By Peter Minde
American two-sport star Sophia Laukli has recently cut back to just one sport, officially pulling the plug on her 2024 trail racing season last week. In an August 12 post on Instagram, she wrote that she had learned that “there’s more that goes into managing two sports and doing it successfully.” She added, “being a human is fun, gotta roll with the punches, but that means pulling the plug on the year to avoid an actual f-ck up year. this girl needs a break.”
Laukli made her decision after a seventh-place finish in the Sierre–Zinal race on August 9th. The race was harder than she expected, and the experience prompted her to cancel her remaining race plans on the trail running circuit.
“It just took me until now and this race to realize that I never really took a big enough break after the ski season, so having a few months of poor training and fatigue was not the craziest thing to happen, just a bummer to acknowledge,” Laukli wrote to Nordic Insights a few days after Sierre–Zinal. She characterized it as a learning experience that she can apply next year.
Laukli entered this spring coming off a successful 2023/2024 ski season; she finished 15th in the distance World Cup standings and 22nd in the overall, both career highs for the pride of Yarmouth, Maine, who is still just 24 years old. She was third in a relay in Gällivare in December 2023, then took her first World Cup win atop Alpe Cermis in the Tour de Ski a month later. Laukli capped her ski season by finishing second to Therese Johaug in the 30-kilometer interval-start skate race at the Norwegian national championships in late March.
Just four days later, Laukli was at a running camp in Annecy, France, preparing to defend her overall title in the Golden Trail World Series from summer 2023. With little opportunity to run trails during the winter she developed knee tendonitis following a heavy running load at the Salomon training camp, prompting her to skip two early-season races in the international trail running series.
[Read more: Sophia Laukli Returns to Trail Racing, Will Start in Chamonix this Weekend]
When Laukli toed the starting line at 2023 trail races she quickly moved from newcomer to favorite, collecting victories at Mont Blanc, Sierre–Zinal, and Pikes Peak, plus podium finishes in the Dolomites and Liguria, en route to the overall series win.
This year, strong results didn’t come quite so easily. Among Golden Trail World Series races, Laukli was fourth in the Mont Blanc Marathon in June, then seventh at Sierre–Zinal in August. She won the Eiger E51 Panorama in July, over what was probably a somewhat less competitive field than is found on the Golden Trail circuit.
Laukli had planned to run the remaining Golden Trail races this summer (one in Poland plus two in the western U.S.) to qualify for the final in Switzerland, but feared jeopardizing her ski season if she continued with high-level trail running.
“This year proved that in order to do both sports, I do have to be smarter with the balance, not race everything, and give myself an actual break from training after each season,” Laukli wrote. “I’m grateful though the decision was so obvious to me based on how I’ve been feeling, I think it would be much harder if I was just on the edge and still had some hope to perform well by the end of the season in running.”
“I’m certainly upset and bummed to have struggled with running this year, but that’s why I wanted and was certain to pull the plug now to avoid a repeat in the ski season before it was too late,” she added. “So, I’m not too worried or stressed because I know there is time for skiing now, and that just gets me psyched for the season.”
“If I was only a runner,” she wrote, “I would definitely push through and keep trying to race to see if things eventually fell into place. But since the upcoming ski season is really important for me, I decided it was not worth continuing to travel the rest of the summer/fall and do these big running efforts that would just dig me deeper into a hole.”
Did Laukli’s 2023 success in Golden Trails put a target on her back coming into this year? “Not so much, there was added pressure but mostly from myself, but that just helps me motivate,” she wrote.
In the 2022/2023 ski season, Laukli competed in Period 1 of the World Cup, then the full Tour de Ski. The rest of that season was a mix of racing circuits but not a large total number of starts: Laukli raced selected events at U23 World Championships in Whistler, senior World Championships in Planica, a handful of RMISA races to qualify for NCAAs, then NCAA Championships to close out her time racing for the University of Utah. 2023/2024, by contrast, was her first full World Cup season. Did the added race load have an effect on her running?
“That was a big part of it, first full World Cup season,” Laukli wrote. “I didn’t totally account for the effect of that either.”
While disappointed to cut the running short, Laukli wasted little time in looking forward to ski season.
“I have to acknowledge it’s very cool to be able to end one season early but already the next day be motivated again,” she wrote.
“I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed and pretty defeated with how running went this year, but I know I will be able to move on because I know the mistakes I made and how to avoid it again, and maybe more importantly, I have learned to develop and incorporate many things in my life I have interest for and can focus on (as in skiing, among others). These ‘down’ years are inevitable, so I’m glad I feel somewhat prepared by knowing that I have other important things in my life besides running and sport, making it feel much less like the end of the world.”
This capacity to move on was tested once again when Laukli came down with Covid a few days after writing the above, per an August 19 post on Instagram. So while her timeline for returning to normal training has been pushed forward yet again, Sophia Laukli seems poised to take it all in stride as she approaches preparing for her next race season.
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American nordic skiing. Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in year one of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year two of Nordic Insights for you to be reading now: I was okay with working for very little money to get this love letter to American cross-country skiing off the ground, but I didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing so. If you would like to support what remains a brutally shoestring operation, this season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
