Mansfield Nordic Club

I started a tradition at the 2020 Truckee, CA Junior Nationals. Wherever the location of JNs in a given year, I pick up a stack of postcards and hand them out at the end of the championship to each MNC athlete who competed. They are blank, but with the instruction from me to write down what was learned over the course of that week…

Some of these postcards get filled out and shared with me at spring meetings. Other times, I’ll receive a photo of a postcard (Virginia gave me permission to upload hers from Minneapolis 2022 below). Sometimes, athletes will just add their notes to a training log rather than use the postcard at all.

These postcards can serve as a foundation for conversations about training, psychology, or motivations. More often than not, they kick-start the ‘goal pyramid’ for the next season. It’s important to that athletes are taking something away from every event or trip they qualify for, and using new trips and teams as motivation to keep improving. In the teenage ski world it feels like the arrival fallacy is never more prevalent than two key milestones our sport has put on pedestals: Junior Nationals qualification and a spot on a collegiate ski team.

But this whole learning experience and arrival fallacy applies to me as a coach, too. Here we are after one of the most successful JN trips ever as a team: The last race was on Saturday, and on this Wednesday evening I have only just started to put down some of these notes for real. It’s as if I needed a window of multiple days just to process what this all means for:

• MNC as a club
• Me as a coach
• These skiers as athletes

And above all else, it is taking some time to ponder where the hell do we go from here? 

I think it makes sense to follow my own advice here, and go with the postcard method. What are some of my takeaways from JNs? What did I learn, or what can we learn as a club, to take forward? Here are a few bullet points I’d jot onto my Lake Placid 2024 postcard:

1. “Racing Fast vs Racing Hard”

The first race of JNs was brutal. A few inches of fresh dry powder, a howling cold wind, and the toughest course I have ever seen. You never doubt your own athletes and their abilities, but in a realistic sense I already knew before it started that our club on the whole might struggle a bit in these circumstances. I also had a hunch about which clubs or athletes from other clubs or regions might excel, and for the most part this all came to fruition.

Our team loves the nuances of training and technique. We invent new drills and names for the types of tweaks and body positioning that the top skiers are on the cutting-edge of. We record and watch countless videos of ourselves skiing. We put on klister or suffer through slippery classic conditions when others switch to skate or throw in the towel. We have a comprehensive strength program that has a huge amount of buy-in from the athletes even though we don’t have our own gym.

All of this generally helps us excel in New England conditions. Icy snow? Tricky downhills? Challenging kickwax? No problem for us.

But it’s easy to forget that lots of other types of skiing exist out there. Although you wouldn’t know it by this past winter, powder snow does still fall in parts of the world (and occasionally, our part of the world). And the tougher the courses get, the less your technique relates to your result and the more your fitness determines your destiny.

Jonah: “All I could hear was the whipping wind and the sound of my exhausted breath”

Although we had some epic performances on day one, it was on the whole our weakest day as a club. In reflecting on it with Justin Beckwith back at the coach cabin later that night, he summed up things in a simple way.

“What you’re saying is, your kids can race fast but they can’t always race hard.”

It’s an age-old practice to “train your weaknesses, and race to your strengths” and I think over the past few years, we have really honed-in on our strengths and developed them to new heights. Climate change, combined with the direction ski courses and formats are going, has then handed us situations that play into our hands. We’ve identified what it takes to ski well in New England conditions and at Eastern Cups specifically, and this has allowed us to enjoy a lot of success: more often than not we get to rely on our strengths in higher and higher percentages of the races we do.

So while we’ve essentially conquered some of the hardest aspects of ski training, I may have spent the past few years neglecting the real basics. Can we dig deep? Can we throw technique out the window and just hang on when the going gets tough? What does that look like physiologically? What does it feel like psychologically? When do we save some money on lactate test strips and just test the boundaries of effort itself?

It feels like this is a simple thing to work on, but we can’t just go do a bunch of hard uphill running or L4 rollerski intervals to failure and magically unlock this ability. There are emotional factors at play, and one club in particular has the code cracked pretty well…

2. Ford Sayre races with HEART

Funny how one concept leads into another, right? We’ve spent a good deal of time with Ford Sayre this year, starting with US Nationals when we joined forces out in Utah.

Hilary McNamee, Ford Sayre’s head coach, has an awesome way of keeping everything in perspective. She’s super deadpan, disarmingly direct, and along with Cate Brams is the coach out there most able to help me keep perspective in a stressful moment.

Hilary is also an awesome leader in that she expects a lot of her skiers, and puts the onus on them to work together and grow as people. I’m often an “enabler” willing to cook, clean, wax, and generally cater to the small details of training camps and race weeks with the rationale that “it’s what the athletes need to perform their best, and it’s my job to help them perform their best.”

In the past, I’ve used this scene from 101 Dalmatians to describe my life at camps and race trips from time-to-time, diligently sweeping up after the chaos to ensure order.

By contrast, Hilary will be waxing in the trailer and realize that it is getting a bit late. She’ll look up a recipe online, copy it into a group message to her kids, and send it along with a note that says “yo, make this for dinner, alright?”

Ford Sayre skiers have a detailed handbook that includes codes of conduct (for athletes and coaches) as well as expectations and even an application to the program. Rather than coming across as self-serving and just boxes to be checked, it’s clear that these concepts mean something to Ford Sayre, the club’s coaches, and the leaders of the programs.

And on the racecourse, Ford Sayre skiers really charge. They were the club that I thought of immediately when I took one look at the course, the weather, and the challenge of Monday’s first JN race. And would you be at all shocked to learn that Ford Sayre was the first club to crown a National Champion? It took them (and Lea Perreard) exactly one race to earn a title, with a victory in the U16 women’s 5km.

What’s more, Hilary was there to witness it, having coached the whole weekend before at U16 Championships, electing to brave a snowstorm and drive right over for this race, too. Watching her and Coach Andy Rightmire hug it out with joy at that finish was inspiring and emotional, regardless of having MNC win several titles in past (and current) years. It set my reflective tone for the rest of the week.

Throughout the championship, Ford Sayre kids outperformed those around them with what I can only describe as heart and you could see it across every finish line. That comes from their personal investment, their sense of pride in their club and sport, and their love for each other. When the course and conditions for the relay were brutal slush and the hill profile as daunting as ever, was it a surprise that the relay team with 3 Ford Sayre skiers finished on the podium, beating the “on paper” stronger New England team seeded ahead of them? No way.

And to close the book on a club with heart, what did they do on the last morning? The Ford Sayre kids competing at JNs all woke up at 5am just so they could get in their van and drive all the way to Holderness in time to catch their teammates at the very last race of Eastern HS Championships.

Now, before this gets read as me being disappointed in our own skiers, please take note…I am beyond proud and amazed at everything our MNC skiers can do. They are incredible athletes, kind teammates, respectful competitors, and great friends. This has nothing to do with talking down our own skiers, but rather recognizing when other programs that are actually very similar to our own have captured something a little bit magical…because I think we can all learn from that!

3. MNC has come a long way

We’ve had a number of skiers at JNs for years now. It was 2018 when we broke the barrier of never having a female athlete qualify for these championships (shoutout to Ali and Magda). We had 4 athletes qualify in 2019, then 6 in 2020, 2022, and 2023, respectively (2021 being cancelled). Hitting 10 athletes was unreal, and is it a high water mark? Possibly, just given the statistics of it all. But to think like that would be a disservice to the depth that this club has come to race with.

Every age group was represented, which says a few different things…we can support athletes at different stages of their career. We can adapt and meet the needs of different school and transportation and social and developmental requirements (middle school through college). It also bodes well for the future because it means that no matter how old or what grade you were in this year, a teammate in that same grade or age group was on this trip and hopefully now returns with some new experiences and lessons to share and broaden our collective knowledge and energy.

We also had representation and strong efforts at U16 and EHS Championships, speaking to the depth of NENSA programming. So while growth in JN participation is great, an added benefit is the trickle-down effect to our club as a whole.

It’s a big honor to be able to have MNC represented on all of these stages, and we have a group that really does that honor some justice.