SOLDIER HOLLOW NORDIC CENTER — Spring Series came early this year. Starting at high noon underneath a high sun, athletes took to the trails Tuesday to contest three circuits of a 3.3-kilometer lap in the men’s 10-kilometer classic interval-start, on the first day of 2024 U.S. National Cross-Country Championships.
They finished gasping for air, then sought out shade, fluids, and more fluids. They later walked through the parking lot back to team vans in shirtsleeves, nursing the tail end of a Gatorade or a Coke. While the air temp was realistically no more than +5 or +6 C, it felt like a lot more than that at altitude; humorously, my car thermometer read +27 C when I turned it on after several hours sitting in the sun. It was warm out there, is what I’m trying to say.
But between the warmup and the parking lot sunbathing, there was a race to contest. Andreas Kirkeng (University of Denver) did so the fastest, covering three laps in a speedy 23:50.8. Joe Davies (University of Utah) was a close second, 2.3 seconds back. Luke Jager (USST/APU) was third, 12.6 seconds back of Kirkeng, his former longtime colleague on the RMISA circuit.
Kirkeng and Davies are foreign nationals, hailing from Norway and Great Britain, respectively. Your domestic national championship podium is therefore Jager in first, Peter Wolter (Sun Valley) in second, and David Norris (Team Birkie) in third. Jager was 8.2 seconds ahead of Wolter, and 17 seconds ahead of Norris, in this race within a race.
Wolter was fourth overall, and Norris seventh; five out of the top eight athletes overall were foreign nationals skiing for RMISA. “I was 27th in the race but the 1st American, at least,” as Renae Anderson jokingly (?) characterized the experience of Western racing in her blog post on regional ski excuses.
(Disclosure: David Norris will be doing some work on behalf of Nordic Insights writing gear reviews. I am currently paying him as much as I am paying myself, viz., $0, but he does have a nordicinsights.news email address. I truly don’t think that this affiliation influences the tone of my coverage — I join just about everyone in American skiing in liking David Norris — but I absolutely need to disclose that up front.)
You can’t talk about racing at Soldier Hollow without talking about the altitude. (The course used today sits at roughly 1,700 meters above sea level, or 5,600 feet.) So what did these men — all of whom, keep in mind, made a podium today — think about the altitude?
Jager, who spent four years here and was on three national championship teams while skiing for the University of Utah: “I mean honestly, in four years here, I feel that I didn’t really ever master skiing at Soho. But I did it badly enough times that I’ve learned how to more semi-frequently stay away from that. I got blown up a lot of times at Soho. My thing today was just, don’t blow up.”
Norris, who like Jager grew up at not-altitude in Alaska, but who now lives at altitude in Colorado while coaching juniors for Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club:
“I’m liking it [the altitude] more and more, but it’s still incredibly hard. … It seems like some courses just feel like they ski higher than others. I’ve always thought Soho skis — it just feels like higher altitude than it really is.
“I think that might be a little bit just because, even on a day like today where the tracks are bulletproof and it’s easy to sit in them, the downhills are still fast enough, and they’re not like techy downhills, but you’re still using your legs to turn. So it’s not just pure rest, and then the working section, lapping through to the top of the hollow [at the end of one lap and the start of the next], is a super long area with no rest. And lap after lap, that just wears on you.”
For a more sanguine take on the subject, let’s go to Wolter: “I was born in Sun Valley, so I was born at altitude. And especially with the lack of snow, we’ve been skiing up high this year at home. So starting our skis at 6,500 feet, intervals at 7,000 feet. And coming down to Soho … maybe you get a little bit of a boost there.”
“But altitude is nice because you have to know how to ski it, and you can play games with those low-altitude kids from the East and Alaska.”
You also can’t talk about an interval-start race without talking about pacing. Any discussion of pacing here can’t really be disentangled from the altitude, at some level, but the two subjects aren’t completely coterminous.
“I learned my lesson a little bit from the Alaska 10km classic, where I cooked a little too hard first lap,” Wolter said. “And I love Soho racing; I first raced here when I was probably in like seventh grade, so 12 years old, 13 years old. So I know this course pretty darn well. And I just started slower than I sort of felt comfortable with, but on this course, if you blow up, you’re kind of dunzo with the altitude.”
Despite this history, and despite this foreknowledge, and despite easing into the race, “I definitely lit myself up on that last hill,” Wolter recounted. “And oh, it hurt so bad going over the top. But I was getting decent splits, and I had to try to push as hard as I could. Which probably looked about like snail’s pace.
“But here we are, hopefully third American. [We spoke before final results were known for sure; Wolter was ultimately second on the domestic podium.] Definitely my best Nationals finish ever, which is sweet. I love continuing the trend upwards in ski world as best I can.”
“It’s always really tricky for me to dial in the pacing” at Soldier Hollow, echoed Jager, “and just keep the foot just enough off the gas to prevent from blowing up, but just enough on the gas to be going fast enough. Pretty much no matter how you pace it the last two minutes are going to be just, like, really, really hard. So that was definitely the case. But it was good.”
“My goal was to pace [the race] right,” said Davies. “Because especially up at this altitude a lot of people start hard and finish slow. And I wanted to at least try and start slow and not get any slower.”
“I love” skiing at altitude, Davies said. “I’ve always had a pretty good engine, and so that kind of suits me. Just being able to push at that kind of limit for a long time. The limit is a lot lower at altitude; for me it kind of works out.”
In addition to the overall podium, and the domestic national championship podium, and the NCAA podium (Kirkeng of Denver, Davies of Utah, and then Christopher Kalev of Alaska Fairbanks), there was a U20 podium.
I *very unofficially* — like I am just looking at the overall unofficial results and counting U20 and U18 athletes here, yes there was a discrete junior podium ceremony but I missed it while conducting interviews with other podium finishers, there’s not exactly a mixed zone going on at this venue — calculate the junior podium as Jack Lange first, Tabor Greenberg second, and Lucas Wilmot third.
Lange skis for Dartmouth, Greenberg for Green Mountain Valley School, and Wilmot for Jackson Hole Ski & Snowboard Club. The margins here were exceedingly close; Lange finished in 24:57.7, Greenberg a fraction of a second back in 24:58.1, and Wilmot all of 4.5 seconds back in 25:02.6. Every second counts out there, kids.
The race was “super fun,” Lange said. “It’s really hard out there. Altitude, hot, sunny. I’m certainly proud of how I executed; really happy with the skis my coaches got me; and proud of the team that’s around me. It’s awesome.”
“I don’t mind” racing at altitude, noted Lange. “At the end of the day it’s just racing; it’s getting from the start to the finish as fast possible.”
While Lange got to the finish faster than anyone else on Tuesday in his age group, he used all 10 kilometers of the course to do so; he ranked 39th through one lap, before moving up to 25th at lap two and 17th by the finish.
“I feel like I had a bit of a lazy start out there,” he recounted. “But I certainly felt like I skied it relaxed and was able to find speed in places and make time where I needed to. Certainly on this course the hills are long and it’s easy to blow up early in the hill and be hurting over the top. I’m happy that I didn’t get frantic at the bottom of the hills.”
Embed from Getty ImagesIn the last race of the day, Dan Cnossen, shown above in a file photo from the last Olympics, took the win in the men’s 5km sit ski interval-start race in 15:29.2. (Feel free to do the math on whether you could doublepole two laps of the Soldier Hollow 2.5km para course, which has roughly 21 meters of climb per kilometer, in the slowest snow conditions of the day, in 15 minutes. At age 43. Shoutout to one of the very few athletes racing today who is older than I am!) He was followed by Joshua Sweeney in second and Ty Wiberg in third. Cnossen races for Eastern Mass Nordic; the rest of the podium has no team affiliation.
Tomorrow afternoon brings another race for para athletes, the sit ski sprint. The rest of the field is back in action on Thursday with the skate sprint. It will all still be at altitude. It might not be as sunny. Eventually it may even snow.
Results: 10km classic | sit ski (all races)
— Gavin Kentch
I’m writing this article from the cheapest area lodging I could find. I just made brown rice and vegetables for dinner on a hot plate, since that is a cheap form of carbohydrates and that is the “stove” available to me here. I am, so far as I can tell, the only media interviewing athletes at this year’s races, which are literally national championships. It is important to me that someone tell these stories, and I am proud that I am doing so.
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