By Peter Minde
WHITEFACE MOUNTAIN CASTLE, New York — You could hear them way before you saw them. Ferrules clicking on asphalt, then spectators down the road cheering for them. Somewhere amidst the impenetrable fog blanketing the summit of Whiteface Mountain, Kendall Kramer (APU/USST) and Brian Bushey (Craftsbury GRP) won the Climb to the Castle rollerski race on Sunday morning. Kramer’s time was 46:40.8, good for third overall on the day; Bushey’s was 38:54.9. For both athletes, it was not only their inaugural C2C win, it was their first time on the toll road.
On the women’s side, Sydney Palmer-Leger of Sun Valley/USST finished second in 48:53.0; with Emma Albrecht of Bridger Ski Foundation taking third in 49:02.8. Behind Bushey, his GRP teammate Jack Christner placed second in 40:40.4, while Timothy Cunningham of Team SoHo placed third among the men (fifth long-course athlete overall) at 47:52.0.
As great as the weather was for Saturday’s sprint, it was that bad for the hill climb. When a reporter woke up at zero dark thirty, rain was pelting down. At least it was warmer than Saturday morning. The rain abated during the drive to Wilmington, and at the toll gate, it had stopped completely. Wet pavement, but not flood conditions.
Temperature at the toll gate was 63 degrees (17.2 C), the same as it was at the Wilmington Four Corners, 1200 feet below. Clouds and mist obscured the mountaintops under a dead gray sky. No rain, but it remained humid.
Speaking of Four Corners, your correspondent watched Matt Whitcomb drop Kate Oldham off right there. Oldham opted for an easy workout on her own up to the castle on Sunday morning, rather than the race. That is, if you can call eight miles with about 3800 of elevation gain an easy workout. And, as he’d discussed yesterday, Whitcomb dropped the rest of his crew at Santa’s Workshop for their warmup, giving legs and shins a chance to get accustomed to going uphill.
Standing apart from the main mountains in Keene Valley and North Elba, Whiteface dominates the skyline in all directions. At 4,867 feet, it’s the fifth-highest Adirondack Mountain. The toll road, which was built almost 100 years ago now in 1929, wends its way five miles to the castle, with an average eight percent grade.
The short-course race returned this year, with increased registration. As long-course racers finished their warmup, short-course athletes clambered into vans for a ride to approximately the halfway point so they could race less distance while also finishing at the castle.
In the main event, the men went out first at 8 a.m. (again, ORDA? Can we please have a more humane start time?), with the women following five minutes later. At around kilometer three, Kramer led the women, followed one or two seconds back by Julia Kern, SMS/USST, and Palmer-Leger. Somewhere after this, Kramer went off the front. Kern dropped back, eventually finishing in fourth place, 39 seconds behind Albrecht.
Kramer focused on her own race on Sunday. “It did sound like there was a group of three of us,” she said. “It spread out pretty quickly. This is a very long hill climb. So I wanted to start comfortably, especially since I’d never done this before.” She wasn’t sure when she separated from Kern and Palmer-Leger.”
“I didn’t make a move,” Kramer said. “I just kept the same pace, but I think it got steeper. So maybe some people’s paces decreased, but I didn’t necessarily make a move or plan to make any moves. I just wanted to keep it steady, and if I could keep it the same pace, then I knew it would probably end up well if I could just maintain it and struggle too hard.”
While the men went out in a group, by kilometer three or four, the leaders separated themselves from the pack, and from each other. At the start, Bushey led the men by half a rollerski or so. Halfway into the race, he skied alone, as did all of Christner, Cunningham, and Lloyd.
As the race gained altitude and closed in on the finish, fog enveloped the racers. In the last three kilometers, visibility went downhill quickly for the athletes and people driving support vehicles. Support cars slowed to a crawl. Placid Corner, where on a good day one has a magnificent view of Lake Placid, was socked in. At the summit, visibility was just 20 to 40 feet.
This was Emma Albrecht’s first C2C. “It was foggy. It was super fun,” she said. “Yeah, legs were a little tired since we did a sprint yesterday, but it was good. We started a pretty hot pace, then settled into like some good groups for the majority of the race, and then once I saw that two-kilometer sign, I went for it and I started trying to break away, and I did a good job of that.”
“It was a really hard effort, as usual,” Kern said of her race. “I’ve been doing this since high school — not every year, but it doesn’t get easier as you get older.”
Of her race plan, Kern added, “My plan was just to settle. It’s kind of like, you find your threshold and that’s what you can ski. And I just wanted to see how long I could stick with Kendall and then settle into a pace and see if I could hold it.”
The dense fog provided an opportunity for mind games. “I wish I could see the views, but that was also an interesting part of the race, because you could break away and hide a little bit [in] the fog, and you wouldn’t exactly know where all the women are in the field because you just couldn’t see them. So yeah, this is really cool,” Albrecht said.
Today was also Brian Bushey’s first day on the toll road. “It was good. It was fun. A little bit foggy, but fun. I’ve never done it, so this is good.” He brought no specific plan with him. “I didn’t realize how consistent of a hill it was. So that was a bit of a surprise, and it was hard.”
“We came in, in back of Brian, and we skiing together for a while,” Christner said. “We started pretty quick, and we probably skied together for the first 3km or so, and then when it really started to climb, and we hit the fog, Brian started to pull away from me.
“My plan was basically to just find a rhythm and just go for as long as I could, and then get to the top. Like, punch it to the finish, but I think that was everything we could have hoped for,” he added.
We also got to catch up with the new head coach of the Craftsbury pro team, Annika Martell. “We have a great group of women coaches in the club as a whole,” Martell said. “So Pepa [Miloucheva, GRP’s longtime head coach] has laid out a great program ahead of me, and I’m happy to be stepping into the role and have her still around to teach me the ropes. And the other women coaches in our club are a great support to me as well.”
Miloucheva has been at Craftsbury since 1998, serving as CGRP head coach from the program’s founding in 2008 through last year. She retired as head coach following last season and took a role as GRP’s physiologist.
“[Pepa] works in our in-house lab and runs testing with both the rowing, the ski, and the biathlon programs,” Martell said. “So she’s able to inform how we can adjust training on a micro level to accomplish our goals.”
Is it normal to have an in-house physiologist at this level? “I don’t believe that there are other club programs that have that in-house. I feel really grateful that we have the resources to support that,” Martell said.
Any thoughts on how USSS can get more women into the upper echelons of coaching? “They’re doing a lot of work to get women onto the World Cup with the Trail to Gold program, and supporting coaches like me and other women throughout the U.S. program. I think there’s always more work to be done, but there is good progress that I think has been made,” Martell said.
Asa Lloyd, skiing for the Craftsbury Ski Club, was the first junior man in the long race; he was officially ahead of Cunningham for third overall in the men’s long-course race. Early in the race, he skied in a large group, and then bridged up to a breakaway. He skied with two other athletes for about two-thirds of the race before it became a solo chase. “A bit of a bummer not to have views on the way up, but it was also a little helpful to not have to see how far you had left to go,” he said.
Seeing Andrew Weibrecht, two-time Olympic medalist in the Super-G from Vancouver and Sochi, was an unexpected surprise. He skied the short course with his daughter. These days, the Lake Placid kid chairs NYSEF’s board of directors, and skis nordic.
“I always like to [ski nordic],” Weibrecht said. “I used to do it a lot for training when I was racing, and you know, it’s super nice now. My kids are doing it, so for me, it was obviously a learning curve. But it’s been a lot of fun. It’s fun to learn new stuff and take on new challenges.”
Junior, Masters, and short course podiums
Asa Lloyd was the first junior male in the long race, followed by James Langan, of Mansfield Nordic, with Clarkson’s Nathaniel Burke in third place. Acadia Enman of Mansfield Nordic was the first place junior woman, with Astrid Longstreth, also of MNC, in second. Linnea Ousdigian of Loppet Nordic rounded out the podium in third.
Sproule Love of Manhattan (NYC) Nordic was the men’s masters winner, followed by Eli Enman, of Northwest Vermont Endurance, in second, and Owen Lenz, of MNC, in third place. Natalie Cartwright, unaffiliated, was the lone masters woman in the race.
Although he didn’t figure in the podium results, masters athlete Ivan Milan merits a shoutout. Milan, 49, hails from Hopewell Junction, New York. With gray in his beard and an enthusiastic demeanor, he’s always a pleasure to chat with.
A week before the C2C, Milan finished a 100km bike race in the Shenandoah Mountains that featured 7000 feet of vertical gain. After such a recent effort, a pragmatic individual might skip C2C. But no, he arrived at the starting line and raced carrying a loaded day pack. At the finish, he swapped out his ski boots for hiking boots and walked back down the mountain. Don’t get me started about the number of trail races he’s completed this year. Plattekill Mountain Race; Manitou’s Revenge; Whiteface Mountain Race, and more. My 49-year-old self could never have kept up with him.
Hometown club NYSEF dominated the short-course open results. For the men, Will Preece came first. Eamon Drohan of Clarkson took second, followed by Tyler Erenstone. The women’s short-course podium was led by Cadence Kennedy. Norah Francis took second; Eloise Zobel was third. Everyone mentioned in this paragraph skis for NYSEF.
Henry Hann was the first youth finisher, and Frank Politi received an award as the youngest finisher. And yes, you guessed it, they’re both NYSEF skiers. One little girl fell hard during her warmup, scraping her knee pretty badly. Undeterred, she hit the short course anyway, gamely finishing. If C2C had a Best Blood award, she would have been a contender. It’s most inspiring to see all these pint-sized badasses sending it up the mountain.
With fog, humidity, and a light breeze, the finish felt colder than the official air temp of 56 degrees (13.3 C). The intensity of the racing more than made up for it.
Race video below. If some of the angles seem weird, it’s because those shots were filmed from a moving vehicle and I had to crop out the door frame and outside mirror of a moving vehicle. The struggle is real.
Results [significant caveat: This is a single results sheet that lists all competitors on the day in order of their absolute time; it is not further broken out by race distance, age group, or gender. Hence finishers 1, 3, 4, and 6–10 on this list are short-course athletes, in various age categories; finisher no. 2 is overall long-course champion Brian Bushey; finisher no. 5 is the second-place male long-course skier; finisher no. 11 is the first women’s long-course skier; etc. Keep that in mind as you read through this.]
