By Gavin Kentch
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KINCAID PARK, Anchorage, Alaska — I could try to describe the extent to which a large pack of athletes skied together for most of the men’s 20-kilometer mass start classic, the second distance race at 2025 U.S. National Cross-Country Championships, but honestly let me just show you three videos.
The first is from atop the first climb on Lekisch Loop, at roughly the 3.8-kilometer mark of the five-kilometer course that athletes traversed four times in Sunday’s race:
That’s Andreas Kirkeng of the University of Denver, bib 4, leading the charge at the front, followed by Florian Knopf (bib 6). Luke Jager of APU is in bib 5, then Will Koch of Colorado in bib 11. I only filmed here for 20 seconds, and clearly these four men are claiming a small degree of separation from the following pack, but also there are roughly two dozen more athletes immediately behind them.
Approximately 12 minutes later and here we are well into lap two, at the 9km mark of the course. The pack is, if anything, now substantially tighter. Knopf is there, and Jager, followed this time by APU teammates Hunter Wonders (bib 8) and Garrett Butts (bib 17). Koch is bib 11, and Peter Wolter is bib 10. Pink hat, bib 12, is Michael Earnhart, also of APU. Lurking in bib 3 is John Steel Hagenbuch. Finally, shoutout to UAA skier Peter Hinds, bib 54, who is skiing way above his bib number here (in the seeded mass start race), and would ultimately finish 16th.
So, large pack of dudes chilling midway through a men’s mass start race. What else is new. Probably the most notable part of this, to be honest, is the deeply wholesome moment when Jager hears Novie McCabe, his longtime girlfriend, cheering immediately to my right; he looks over in her direction, and his face just lights up. Honestly, this is really sweet.
Okay, now back to racing. Lap three, 14km in. Wind is picking up. Pace is picking up. People are working a lot harder now.
We still have Kirkeng, Knopf, and Jager at the front, much as before. Butts is next, bib 17, then Steel Hagenbuch in Dartmouth green, bib 3. The three-headed APU monster of Earnhart, Wonders, and Scott Patterson (yes that Scott Patterson) is still in the picture, as is Koch, but it is hardly speaking with hindsight to say that things are happening here.
Over the final lap, Andreas Kirkeng happened. This is him bowing across the finish line for what would be at least his sixth national championship, except that he is a Norwegian racing in America so it is his zero-th national title. (Nat has the excellent deep dive on Kirkeng’s predicament up today.)
“He’s probably the best skier in the world to never ski World Cup,” Jager said of Kirkeng after the fact. “Maybe there’s some, I don’t know, Siberian, you know, harbored somewhere in the Pearl of Siberia who has like a VO2 max of 118 or something, but that I know of, I can’t think of anybody else.
There is around 10 seconds of daylight behind the Denver skier. Shortly after, Steel Hagenbuch leads in Jager in the inside track as they enter the stadium.
Jager puts up a fight, but Steel Hagenbuch has played his cards better over the final kilometer, and takes second by around a second. He has the wherewithal to point to the Dartmouth logo on his left bicep as he glides across the finish line while mugging for the camera, which is objectively very cool.
Steel Hagenbuch “absolutely does not” plan his celebrations in advance, he will tell me later. “But I do have a conveniently located Dartmouth snowflake on my shoulder.”
Honestly, that’s sort of your race right there: A large pack skied together for much of the race; eventually a breakaway got away; the only real questions were where, and would it stick. This is men’s mass start racing on a rolling course with relatively stable conditions; no one was taking a flyer today.
Kirkeng’s winning time was 50:47.5. Steel Hagenbuch was 10.5 seconds back in second, and Jager 11.7 seconds back in third. Knopf was fourth (+15.8) and Koch fifth (+23.7). He was slightly ahead of Earnhart, who led in the sixth-through-ninth APU train of Earnhart, Butts, Wonders, and Patterson.
Your domestic podium was therefore John Steel Hagenbuch, Luke Jager, and Will Koch. Top three U23 Americans, a relevant datum for World U23 Championships team naming, were on my reading Koch, Earnhart, and Walker Hall.
Nearer the bottom of the results sheet, but not even on the reverse podium, shoutout to my APU Masters teammate Connor Scher, who was 81st. I will remember this the next time I am unable to beat you in classic intervals. And an even greater shoutout to nonsighted athlete Brian Armbruster, who skied today with guide Holly Brooks. Going down those Lekisch downhills in classic boots, blind, is an accomplishment.
“There were definitely some discrepancies in skis I would say out there,” Steel Hagenbuch candidly stated after the race, “and everyone was just working with what they had. I think that personally, my skis weren’t the fastest out there, but I had good kick on the uphills. So I was just trying to stay close on the flats and the downhills and then get in the position I wanted to on the working sections, and I just kind of built through the race.”
Steel Hagenbuch recounted that Kirkeng did not make a single decisive move, so much as that he “just started going faster” over the final lap.
Angling for the domestic win behind him, Steel Hagenbuch slowed just slightly to let Jager go in front of him through the stadium, he recounted, then followed the APU skier into the final downhill and uphill right-hand turn to the finish.
“And then I was just kind of throwing my body and flailing towards the line and then I had a little bit of a gap,” Steel Hagenbuch said of what looked from courseside like a masterful final sprint.
Steel Hagenbuch, who has struggled this season with a newly diagnosed case of exercise-induced laryngeal obstruction, said that today was the best he has felt all year in a race, with his heart rate responding the way he would expect it to and his breathing “the most normal.”
He noted that last season he would always be in “the low 190s” for heart rate, while his Period 1 World Cup races this year were in the low 180s, “which is representative of not being able to get the oxygen in that you need to in terms of the breathing struggles that I was having. But today my max heart rate was 191.”
(No, he does not look at this during the race, to answer my and probably also your question. This is based on post-race analysis. Yes, you can find his Strava for today here if you are curious.)
“The strongest man definitely won,” Jager said of the day. “So that’s always a good thing, I guess.”
Kirkeng “went and spent a lot [of energy] on the first lap and then kind of tucked in for a while,” Jager recalled, “And I was naïvely like, Oh, maybe he’s tired. But I knew better than to really believe that. And, yeah, he proved us right.”
Behind the leaders, though not that far behind, Will Koch, of the University of Colorado, was pleased to claim “actually the first good race I’ve ever had on this race course.”
Koch could foresee the end of the race playing out the way it did from the moment in the first lap when an early attempt at a break failed to stick.
“On the first lap,” he recounted, “a couple guys tried to break away, the Denver guys, Andreas and Florian. I went with them then, but then they slowed down again and everybody caught back up. At that point, I knew that if Andreas wasn’t able to break away, then nobody was going to be able to break away. So after that, I wasn’t very surprised to see everybody still together at 15km.”
What do you start thinking about at this point, I asked, if you can already anticipate a bunch finish.
“I think the key is just to stay relaxed out there,” Koch mused. “So many times, the last lap, I think it ends up feeling so, so hard. Then you actually look at the split times, and it’s the same speed as all of your other laps. I think a lot of that is because people on the last lap, they start to get really frantic, and then their technique falls apart, and they slow down.
“So I just really try to think about staying consistent, and don’t suddenly try to be a huge hero on the last lap and change your technique. Because if you just stay solid, then you’re probably going to beat everybody else that’s flailing around.”
So we can all say that you want to stay relaxed out there, I noted, like of course you want to ski relaxed rather than not so. But, like, how do you make that happen?
“It’s important to breathe, always,” said the notably cerebral and chill man who is broadly known on the circuit as “Chilly.”
“Whenever you get a chance to take a rest, take that rest. Whenever you get to tuck for a minute, relax. And whenever you’re in a good draft, just relax.
“When it comes down to it, that’s a lot of the time in the race. If you’re able to keep your cool out there, you save a lot of energy. And then whenever there’s a pinch, like you have to increase the pace for a minute, you’ll have the energy for it. Hopefully you’ll be in a state of mind to keep your technique together.”
Tomorrow is a day off here in Anchorage. Athletes will recover and coaches will watch the weather, likely while thanking Ullr that Tuesday’s SuperTour sprint to wrap up the week is skate rather than classic.
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 years one and two of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year three 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.
