By Gavin Kentch
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KINCAID PARK, Anchorage — For Lauren Jortberg, the winner of Sunday’s 10-kilometer (okay, 13-kilometer) interval-start skate that opened the SuperTour distance season, the race was confirmation that she is successfully refining her gliding skills and the application of power into the skis.
For Emma Albrecht, in second, the result was the best SuperTour distance showing of her career, 32 minutes of in-the-zone skiing that instantly made hundreds of hours of training worthwhile.
And for Nina Schamberger, in third for the second day in a row, it was further proof that the changes she has made in her life are bearing fruit. It’s fun to podium in a race, don’t get me wrong, but it’s also fun to feel like you’re doing things the right way. These women could all claim both yesterday.
To give you full results before I go any further: Jortberg, who skis for Centre National d’Entraînement Pierre-Harvey, or CNEPH, won, for the second day in a row. Her winning time was 32:18.8. Albrecht, of BSF, was second, 4.7 seconds back. This put her just ahead of Schamberger in third; the junior at the University of Colorado was third, 5.0 seconds back of Jortberg and 0.3 seconds back of Albrecht. Jessie Diggins’s margin of victory over Stina Nilsson, in both the 2018 Pyeongchang team sprint and the 2017 Lahti team sprint, was 0.19 seconds, if that is a helpful reference for you for what 0.3 seconds looks like on the ground.
Alaska and Colorado made up the rest of the six-deep SuperTour podium. Novie McCabe of APU, looking increasingly like her old self, was fourth, 23.4 seconds back. Marit Flora, of the University of Alaska Anchorage, was fifth, 1:15.7 back. And Selma Nevin, of Colorado, was close behind Flora in sixth, 1:17.2 back. RMISA strong.
(McCabe skied collegiately for Utah and Albrecht for Montana State. Jortberg, a 2020 Dartmouth grad, was the only woman on the podium who skied on a different circuit in college. Although seventh place yesterday came from EISA and eighth from CCSA, so so much for that narrative.)
On to the race itself. Jortberg started early in the seeded group, and had minimal benefit from on-course splits as she made her way around three laps of a wind-scoured, 4.33-kilometer course. (The race was changed from a planned two laps of an even more wind-scoured 5-kilometer course roughly an hour before the start, due to safety concerns surrounding the final downhill on the longer course. If the Kincaid stadium is the windiest spot in town, and it usually is, then the Lekisch Loop, which featured on the 5km loop, is the windiest trail in Kincaid. See the men’s race article for more on the 4.33km course.)
“I was getting some really strange splits, to be honest,” Jortberg said afterwards, sitting in the wax bunker, the air ripe with residue from both wax and exerting athletes.
“That’s what’s hard about being one of the first starters in the A-seed,” she continued. “I was getting splits that I was leading lap one, but without any of the big guns coming through, so it kind of made me feel like I shouldn’t listen to those splits. But I thought I was doing pretty bad out there, to be honest, because usually you get those splits when you’re not doing very well. So I was pretty surprised about how it ended up… but that’s why you should never listen to splits.”
For the record, Jortberg had the day’s fastest time on lap one; she put seven seconds into Albrecht there and ten into Schamberger. That said, Schamberger then clawed back all ten seconds over lap two, while Jortberg slowed. Jortberg then closed 4.7 seconds faster than Schamberger, and 4.8 seconds slower than Albrecht, to give the CNEPH skier the win. But this is all a lot easier for me to reconstruct staring at a computer screen than it is for a coach standing courseside calculating back splits, or an athlete listening to same. If she listens to them.
“It was solid skiing,” said Jortberg of her day overall. “I don’t think it was my best skiing, but I think it was good.”
“There’s a lot to learn out there,” she continued. “It was really cold and windy” [SO COLD. –Ed.], “and just kind of a lot of varied snow within the course, so ski choice is pretty hard. So I think that — I’m happy, but I also feel like there’s a lot to work on moving forward from it, too.”
“I feel like I’ve been really focusing on learning how to glide,” Jortberg expanded. “I have a lot of power and I feel like often I hadn’t really been actually applying that power. So I was really happy with, on a fast day like today, gliding more. It was tricky in some sections because it was either really like icy or like really slow, to be honest. It was really weird snow out there. So I was happy with my gliding, but still working on it.”
Emma Albrecht was second on Sunday, which was the best SuperTour result, and best FIS-race result, of her career. She was third in the final in a SuperTour classic sprint in Birkieland last December. She was also third in the qual here on Saturday. But this was her first time ascending to the second step of the podium in any FIS race.
“It feels good,” said Albrecht of her day (we spoke in the arctic entryway of the wax bunker, which was colder but better-smelling). “I’ve not been a great distance skier. I think my first year out of college [the 2024/2025 season], I excelled more with my sprinting, and so it feels really good to have a solid distance result. I felt like I was able to push myself, I felt like I was able to get faster every lap, and I felt like I skied with very good technique throughout the course. And I just felt very confident and I felt good, and it was one of those races that you know you’re going fast and you know you’re skiing well, and in your head, you just want to keep digging deeper. So it felt very good.”
Go back and read that penultimate sentence again. If you’re reading this website, chances are that you train from 100 to 1,000 hours a year (or more; hello APU men), all for a shot at experiencing a single 32-minute stretch like that. If you’re lucky, it happens once a year; if you’re very lucky, it happens a handful of times.
So I asked Albrecht about this: You trained hundreds of hours last year. What’s it mean to have it actually all work for 32 minutes? Does that make you want to do it again?
“Oh, for sure,” Albrecht said.
“People always ask me, How long are you going to keep skiing? And for me, it would be harder to stop skiing than to keep skiing. … It’s something I love to do. It’s my favorite thing to do when I wake up.
“And so, having gotten a result that will give me good points and that will hopefully potentially qualify me to something down the road later this season, that is very exciting. Because that was on my mind the entire race, was just, How can I ski so that I leave nothing left in the tank, and how can I ski this race the best that I can?
“And I wasn’t thinking about anyone else on course, I was only thinking about myself and how I can ski it. So I think it definitely feels very satisfying to have proven not only to myself that I can do it, but there’s definitely been a few people in my ski career telling me that I shouldn’t be skiing or that maybe I should just like go into a career, or they’re questioning why I’m keeping skiing, because I never made NCAAs or anything. And so getting a solid result, it feels very good.”
I have nothing to add to that.
Albrecht later said, with an endearing lack of pretense, “I’m pretty proud of myself.” I am proud of her, too, and of anyone out there putting in those x hundred hours a year just to get y minutes like that. We should all be so fortunate.
Nina Schamberger, finally, certainly considers herself fortunate.
“It was so brutal,” she said of her race, “but it was really good. I just really wanted to get a strong start to the season because I made a lot of changes in the last year, and so it was great to see the work paying off and just kind of remember how to race again.”
Can you tell me about those changes? I prompted.
“Well, I transferred colleges [from Utah to Colorado], so that’s the most obvious one, but I’ve also just done a lot of work with mental health and some changes with my training planning. I went back to my coach from high school, Olof [Hedberg], this spring, and he’s been helping me with writing a training plan and really, really focusing on technique over the summer. Probably a hundred times I got my parents to go out on their bike and film me while I was rollerskiing. Lots of video, lots of work.
“The team change has been just so incredible. I’m really, really grateful for [CU coaches Jana Weinberger and Austin Caldwell] giving me a second chance and getting to be a part of this team and getting to be closer to home. There’ve been a lot of changes, and they’ve all been really, really great.”
Finally, I asked Schamberger if she wanted to speak to her mental health work; I personally think that this is very important, but I also wanted to tread lightly here.
“No, I will,” said Schamberger, graciously. “It feels kind of dumb to say because I’m only 20, but I’ve had a lot of obstacles over the last five years or so, and a lot of them are just mental, struggling to find confidence for a number of reasons. But I felt like I really addressed my weaknesses this summer, and that is helping me a lot throughout this year.”
Racing resumes at Kincaid on Friday with skate sprints, then some form of distance race on Sunday, precise format TBD. We are definitely into an extended clear and cold, high-pressure weather system in southcentral Alaska, so don’t expect any new snow before then, sad to say. Maybe it will just be cold next weekend, and not also brutally windy. Stay tuned. Ski racing is fun.
Finally, since I’ve already had people ask me about this: Hailey Swirbul missed her start time on Sunday, is why she has the result she does, slash why her lap-one time is roughly 90 seconds slower than the average of her lap-two and lap-three times. I don’t want to speculate here as to her hypothetical finish position; that doesn’t seem fair to the rest of the field. But for the folks who have been coming to me with questions, Swirbul’s current form is indeed better than her 26th-place finish Sunday, in a field of 33, would in the abstract imply.
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