When I woke up today, I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. I wanted to rush around the house and wake everybody up and show them the beautiful snow outside. Unfortunately, there was no one to wake up except Emily, and I figured she’d appreciate being able to sleep in on her day off. [...]
When I woke up today, I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. I wanted to rush around the house and wake everybody up and show them the beautiful snow outside. Unfortunately, there was no one to wake up except Emily, and I figured she’d appreciate being able to sleep in on her day off. [...]
When I woke up today, I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. I wanted to rush around the house and wake everybody up and show them the beautiful snow outside. Unfortunately, there was no one to wake up except Emily, and I figured she’d appreciate being able to sleep in on her day off. [...]
The end of the Utah camp ended on a high note for me. First of all, I’m going to Sweden! The Utah rollerski races, along with the Jericho races back in August, served as qualifiers for the first international races of the year. I saved my best race for the last qualifier [...]
When racers like Therese Johaug and Ivan Babikov reach the final day of the Tour de Ski, their bodies are already exhausted from day after day of racing. Their legs are tired, are they’re not alone: a recent study found that some aspects of heart function can not only decline, but remain suppressed after several days of consecutive races. But thanks to the human body’s remarkable ability to adapt to repeated stress, Johaug, Babikov, and...
LAKE PLACID, N.Y. — Tad Elliott isn’t a big runner. Reflecting on his training from inside the Lake Placid Olympic Training Center, he was quick to admit that. So when fellow U.S. Ski Team rookie Ida Sargent took him on a long run in Park City, Utah, and the two ended up lost, he wasn’t thrilled. Elliott, the fun-loving, laid-back jokester, not happy? “I was cranky,” he said of what turned out to be a...
Pete Phillips is currently the head coach of Burke Mountain Academy. Phillips has decades of experience coaching juniors at many of the top clubs in the country. In addition to his scholastic coaching duties, Philips leads annual spring trips to Norway and Sweden. Sensible goals are powerful motivating factors for any serious athlete. They are tools in the kit. To get the most use from goals they need to become a conscious part of training,...
For a long time, Dakota Blackhorse-von Jess has known he was fast. He won a junior national championship in the sprint, won carnival races while representing Dartmouth College, qualified for a World Cup in Canada, and then transitioned into being a full-time, post-collegiate racer. But it wasn’t until this past January that the Bend Endurance Academy racer had his breakthrough, finishing fifth in the freestyle sprint at U.S. Nationals in Rumford, Maine. While Blackhorse-von Jess...
A native of Fairbanks, Alaska, Reese Hanneman currently races for the Anchorage, Alaska-based APU Nordic Ski Club. The chromed-out hog fired right up, and it sounded mean. An old friend from my high-school swimming days straddled the bike, and twisted some life into the Harley. Or was it a Star? An Indian? Either way, it had some throat to it. I’m sure that among hardcore motorcycling circles, the thing was a piece. By which I...
This is the seventh and final installment of a seven part series in which the U.S. Ski Team’s Noah Hoffman recounts his 2010-2011 season. With the 2012 season just around the corner, the series comes to its conclusion with a SuperTour Finals, and a spring rest. 5/11/2011 I had an extremely eventful end to the race season with some really good and some disappointing results. In addition, I’ve had an incredible, whirlwind spring. I’ve spent...
With three World Cup sprint podiums last season, two of which were at the very top, Kikkan Randall is known for her speed. But even though her forte is in races under three minutes long, one of her favorite workouts to do in the fall is a 50 k rollerski double-pole session. In addition to being a solid level one effort, the U.S. Ski Team (USST) veteran also uses the workout as an opportunity to...
There is only one thing that I really know about Duncan. Duncan truly enjoys punishing himself through endurance activity more than any other human that I know. Training is his drug of choice and he is a serious addict. – Tim Burke Utter the name “Duncan Douglas” to anyone who knows anything about skiing, and you are guaranteed to elicit one of three responses: (1) dismissive incredulity, (2) respectful awe, or (3) idolizing hero-worship. If...
Over 115 athletes, 30 coaches, the full National Development Center Thunder Bay (NDC T-Bay) roster, and Canadian National Ski Team (CNST) World Cup team member Len Valjas. Does this sound like any ski camp you’ve been to this year? Unless you’re in Norway, chances are it sounds more like a skiing fantasy rather than reality. Yet Ontario’s Team Hardwood, a club just outside of Orillia, Ontario, attracted the massive numbers in a training camp at...
Note: This is the second profile in a new series about working out with high-performance athletes. While Alex Matthews was in Middlebury to observe and report, she focused on the kids who trained with U.S. Olympian Garrott Kuzzy at a summer camp. MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — Leaning on the back of his Volkswagen station wagon, Garrott Kuzzy smiled as his training partners arrived at the Middlebury College parking lot. All seven poured out of two vehicles....
Canadian Stefan Kuhn has made a rapid transition from elite skiing to elite coaching. The former Canadian National Ski Team (CNST) member and Vancouver Olympian announced his retirement less than six months ago, and was immediately snapped up in a coaching capacity by the Alberta World Cup Academy (AWCA), one of Canada’s premiere training centers. During his career, Kuhn was primarily a sprinter – as is evidenced by his 15th place finish in Vancouver, the best...
LAKE PLACID, N.Y. – In theory, moving up the annual U.S. Ski Team camp in Lake Placid from October to mid-September made sense. It allowed space for a final dryland camp in Park City, Utah, where the USST athletes could train at higher elevations and follow up on tests taken earlier in the year. Also, September usually brings better weather than October in Lake Placid. In nearly 10 years of training in upstate New York,...
Several members of the U.S. Ski Team and National Training Group came out for Day 2 of the Lake Placid USST dryland training camp on Thursday, competing in a classic rollerski sprint. Over the two-hour time trial, six women and nine men raced four times — the women on a 1.3-k loop and the men over 1.5 k. Everyone advanced to the finals, and the idea was to go hard. Here is a recap...
After a week of some pretty incredible skiing on Eagle Glacier Rosie and I loaded up her new car to head out on a road trip for several days. I wanted to experience Alaska. Real Alaska. This kind of Alaska. Although I didn’t have the former governor of the state as my guide, Rosie did [...]
After a week of some pretty incredible skiing on Eagle Glacier Rosie and I loaded up her new car to head out on a road trip for several days. I wanted to experience Alaska. Real Alaska. This kind of Alaska. Although I didn’t have the former governor of the state as my guide, Rosie did [...]
