: skiing is not going to disappear completely, but it will generally be higher [in elevation].” So says Cameron Wobus, a Bowdoin ski team alumnus and a researcher at Abt Associates, a global research firm. Wobus and colleagues based in Boulder, Colo., and Washington, D.C., recently published a study in Global Environmental Change assessing the...

OTP Cuts Biathlon Canada’s Base Funding to Zero

If you made it past the article’s title, then get ready to immerse yourself in the intricacies of Canadian high-performance sports funding. OK, here it goes…money, money, money. Add this for effect, $. Imagine for a moment you’re the CEO of a national sporting body and you’ve got high aspirations — things like championship and Olympic medals. There’s an infinite amount of puzzle pieces to organize and assemble. There are two critical pieces to even...

Over Before It Really Began: Burke and Sweetser Part Ways

A recently promised revival of the nordic program at Vermont’s Burke Mountain Academy (BMA) now seems to be on hold, following a recent change in leadership and what appears to be the school’s subsequent decision to cut ties with its describes itself as “the preeminent ski academy” was bright. A a May 26 article on FasterSkier. “We felt really welcomed there,” Sweetser said of the Burke community. He dismissed concerns that the school’s nordic program...

Alaska REG Recap: Into the Wild

The following Regional Elite Group (REG) camp recap was submitted by NSCF-FXC Interim Head Coach Alasdair Tutt. FasterSkier encourages coaches and athletes from any regional offseason camps (dryland or on-snow, in the U.S., Canada or abroad) to submit their own recaps and photos to Western and previous REG camps. The course saw the athletes wind up beside an alpine run before appearing out onto the road overlooking the sea. The fastest times were set by Ti Donaldson and...

Germany’s 2010 Team Sprint Silver Medalist, Tscharnke Retires

At the conclusion of last season in late March, German cross-country national team member Tim Tscharnke still Norwegian gold-medal duo of Petter Northug and Øystein Pettersen. At the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia, Tscharnke and teammate Hannes Dotzler nearly took another medal in the team sprint, winning their semifinal and leading a three-person group in the final, before Tscharnke

Men Go to SoHo, U.S. Women in the Methow (Camp Photo Galleries)

(Note: This article has been updated to include comments from Canadian coach Ivan Babikov on his team’s recent camp in Park City, Utah.) Two days after Andy Newell and Erika Flowers tied the knot in Bozeman, Mont., seven members of the men’s U.S. Ski Team and eight U.S. women’s team members jumped into an intensity training block at their respective dryland camps in Park City, Utah, and the Methow Valley in northern Washington. The 10-day camps...

BEA Founder and Director Husaby Leaves His Post, But Mission Continues

In the summer of 2013, Bend Endurance Academy (BEA) Executive Director Ben Husaby made what some may have considered a strange company purchase. The two-time Olympic cross-country skier bought an old yellow school bus, painted a pale-blue stripe lengthwise down its side and inscribed the organization’s moniker where an educational institution name once was. Why? Was he planning to shuttle BEA student-athletes to and from school during his spare time? Not quite. When Husaby founded the...

Summer Training In… Hamar, Norway, with Silje Wilson and Annavitte Rand

Talking about their summer plans, University of New Hampshire (UNH) skiers Annavitte Rand and Silje Wilson suddenly had what they called a crazy idea. Wilson hails from Hamar, Norway, and Rand from Vermont. They both wanted something new out of this summer: Wilson wanted to train with other college skiers (and not just Norwegian club teammates), and Rand wanted to go somewhere new. “Given that this is the summer before my senior year, I knew...

Flying Farther: Developing Ski Jumping and NoCo, USA Nordic Style

Three years ago, U.S. Ski and Snowboard (officially dropped nordic combined from its funding rolls. It was a potentially big blow and flat-liner moment for a program coming off one the most successful runs in U.S. nordic sports history. As recently as 2013, the foursome of Todd Lodwick, Billy Demong, Bryan Fletcher, and Taylor Fletcher earned bronze in the team event at World Championships in Val di Fiemme, Italy. Now, under the umbrella of USA Nordic, and two World Championships...

‘Why Not Go Again?’ Patterson Makes Mt. Marathon His Own One Year Later

As with other epic modern-day adventure race series, the fabled origin of Seward, Alaska’s annual Mount Marathon — held every July 4 — began with beer and a bet: who among us can run from the streets of downtown to the top of the 3,022-foot mountain crowding Seward’s skyline, then back to the bottom the fastest? What about within the hour? While the footrace race has evolved massively since the port town’s pioneer miners took...