By Gavin Kentch
PARK CITY, Utah — Last weekend I caught up with USSS Development Team Coach Greta Anderson at the epicenter of high-level American nordic skiing, non-Alaska/Vermont division, Park City. Anderson was in town to lead the June National Training Group Camp for the 2024/2025 season. She was joined by three other coaches and one strength and agility specialist: Bryan Fish, Cross Country Development Director with USSS; Cate Brams, head nordic coach at Harvard; Julia Hayes, who runs a coaching business called You Can Do It Coaching; and Brian Neff, strength and conditioning coach for the USST para snowboard and alpine teams.
National Training Group Camp, or NTG, brings a dozen-plus athletes together in Park City twice a year for a week of group training. There is June Camp in, well, June, then fall camp in October. The latter coincides with a vast in-migration of the lion’s share of American pro skiers to the rollerski paths and mountain trails of Park City for a block of altitude training.
[Read more: Photo Roundup: Yellow Leaves and Yellow Rollerski Shirts at Park City Camp (from October 2022)]
Athletes are selected for NTG based on their results in the previous season. This month’s camp attendees were drawn from this public document. In an abundance of caution, I am not publishing which athletes actually were in Park City this week, in a nod to the fact that some of them are minors and that USSS staff is generally circumspect when it comes to anything involving the identity of minor athletes. (Yes I know that there are photos of the athletes in this article. I don’t make the rules, or, I will be snarky about a lot of things, but conservative interpretations of SafeSport best practices is squarely not among them.)
I talked with Anderson in a weekend-desolate Center of Excellence (excuse me, the U.S. Ski & Snowboard USANA Center of Excellence powered by iFIT) about team programming and goals for the week. This conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Nordic Insights: First things first: How are athletes chosen for this week of camp? There’s a lot of young skiers in the country, and a lot of good skiers; how do you, and USSS more broadly, settle on those athletes who are here now?
Greta Anderson: We have athletes that in any given region have four different race circuits to choose from. They have their home junior race circuit; many of them have an NCAA circuit option, which sometimes goes hand-in-hand with SuperTour, and sometimes does not. And then in addition to that we have World Cup races on the table, which, for this group, they’re generally a bit young for it, but we do have some that pop up and pop down.
So we make the nominations. The athletes can accept or decline the nomination. And then based on their acceptance or declines, they are invited to a camp this year in June and a camp this year in October to get folks together to basically just boost the training group, share ideas, and talk about what we want to accomplish as a nation in the future with their ski careers and with our teams.
That answer largely anticipates my next question: What are your goals for this camp?
We have a couple of really specific goals, actually, and we’re trying to accomplish some things that we don’t do in training at our home clubs each day.
Running a decentralized system [in the U.S.], most of these athletes are fast because they are very plugged into what they’re doing at home. And they’re already on programs where they’re seeing a lot of progress. Obviously, they all came off of strong race seasons.
And so this year, specifically, we are targeting coordination and high speed, like top-end speed. So I would say the six- to fifteen-second window of being able to move at a very high rate of speed and act with a lot of coordination is something we’ve identified that we really need to target and practice. So that the athletes have that skill set when they go into racing, be it packs, surging and letting up, high-speed starts and finishes in sprints, and also in tricky race conditions. So we’re trying to improve their agility and their raw speed and coordination.
This may be a large question, but, uh, how do you do that?
That is a large question.
But it’s also quite simple. We are going to specifically target and practice working in six- to fifteen-second windows, things that are multi-directional and require athletes to be intuitive, quick on their feet, and make decisions that are more automatic rather than planned, doing things that aren’t paced.
We’re improving our reaction time physically, mentally, and emotionally. That’s the hope.
What’s the large-scale trend for the duration of sprints? They’re getting shorter, right?
They are getting shorter and faster, to the point where some of the older, very successful sprinters are saying, Gosh, this is getting too fast for me. That said, for the Olympic sprint this year, the course is looking a bit longer than it was, a bit more like what we’ve seen in the past five to 10 years. But right now, as the races are trending shorter and faster, we’re hoping that our raw speed is on the front end of that.
That said, speed and coordination, those are going to be helpful in many contexts.
I assume that’s also going to show up in pack racing, any time you have a pack in a race of any distance.
I think always, if you’re more coordinated and you have another tool in your toolbox, which is surging and being able to relax or being comfortable with moving at different speeds and the speed changing all the time, you have more options when you’re racing in a pack.
And the reality of cross-country skiing right now is that there’s a lot of really fit people racing. And you have to learn to navigate the pack, and you have to do it in a way that is efficient and economical. If you’re not practiced in doing that, you can really struggle in pack situations and in mass starts.
One of the challenges we have, being a ski nation that’s so spread out, is that a lot of these athletes who are fast racers are off the front of their training group or off the front of the race, often not being challenged with a lot of other traffic around them. And at the international level, when they get reintroduced back into those high-level packs, we want them to be really comfortable with the skill set they have navigating them. So that it’s not an ask on their energy system; it’s just an ask on their intuition.
This is not a question, but this makes me think of your presentation to Spring Congress 2024: You encouraged athletes to spend time practicing skiing in a group, and, for example, to start at the back of the group and, without using any words, then work their way to the front. If someone had taken that to heart and spent the last year working on this they would have another year’s worth of practice in moving up like that, even if they were the fastest athlete in their group.
[Read more: Highlights from Spring Congress: What the USST Wants You to Know About Skier Development (from May 2024)]
Yes. And in partnership with that, we want them really comfortable skiing in close quarters with others.
There’s often contact. And contact with people whom you know at your club and you know their skiing style is more comfortable than contact with strangers when you’re skiing somewhere new. And so we just want the athletes to be really comfortable with those situations and practiced in it. I see it as a place that our nation can really improve.
Circling back real quick to your question about how we achieve better coordination, something we’ve asked [strength and agility guru] Brian Neff to help us design and implement with the group that’s here right now is some programming that is 10 to 15 minutes that the athletes can use after they warm up, but before they do their training session. [The routine] can be implemented or used about three times a week between now and the end of October, or when their race-season transition to snow starts, where they are working on high neural recruitment and coordination.
So we want to build and package basically these 10- to 15-minute segments that are an important part of training and are happening in the athletes’ training really frequently and that the athletes are comfortable building in on their own and making part of their own training programs, but that aren’t a huge addition to their load in terms of causing fatigue.
So you see these athletes for a week now, and you’ll see many of them again in October. How do you work with them when there are so many other weeks in the year? Are there other types of programming that you are sending them out with; more broadly, how do you see the role of these specific camp weeks relative to the other 95 percent of the year in which the work also happens?
That’s a good question. We are such a large nation; we’re so spread out. It’s something that for us is an advantage if we choose to utilize it in that way and view it in that way.
I think the goal of the camps is that we’re supplementing what they’re already doing right. These are athletes that are already on a really good track. And they’re each on a different track; they each have different training programs at home.
So when we come together, I want us to be doing and targeting something different that they wouldn’t do at home or might not be able to do at home that they can focus on here in this group that introduces new ideas into their training and racing repertoire and is also something they can take home. Because not only do they take it home and improve their skiing overall with it, but the goal is that they also are taking that back to their home clubs.
And that is trickling down into the next generation of skiers so that we continue seeing that impact that Kikkan had with Jessie’s generation and that Jessie has had with Julia’s generation and that Julia is having now with, I would say, probably Novie and Sydney’s generation.
Are there other things you can do here that help this larger infrastructure of ski clubs in this large country?
I think being available as a contact and discussing ideas. Something we would like to continue to build this fall is to have more Zoom calls where we’re just talking about best practices for training and racing with coaches around the country. So if coaches are interested in that, that’s something that we want to continue to expand.
Anything else?
We’re looking forward to the Olympic year.
And with this group that we have now, I think it’s easy to say the 2034 games in Salt Lake, here in Salt Lake, are really far away. But also, this is the generation that is likely going to be physiologically in their peak form at that time.
So it’s a really special time to be a junior ski racer in the U.S., and it’s a really important time to be a junior ski racer in the U.S. And so we hope that we can match the racers’ big goals and dreams with the support and innovation and strategic plan that they need.
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