By Gavin Kentch
It is late August. Here is some recent news from the endurance sports internet that I think you should know.
In no particular order: David Norris runs well amidst a deep field in Chamonix; Molly Peters brings her equal distance crusade to NCAA cross-country running, but, three years in, encounters more pushback here than she did with skiing; Alex Hutchinson explores whether machine learning can tease out the factors most predictive of individual athletic recovery; and candidates to host the mid–Period 3 World Cup weekend originally assigned to Nové Město are down to Cogne, Italy, and Ulricehamn, Sweden.
David Norris 23rd in UTMB World Series finale in Chamonix
There are currently two circuits for high-level international trail running flitting across the globe, the Golden Trail World Series (aka “where Sophia Laukli runs”) and the UTMB World Series. The mid-distance series finale for the latter occurred Thursday in Chamonix and environs. The race goes between Orsières, Switzerland; Champex-Lac, Switzerland; and Chamonix, France, and so is generally referred to as the “OCC” race.
The OCC course is listed at 57 kilometres, with a healthy 3,500 meters’ worth of elevation gain. Conditions on Thursday were not temperate; as iRunFar noted, “The hot-weather kit requirements were activated for this year’s race … . Runners were required to add sunglasses, a Saharan cap, sunscreen, and extra water capacity to their normally required gear.”
David Norris, who runs for the On Trail Team when he is not coaching junior skiers for Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club, was the fourth American across the line on Thursday (at the front, Eli Hemming became the first American runner to win this race), and 23rd overall in a field of roughly 1,800. Hemming’s winning time was 5:11:48; Norris finished in 5:49:01. The field was stacked, with prize money going ten-deep and a total prize purse of 76,000 euros awarded.
race writeup from iRunFar | results
Molly Peters takes on unequal distances in NCAA cross-country running
You may remember Saint Michael’s College skiing and xc running coach Molly Peters from such equity campaigns as Ski Equal, which within a few short years successfully prodded NCAA skiing to go from divergent distances for men and women (a 10km and 20km for men at NCAA Championships, versus a 5km and a 15km for women) to equal distances at all races. The lobbying efforts of Peters et al. were not unconnected to the ensuing proposal from U.S. Ski Team coaches Chris Grover and Matt Whitcomb that led to a comparable change being adopted for high-level FIS racing, across the World Cup and World Juniors already and soon at World Championships and the Olympics.*
(* The women actually raced farther than the men in the final days of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing; women contested four laps of a 7.5-kilometer course for their planned 30km skate to close out the Games, while the previous day the men had gone four times around a weather-shortened 7.1-kilometer lap, leading to, uh, history’s first-ever Olympic 28.4km.)
Starting in fall 2021, Peters set her sights on bringing about a comparable change for NCAA cross-country running. The men’s race at NCAA cross-country running championships has been 10 kilometers since 1976, and six miles for the decade before that. The women’s race was added to NCAA cross-country running championships in 1981, and was a five-kilometer race from its inception through 1999. From 2000 through present, the women’s race distance at NCAAs has been six kilometers.
At the NCAA track and field championships, meanwhile, held in spring, women have raced both the 5,000 and 10,000 meters on the track every year since the event’s inception in 1982. Peters points out that, at some programs, literally the same athletes race 6km in the fall and then 10km in the spring, suggesting that women’s ability to complete a competitive 10km race is not really up for debate.
While the shift to equal distances in NCAA skiing may seem inevitable in hindsight, Peters and her supporters have encountered more resistance from the NCAA when it comes to running.
As detailed in a comprehensive piece by Katie Lever in Matt Brown’s Extra Points newsletter earlier this week, Peters is well into her third year of pushing for change on the running side of things. She has generally met with persistent rejection, for reasons that may be characterized as somewhere between “well-intentioned but misinformed” and “woefully chauvinistic and reflecting decades’ worth of systemic gender inequality” depending on one’s perspective.
Again, you should read the whole thing here. It concludes, “For now, Peters feels stuck. Having exhausted all of her internal routes within the NCAA and feeling weary about the legal headache of a lawsuit, she feels her options are limited.” But you should read the piece to see how Peters got here, and what may be next.
Embed from Getty ImagesAlex Hutchinson: Can machine learning predict individual athletic recovery?
Alex Hutchinson, the longtime sports science maestro for first the Toronto Globe and Mail and now Outside Online, actually headlined his article slightly differently, but I’m phrasing it like that in this roundup to bring it within the aegis of Betteridge’s law: If the headline ends in a question, it can be answered, “no.”
Which is to say, new research shows that machine learning — TLDR, machines were trained on a large tranche of training log data to look for correlations between athletes’ perceived morning recovery status and other variables in their training log — can ably assemble a constellation of factors that may serve as the best predictors of athlete recovery generally, such as soreness, sleep index, resting HR, seven-day average protein intake, etc.
But when it comes to predicting individual recovery, each athlete tended to have “a unique set of variables that predicted whether he or she would feel fresh the next morning,” Hutchinson writes.
Hutchinson’s précis may be found here, and the original article, from the European Journal of Applied Physiology, here. As the article abstract concludes, “At the group level, daily recovery measures can be predicted based on commonly measured variables, with a small subset of variables providing most of the predictive power. However, at the individual level, the key variables may vary, and additional data may be needed to improve the prediction accuracy.”
Embed from Getty ImagesPeriod 3 World Cup stop: Nové Město out, Cogne probably in. Unless it’s Ulricehamn.
The Czech Ski Association withdrew from hosting the World Cup stop previously planned for Nové Město na Moravě on January 31–February 2, midway through the 2024/2025 World Cup season, FIS announced last week. FIS cited simply “economical factors” as the basis for the decision.
On the one hand, an official decision on Nové Město’s replacement will not be made until the FIS Autumn Meetings at the end of next month. On the other hand, Italian news sources are reporting that Cogne, in the Valle d’Aosta region of northwestern Italy, is alternately “in the pole position” to be the new Period 3 stop or has already been unofficially–officially confirmed, depending on which news story and auto-translation you follow.
Expressen, meanwhile, the Swedish paper, reported the original news of the cancellation on August 21, and later that day quoted Lars Öberg with the Swedish Skiing Association as saying that Ulricehamn is ready and willing to fill the gap. There has not been further coverage of this story on that site.
FIS “knows that Sweden wants to organize more World Cup competitions” Öberg told Expressen last week, according to an auto-translation of the second story linked above. “We have a dialogue with FIS. Then, for contractual reasons, I cannot comment further.” He added, “We naturally hope that an announcement will come as quickly as possible.”
That portion of the World Cup calendar for 2024/2025 contains races in Engadin, Switzerland, the preceding weekend (January 24–26), no races anywhere the weekend of February 8–9, and then races in Falun, Sweden, from February 14–16. There is then a ten-day break until 2025 World Championships kick off in Trondheim, Norway, on February 26. Organizers with Cogne have stressed the region’s relative proximity to Engadin as a reason why they should be awarded the World Cup weekend of January 31–February 2.
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.
