There’s a lot of different paths to the top. Kikkan Randall grew up with an aunt and uncle who had both skied in the Olympics, and was all of five years old when she decided that she wanted to do this too.
Sophia Laukli, by contrast, will honestly tell you that, when the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang came around, “There was no part of me that had my eye set on qualifying for the Olympics.” Four years later, she was marching into the stadium in Beijing and then putting on a bib for the women’s 30km skate in Zhangjiakou, making her Olympic debut at age 21.
Or here’s another compare and contrast: There are 23 athletes on this year’s national team for cross-country skiing. 22 of them train with an American-based ski club and/or college ski team. The 23rd (spoiler: it’s Laukli) decamped this spring for Team Aker Dæhlie, a private superteam based in Oslo.
“I thought I would just follow a bunch of Norwegians and learn how to classic ski,” Laukli recounts. This was not untrue — Norwegians are good at classic skiing — but far more instructive for Laukli has been the exercise in athlete self-belief, self-direction, and ownership of her own plan and approach that her time with Aker Dæhlie has provided.
If I had to summarize this really quite good podcast (and I know it’s on “my” website so really what do you expect me to say, but also to be totally honest I have no involvement in the recording and production of these and first listen to them the day before they post so I can write this blurb, so I listened to this cold and I really do mean that this is great) in a single word, it would be: independence.
Laukli talks at length, thoughtfully and insightfully, about what she has learned from forging her own path. She didn’t start rollerskiing, or otherwise pursue year-round ski training, until her junior year of high school. She tried college skiing in first the bucolic liberal arts confines of Middlebury College, then later transferred to the pro team–lite environment that is the University of Utah ski team. She’s done a lot of different things, and learned about herself, and what works for her, along the way.
So can something other than a highly codified, check off age-specific training hours and milestones on a pipeline, one-size-fits-all model get high-level athletes to where they want to go? Here’s Laukli:
“I now can look back and really appreciate that I got to [skiing] so late. I’m very fair from burning out, because I had a later start. … I’ve spent a lot of time in Norway, and I’ve seen how many resources there are in these established ski centers. But it was cool to grow up in a place where you kind of have to navigate it on your own, and find a unique approach to it. … Because I’ve developed my own unique approach [to skiing and running], and that is what has made it a sustainable and achievable two-sport situation for me. Just because of trying to figure out alternative ways to get good at it.”
And about that two-sport situation: Laukli is also, by the way, the reigning champion of the Golden Trail World Series, the world’s highest level of professional trail running (read more about her summer trail running here).
Laukli readily admits that the need to continue focusing on high-level trail running through the final Golden Trail race in Italy in mid-October was harmful to her ski training at the time — but she more broadly credits her ski training for much of her success in trail running. It’s partly a simple statement about training volume (you, or at least she, can log a 3-hour rollerski in the morning and count that as just the day’s first workout, while a 3-hour run will take a greater toll), but also a much more interesting reflection on the importance of balance and of avoiding getting bored from an intensive focus on just one sport.
Put another way, I can talk about the importance of balance until your eyes glaze over, but let’s just hear from Laukli on this point directly:
“I don’t think I would like either sport as much if I had only committed to it. I would be technically better in either sport if I didn’t do the other — but I don’t know that I would be continuing in either of them much longer.”
* * *
There’s more, much more, in a conversation that probably shouldn’t be a full two hours, but that also seldom lags. You just might need to listen to it in a couple of chunks. Laukli is plainspoken about the financial rewards of trail running versus her “main” sport of skiing (“it turns out there’s a lot more money in running than in skiing”), about her relatively recent epiphany on the importance of fueling in longer trail races, about marketing between the two sports, about the prevalence of disordered eating in endurance sport, about the specific appeal of female coaches, about the uses and abuses of social media, and, truly, much more.
There’s also some real talk on the move from NCAA skiing (Laukli was third and fourth at NCAA Championships in March; then-Utah teammate Novie McCabe won both races) to the World Cup, and what that can feel like for an athlete who is, despite all her wisdom and maturity and accolades, still only 23 years old, and embarking on potentially her first full season of solely World Cup racing.
“It is exhausting to come back each weekend” of the World Cup season, Laukli candidly notes, “with the mentality of not being last, rather than being on the podium. And that is the biggest shift from college skiing.”
Laukli adds, “I’m also stressed to no longer have the college circuit to fall back on as a confidence boost. It is pretty scary to have all your races be — knowing they’re going to be humbling. There’s the potential for some good races, but when you’re racing a World Cup every weekend, you’re not going to have a good race every single weekend. And having a bad race on the World Cup is much more humbling than having a bad race on the college circuit.”
This is an athlete who was 13 and 14th in her last two distance races. Keep that honest sentiment in mind when you watch your seemingly invincible heroes on TV this winter — they’re human, too.
This episode is embedded above. We have a producer now, so you can actually “clearly hear” our final product now, at “the same volume throughout.” Yay us. Also, please keep in mind that podcast content does not represent the views of either the Nordic Insights editorial side or its advertisers; as I said above, I don’t hear this until it’s done.
As a logistical nota bene, this episode was recorded in mid-November, slightly before the World Cup season began. Keep that context in mind when you hear Laukli state, truthfully, that she does not fully know how her summer running training will translate to the ski season.
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Financial real talk: I worked my butt off for the first year of this website, and took home a net profit of all of $1,500. Inspiring stuff I know. And that was only thanks to the $3,000 that I took in from readers through my GoFundMe. On the one hand, I haven’t been going very hard on soliciting donations yet, out of deference to the NNF’s Drive for 25, which is more important than this website. On the other hand, the money from the GoFundMe is the only reason that I had a profit instead of a loss for the first year of Nordic Insights, and is in turn why there is a second year of Nordic Insights that you are currently reading — I was on board with doing this for very little money out of a love for American nordic skiing, but didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing this.
So. If you would like to support the second year of Nordic Insights, last year’s GoFundMe is still up here. I will update this with a new fundraiser soon/once Drive for 25 ends; for the time being, just mentally substitute in “World Cup” for “Houghton” (basically the same venue tbh). All the money still goes to the same place. Thank you for your support, and thank you, as always, for reading.
