SOLDIER HOLLOW NORDIC CENTER — Haley Brewster came into this week hoping for top-20s in every race. Even if she doesn’t race again, she will leave 2024 U.S. National Cross-Country Championships with a second on a domestic podium, in Thursday’s skate sprint, and an outright win in Friday’s 20-kilometer mass start skate race. It’s been a big 24 hours for the University of Vermont skier, who is also on the U.S. Ski Team.
Friday morning felt significantly more like winter than any other day this race week. A skiff of snow had fallen overnight, and it was still below freezing, if barely, when the women’s race kicked off at 9 a.m. A hundred-plus athletes headed out of the stadium, bound for six times around the 3.3km loop. I don’t have a single snarky thing to say about conditions this week; organizers’ snowmaking efforts last week were superb, and the 3.3-kilometer loop has provided a fair, high-quality racing surface all week. But it’s a good thing that it has, because there sure aren’t many other trails open at present.
That is, again, nothing against the organizers. But I want to share the local perspective that this means that athletes have largely ended up doing warmup and cooldown skis around a humorously constrained area, which is also the same area used for wax testing. It is the official editorial position of this site that climate change is bad, actually.
Back to the race: Kendall Kramer led much of it. The University of Alaska Fairbanks junior looked largely in control, skiing smooth and strong at the front. She was accompanied by, among others, her teammate Rosie Fordham, having a career day.
UAF hit a home run yesterday on the service side, is my somewhat informed observation after watching nearly all the race in person. “You’ve got the best skis in the field!!!!” an exuberant Ben Buck, Fairbanks assistant coach, screamed from the side of the course as two UAF athletes streaked by in a lead pack of four at the start of the final lap, both of them skiing better than they ever had in a national championship.
On the one hand, this is the type of interaction that may lend itself to puffery, or at least to an optimistic presentation of reality; no coach (hopefully) ever told an athlete, “Yo, pack it in, your skis suck.” On the other hand, he was probably right.
Back, again, to the race: Kramer and Fordham of Fairbanks, Brewster of Vermont, and Margie Freed of Craftsbury at this point had a slight lead over the rest of the field. (The five-woman chase pack at this point contained Ava Thurston of Dartmouth, Sydney Palmer-Leger of Utah, Shea Brams of Middlebury, Alex Lawson of Craftsbury, and Mariah Bredal of Sun Valley. I would estimate that they were eight-ish seconds back of fourth at this point.)
There were roughly 2km remaining in a 20km. There were some punchy hills around the sprint loop, and then a large hill up the cabin loop, yet to go. Something was going to have to happen, and soon.
Ultimately, Haley Brewster happened. The UVM sophomore was strongest going up the final and decisive hill, and was able to hold onto her V2 longer than anyone else around her. She opened up a small gap going over the top, stayed on her feet through the sweeping turns down to the finish, and skied in unchallenged for the win. It is her first national championship. And what were you doing when you were 20 years old?
Brewster’s winning time was 54:37.2 for 20km. Kramer was 6.3 seconds back in second. Freed was third, 15.3 seconds back. Fordham, who had skied heroically all day, started feeling very bad very quickly, but was able to hold off a fast-closing chase pack by less than a second to hold onto fourth, 27.2 seconds in arrears. Bredal in fifth, Lawson in sixth, Brams in seventh, and Palmer-Leger in eighth all streamed in a few seconds later.
“Going into the last lap, I was just going to see if anyone was going to make a move earlier than that hill,” Brewster said of her race strategy. “But I think that was my plan going into the last lap. Based on how I had felt earlier in the race, I knew that I kind of needed to go before the very end of the race, but not too early on.”
Brewster’s late-race calculations included the fact that her skis were comparable to those of the athletes around her, but also that she was having trouble pushing over the tops of the hills as well as Kramer et al., and was seeing small gaps form there each time. “So I think the beginning of the uphill was definitely a stronger spot for me,” she said.
So what was she thinking about coming down into the stadium for a triumphant win?
“I was mostly just trying to V2, and thinking about how close Kendall was to me,” Brewster said. “And I heard my coach cheering.”
Brewster’s coach at UVM is Patrick Weaver, who competed in three races at the 2002 Winter Olympics at just this venue, finishing as high as 16th in the 15km classic. (No, Brewster was not alive at this time.) Weaver breaks out his Olympic experience only rarely, Brewster told Ryan Sederquist for a fine article in yesterday’s Vail Daily, but to fine effect when he does.
“He talked about how it wasn’t exactly what he thought it was going to be,” Brewster said in that article of a pre-race speech by Weaver. “He went into a race not really expecting much, and it ended up being one of his best races ever.”
Brewster’s goals coming into this week were a top-20 in each race, she told Sederquist. Through three races, she has placed first, third, and sixth among domestic athletes. Good pep talk, coach. (But seriously though, cf. Alayna Sonnesyn’s comments in this vein after Thursday’s race. Or Matt Whitcomb’s thoughts about “belief that results can happen, belief that a great day, even if you’ve been feeling tired, can happen tomorrow.” You might start to sense a theme here.)
Turning to Margie Freed, in third, the Craftsbury skier candidly stated that she was “really, really tired this morning,” but nonetheless reasoned that everyone is tired by this point, and that she would see what she could do out there.
“My skis were really fast on the downhills,” she added, “so I found myself having to snowplow or kind of stand up to not shoot around people too much and get way too in the lead. But I tried to pace it well, and just stick with the front group and see where that led me. On the last hill my legs started to give out when Kendall and Haley took off, so I just tried to stay strong and do what I could to maintain my position.”
Finally, here is some more good ski advice, this time from Freed. What does she tell herself when the race is coming to its crux, first and second have put a 10-meter gap on her that may as well be 10 miles, and her legs are giving out with a chase pack close behind and the final podium spot in the balance?
“I just kind of told myself that everyone’s hurting and it’s gonna be over soon; I might as well hurt while going fast,” Freed said. Words to live by.
I’m putting Kramer last because I always talk to her for way too long and come away with all sorts of great content.
“How good were your skis” I asked her, which was intended as a softball but actually led to an illuminating discussion about overall athlete mass and different paths to success no matter one’s body type.
“They were pretty good,” Kramer said. “You can tell when my skis are good, because I’m so light and I usually get dropped really hard on downhills, no matter what, really. And so if I’m passing girls on downhills, that means my skis are really good. The coaches test so much. They are the first ones here, the last ones here; our UAF coaches test so much. So they are really committed to fast skis.”
I wasn’t trying to set up a bodyweight comment here!, I started to backtrack.
“I mean, it’s true,” noted an unoffended Kramer. “I’m not comparing myself and, like, flexing that I’m lighter necessarily, but I usually — I do get passed, and that’s the common denominator.”
“That’s an awesome part of skiing,” Kramer continued, “that you can have so many heights and body types, and they all work. And there’s just different aspects where they’re gonna come as a strength or a fall-behind. And so it’s super awesome that that’s a variable in skiing.”
Kramer gave an additional shoutout to her coaches for not only “doing so much for our skis but also being there to give us our feeds at the perfect time.” She also said, “I’m grateful that my mom comes to all my races, and she’s here.”
I duly talked with both coaches and mom, but first please enjoy some hard-hitting journalism about feeding strategy in these longer races:
What did you take for feeds?
“I tried something new this race. It was Nuun electrolytes — like fruit punch electrolytes, classic, not much riskiness there — and yerba mate tea, which has, like, a lot of caffeine, more caffeine than coffee. I love it so much.”
So are those mixed together?
“It was just mixed together. I usually do, like, Gatorade and black tea mixed together, but that’s just caffeine and electrolyte, and I tried a new caffeine and electrolyte today.”
So are you using a sports bottle for this, or a baby bottle with no top? [Thank you, Kendall, for your patience by this point in the interview.]
“We always just get Gatorade bottles, and dump out the Gatorade. So those have been really good. And I’m really glad that I’ve learned how to do feeds well over the years.”
So do you practice taking feeds?
“Luckily, we figured out some really good spots. I mean, that’s obviously a really great feed spot [pointed to a nearby portion of the course] because it’s going into the downhill, and you can digest it before you start working again. I think that I’ve done so many — with college racing, you do so many 20km’s and 15km’s. But we also practice. We get to altitude a few days before the race, and we have like a feed practice day.”
On the one hand, I just subjected you to 200+ words about feed logistics. On the other hand, everyone will at some point do their first race involving a feed, so if it helps you to hear how the silver medalist at U.S. Nationals does this, there you go.
Second to last word here goes to (one of) Kramer’s coaches: What’s it feel like to stand on the side of the course and watch your athletes crushing so hard?
“I’m just so proud of them,” Buck said. “We work on this all fall. … We race a lot like this, 20km’s at altitude in RMISA, so this is our bread and butter. And we went out there and showed it today.”
Buck’s athletes have had a lot of time all fall to work on this: The UAF team has been on snow in Fairbanks since October 6th. Given snow conditions in the rest of the country to start this winter, I think it is extremely likely that the Alaska Fairbanks athletes had more on-snow time under their belt when this race went off than anyone else in the field, if not the entire nation.
And final word here goes to Kramer’s mom, Susan Schwartz, who was, as Kramer noted, present today. Schwartz first watched Kramer race in seventh grade, she recounted. “She started with FXC when she was in eighth grade, seventh grade,” Schwartz said, “and so she raced her first time in seventh grade. And she was like 20th in Fairbanks. … And then she just progressed from there.”
Schwartz also noted that Kramer has had “phenomenal coaches” for her whole time in the sport, most recently Ben Buck and Eliška Albrigtsen with UAF.
So what’s her secret, what’s the crazy regimen of over-involved ski parent that helped Kramer to her first World Cup start at age 16 (!) and has seen her achieve ample success since then?
“I just make sure she gets rides if she needs them, she gets food if she needs it, and then I let the coaches do the rest,” Schwartz said.
Neve Gerard breaks through in 10km skate for first junior title
Shortly after the senior/open women completed their race, a field of 108 (!) juniors filed into the stadium for the U20 race. The juniors did three laps of the course instead of six, but other than that their race looked pretty familiar if you had seen the day’s first contest: A single athlete was strongest over the top of Hermod’s Hill (aka cabin hill), got a small gap there, and kept it to the finish.
This time around that athlete was Neve Gerard, of Mount Bachelor Ski Education Foundation, who crossed the line in 28:24.6. Rose Horning (Ski and Snowboard Club Vail) was second, 2.7 seconds back. She was in turn a half-second ahead of Ally Wheeler of High Plains Nordic Ski Association (+3.2). Hattie Barker (UNH, +13.7) was fourth, falling back to no man’s land after spending much of the race at the front. Natalie Nicholas (BSF) was 35.8 seconds back in fifth, before Sydney Drevlow (LNR) in sixth led in the next 100 or so finishers.
“I felt pretty confident that it could be a good day,” Gerard said after her race. “The skis were running really fast. I made a move on Hermod’s and it stuck. … I was digging really hard. Then I really pushed the downhill and I looked back, and they weren’t there.”
How did this feel?
“It felt really good,” Gerard explained. “I’ve gotten second at Nationals, like, more times than I can count. So it was really nice.” Because this is ski racing, Gerard added, of her winning move, “I thought I was gonna black out at the top, but I didn’t. I took a few big pushes into the downhill and that was that.”
Gerard’s results this week ultimately qualified her for both the U18 Nordic Nations trip and World Juniors, but she had already accepted a spot on the U.S. squad for 2024 Winter Youth Olympics in Gangwon, South Korea, instead. “I’m excited for Youth Olympic Games, but it is a bummer to decline those two trips,” she said candidly.
Racing this week in Soldier Hollow wraps up tomorrow with the classic sprint, which is technically a SuperTour race rather than a national championship. Start lists for the sprint are not up yet, so I cannot report how many people discussed in this article will stick around for one more race. Most but not all of them, is I suspect the answer; the final race day of Nationals week is always a little less populated, and a little more subdued, than the first three.
— Gavin Kentch
So far as I can tell I am the only media outlet interviewing athletes at this year’s national championships, bringing you hard-hitting reporting like what Kendall Kramer had in her feed bottle. This coverage is happening only because I paid my way to travel down here from Alaska for a week-plus reporting trip. If you would like to support these efforts, you can find my GoFundMe here. (This is still last year’s fundraiser, sorry, because I’ve been busy; the money all goes to the same place.) Thank you for your consideration, and thanks for reading.
