More volume, double-poling, and a strong female training posse: Nakkertok and Thunder Bay's Katherine Stewart-Jones is feeling fast and looking forward to racing U23 World Championships Utah this winter.
Just six-hundredths of a second shy of Len Valjas's winning qualifying time on Thursday, Bob Thompson of NDC Thunder Bay is headed to Europe for his first international World Cup experience. He clinched the final men's spot on Canada's World Cup Period 1 team.
Jesse Cockney just earned World Cup starts for period I with the Canadian national team. After a stint in Quebec City, Cockney moved back to Canmore - where he has lived since age seven - and says he has felt a big improvement in his fitness.
Update: Early Thursday, Cross Country Canada (CCC) announced that Jess Cockney has been selected for World Cup Period 1, referencing both his Olympic history and last season's World Cup top-10 result.
After a junior and U23 career spent skiing for Rossland, BC's Black Jack ski team, Julien Locke earned a national team nod in May and has relocated to Canmore, Alberta. He's aiming to impress at the World Cup sprint selection races at Frozen Thunder this week.
Kershaw tackled our "17 Questions" from a training camp in Utah. After training around Oslo this season, he thinks that Martin Johnsrud Sundby will still be the man to beat when the World Cup starts: "he's a beast."
In Canada's first unofficial on-snow race of the 2016/2017 season -- which most of nearly 100 competitors viewed as a training effort -- American Chelsea Holmes and Canadian national-team biathlete Brendan Green topped their respective fields in the 7.5 and 12 k freestyle races.
In 2016, Maya MacIsaac-Jones got her first World Cup top-30 in the Gatineau sprint stage of the Ski Tour Canada. She'll start this season on the World Cup, but is shooting for excellence at U23 World Championships in Utah later in the year - fueled by pre-race Harry Potter reading.
Canada's famous Frozen Thunder officially opened Saturday after the Canmore Nordic Centre dumped an estimated 400 truckloads of snow onto its 1.3-kilometer loop in Canmore, Alberta. By Sunday's end, the loop should be roughly 2 k.
After scoring his first World Cup points last season, Whitehorse native Knute Johnsgaard is enjoying training more with Canada's senior national team. But he particularly appreciated a trip back home to the Yukon to chase wild sheep around on mountain ranges.
What's one thing Canadian senior national team member Cendrine Browne would change about skiing? "I'd take back the [FIS] rule on double poling!"
For the Canadian World Cup Team, September entailed a trip to the Italian Alps for altitude training. Alex Harvey, Devon Kershaw, Lenny Valjas, Graeme Killick, and their coaches ventured to Livigno and Stelvio Pass, and joined the Norwegian men's team for some workouts.
Everything's better with a group -- at least in terms of threshold interval workouts. In this "Throwback Workout" from three years ago, U.S. women's coach Matt Whitcomb explains why this was one of the best workouts he had seen back then. “It doesn’t need to be incredibly hard — today was roughly threshold and above during bursts of speed — but it was about the terrain that helped push the pace for us,” he said.
In this episode of the FasterSkier podcast, Devon Kershaw speaks his mind from Oslo, Norway -- where he's living and training. From learning Norwegian to how many more years he plans to stay in the game, it's all here.
Longtime Canadian World Cup skier Ivan Babikov is retiring to take on coaching responsibility for his former teammates Devon Kershaw, Lenny Valjas, Jess Cockney, and Graeme Killick. "Ivan has been in our system and his job is to execute the plans," Cross Country Canada High Performance Director Tom Holland explains.
On Friday, Cross Country Canada announced its veteran skier Ivan Babikov has retired from racing to help coach the Canadian World Cup Team. Babikov will work specifically with Devon Kershaw and the men’s World Cup level athletes based in Canmore, Alberta, while also serving as B-Team coach.
Happy Father's Day to all the pat-on-the-back, "go get 'em kid!" dads out there. We asked U.S. and Canadian national-team skiers to share the best advice or lessons they learned from their dad. As Ian Torchia's dad told him: "You know what happens to hot dogs, Ian? They get eaten!"
"What role did you mom play in your development as a skier?" was the single question we raised to North American cross-country, biathlon and nordic combined national-team members. Many of them had a hard time holding back in their responses.
It's a big day for national-team nominations as Canada released its list of top-tier cross-country skiers -- with six men and one woman on the World Cup A and B teams -- for the 2016/2017 season.
Coaching at the international level beings expectations, personalities to manage, not to mention the nitty gritty of booking plane tickets and travel logistics. When Justin Wadsworth stepped away from Canada's National Team head coach position this past March, it gave an opportunity for three core skiers from his tenure -- Kershaw, Harvey, and Babikov -- to reflect on where they have been.