By Merridy Littell
GOVERNMENT PEAK RECREATION AREA, Palmer, Alaska — Day one of the 2024 Race to the Outhouse weekend, held here Saturday morning, was not your average community race. It was the first FIS race in North America this year, a picturesque kickoff to the season with freshly fallen snow covering the trees and early morning light (read: sunrise at 10 a.m.) illuminating the race course. Historically held on Archangel Road slightly farther up the road to Hatcher Pass, racers would ski uphill to where an outhouse resided. This year, the race was held at Government Peak, or GPRA, instead. There was an outhouse at the venue, just not at the top of the course.
Glaringly (unlike the sun) was the fact that the field was one of the deepest that U.S. racing will see this year: Ten athletes with World Cup starts under their belts participated in this 5-kilometer interval-start skate race. Four were on the women’s side of the field (Rosie Brennan, Kendall Kramer, Rosie Fordham, and Renae Anderson), and six on the men’s (Gus Schumacher, Luke Jager, Zanden McMullen, Hunter Wonders, Michael Earnhart, and Scott Patterson. Patterson marked the first race of his retirement by finishing 11th in the stacked field.)
In a race where many skiers did not have FIS points to speak of, Brennan’s astounding mark of 3.88 distance points sticks out, as do the many other racers in the field sporting points in the single digits. For context, the best possible points value in FIS racing is 0.00 — a title currently held by Jessie Diggins for distance and Jonna Sundling in sprint. Some of the best racers in the world were seeded among the local racers, a unique opportunity in a community race.
To see first-year U16 skiers race alongside seasoned veterans soon to be skiing in Period One of the World Cup is a sight to behold. Consider that all these athletes are experiencing their first race of the season, no matter whether their USSS points read 2.89 or 990.
For many skiers, the year’s first race is often a time trial, so the low-key but official Race to the Outhouse was a nice change of pace. As 5km skate winner (and two-time Olympian) Rosie Brennan told Nordic Insights at the finish, “It definitely makes it feel more real to put on a bib and have [a] timer and cheerers and all those kinds of things than doing some janky time trial in the woods in Kincaid somewhere.” (Kincaid is the largest ski area in Anchorage; it will host 2025 U.S. Nationals in early January.)
This race was an opportunity for many Alaskan skiers to rev the engine and blow out the carbon at the start of the season. Racers from Fairbanks, the Mat-Su Valley, and the Anchorage bowl descended upon Government Peak Recreation Area to pit themselves against the difficult, FIS-homologated course.
With a series of large uphills starting in the first 200 meters and running across the first few kilometers, racers run the risk of flooding at the top; after all, the first hill is an A-climb (major uphill) with a C-climb (steep climb) in the middle as shown by the graph below. After these hills, skiers have to navigate a number of tricky downhills and a rolling section of small uphills and turns. “Course is quite physically challenging,” notes the homologation certificate of a course that presents a healthy 192 meters of climbing over 5.0 kilometers.
As Brennan said, “There’s a lot of transitions, there’s a lot of turns, but it’s also hard. You’re kind of always just doing something new. So that is very hard, and definitely not my forte. So I was kind of trying to lean into that a bit and practice some of those skills.”
An altitude graph of the GPRA 5km course from the certificate of FIS homologation found here
It’s easy to get bogged down in the second half of the course, and a powerful V2 is necessary to maintain speed over the rollers. Given that the race was the first one of the season, some racers (including myself) struggled on that section.
The race finishes with a sharp uphill that leads into a very short downhill and then a false flat to the finish. This dynamic makes it very interesting for spectators, who were treated to a sprint finish between Thomas O’Harra of APU and Gus Schumacher of APU and the national team. Although given that the race was interval-start the “sprint” was more for fun: Schumacher had started a minute after O’Harra, and therefore was leading him by a full minute as they came into the finish. Schumacher is listed as finishing 1:00.7 ahead of O’Harra in the results.
The women’s race was won by Rosie Brennan (USST/APU) with an impressive time of 14:01.4, followed by Kendall Kramer (USST/UAF) (14:10.1) in second and Rosie Fordham (14:27.5) in third. Fordham is listed as unaffiliated but is part of the UAF ski team and the Australian National Cross Country Ski Team. The men’s race was led by Gus Schumacher (12:31.1) with Luke Jager (12:37.3) close behind in second and Zanden McMullen (12:43.3) in third, all of USST/APU.
Full (unofficial) results can be found here. It is interesting to see the variety of skiers found in this list; first-year U16s not even into their high school careers, the top high school skiers in the state, athletes from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and University of Alaska Anchorage, the aforementioned World Cup skiers, and masters skiers from local clubs can all be found in the same race. This is a wonderful illustration of how these kinds of races literally bring the community together.
I feel the need to emphasize once again that the Race to the Outhouse was a community race, despite the big-name athletes who headed its results sheet. It was put on by the Mat-Su Ski Club, a community organization that hosts a nordic program and grooms and maintains the trails at Government Peak Recreation Center (yes I will shamelessly plug local ski organizations). As a conclusion to the day’s events, I’d like to thank the Mat-Su Ski Club for hosting this and many other races and providing the community with a high-quality venue and trails. Your work is greatly appreciated by this U18 racer!
Here are some photos (heavy on APU):
A full race article on Sunday’s race will be up on the site on Monday. Merridy gets full credit for having this article written yesterday, even if same-day publication proved a bridge too far while her editor was also racing both days.
Unofficial results: Saturday (5km skate) | Sunday (7.5km classic)
Official results (FIS racers only): all races
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, last season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
