Star Tribune
Cross-country skiing sees boom — even as your body screams at you to stop
It’ll be the first cross-country skiing World Cup event on U.S. soil in more than two decades, and it’ll be in her home state. So Jessie Diggins plans to race especially hard at this weekend’s Loppet Cup at Theodore Wirth Park in Minneapolis.
And when Diggins, the Afton native who has become the most decorated American cross-country skier of all time, races really hard, her insides can start feeling a little dicey. She goes numb from the waist down. Her breathing turns labored, her vision turns pink. More than once, her contacts have frozen to her eyeballs. If the 32-year-old Olympic gold medalist goes really deep into her “pain cave,” sounds become muffled. Lying in the snow after the finish, her world spins. She can get close to “bonking,” when the body uses up all its glycogen and loses physical and mental function, approaching delirium.
“It’s probably not very good for me, actually,” Diggins said on a recent media call ahead of the event. “But that’s a big part of the sport. So much of it is how much are you willing to suffer.”
Some 30,000 spectators will watch the world’s best cross-country skiers compete this weekend, and it comes at a time when cross-country skiing, also known as Nordic skiing, is having a bit of a moment (notwithstanding Minnesota’s very un-wintery winter).
What the New Yorker magazine called “the world’s most taxing sport” has seen a recent burst in popularity, especially in Minnesota. Ski aficionados point to a number of reasons for this.
About a decade ago, Elm Creek in Maple Grove became one of the first dedicated cross-country ski operations in the country to make its own snow. Three other trail systems in the metro area have since added snowmaking operations, boosting the Twin Cities’ reputation as the largest urban cross-country ski market in the world.
“Nowhere else in North America has this many snowmaking venues for Nordic skiing,” said Bruce Adelsman, who runs Skinnyski.com, a trail report website focused on the Upper Midwest. “We’re spoiled by it.”
Diggins’ 2018 Olympic gold in the team sprint, America’s first-ever cross-country gold, helped fuel growth — especially among girls, and especially in Minnesota. The year after, the Minnesota Youth Ski League saw a 35% rise in membership, then 25% more growth the next year. Two winters later, after the pandemic forced people outside and saw more people invest in equipment, league participation jumped another 30%. Its membership has doubled since 2018, to 4,000 youth skiers statewide.
Nationally, nearly 8,000 high schoolers participate in cross-country skiing, according to an annual survey — with nearly half of those in Minnesota.
“We’ve had a real modernization in the culture and attitude of Nordic skiing,” said Amy Cichanowski, executive director of the Minnesota Youth Ski League, which is at the bottom of the sport’s developmental pyramid. “We were typically viewed as very old-fashioned, still in our knickers and with heavy equipment. But 10 years ago it turned into more of a fitness focus. And with manufactured snow, skiing became more of a sure thing every winter.”
That fitness focus stems from sports science’s increasing recognition of the health benefits of cross-country skiing. That has turned the sport’s grueling nature into a feature, not a bug.
Stephen Seiler, a Norway-based exercise physiologist who studies endurance training, points to two endurance sports that constantly use all four limbs and the core: cross-country skiing — for both the classic and the skate disciplines — and rowing. Those two quadrupedal endurance sports are among the best ways to push the human heart to maximum oxygen delivery, Seiler said, because so much muscle mass is activated simultaneously.
“If you’re not in shape for it, it’s the most brutal truthteller you can experience,” Seiler said. “There’s nowhere to hide. Your entire body is tired. Your upper body, your lower body, everything just gets beat up if you’re not trained for it. But it’s all about giving the brain a bit of a high.”
That exhausting, exhilarating feeling is what the world’s elite skiers chase in training and in races.
“It’s this really special skill, teaching yourself how to completely exhaust yourself to the point you can’t stand up anymore,” said Kristen Bourne, a Twin Cities native who coaches U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s cross country D-Team, or developmental team. “It’s kind of sick, actually. But when you experience that, it’s almost addicting. It’s like, ‘Wow, I’m really powerful.'”
Lydia Kraker didn’t join the Nordic ski team at Duluth East High School, one of Minnesota’s top Nordic ski programs, because she wanted to push her body to its limit. She joined back in seventh grade, right after Diggins’ gold, simply because a bunch of friends were joining. It seemed fun.
Since then, it’s become an obsession for Kraker, now a senior. She skis five or six days a week with some of the 120 boys and girls on Duluth East’s team. One day her sophomore year, she joined teammates for a 100-kilometer race at the Korkki Nordic Ski Center between Duluth and Two Harbors, just to see if they could finish. Her junior year, Duluth East’s girls team won the state meet. On Wednesday at state at Giants Ridge in Biwabik, she placed fifth overall in the girls pursuit, and on Thursday her team again won state. Kraker is heading to Colby College in Maine next year to ski for their well-regarded team.
She’s fallen in love with the sport’s most difficult parts.
“I feel horrible when I’m racing, but I love how I feel after,” Kraker said. “You gotta tell every instinct in your body that says ‘Stop! It hurts!’ — you gotta ignore that and keep pushing. Sometimes I barely can get across the finish line. At some point it’s whoever can do it mentally. … Your body shuts down a lot of basic functions when you’re racing, then your body has to all start back up again. And afterward you feel so incredibly accomplished.”
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 11,000 bridges in communities across America are finally getting the repairs they’ve long needed with funding from our infrastructure law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a news release. He said the bridge repairs ensure “people and goods can get where they need to go, safely and efficiently.”
A 19-year-old driver trying to get around slower vehicles collided head-on with an SUV in Wright County and killed one person and injured several others, officials said Thursday.
SUV passenger Janice Evelyn Johnson, 92, of Arden Hills, died Monday at HCMC from injuries she suffered in the collision on Oct. 22 in Monticello Township on County Road 37 near County Road 12, the Sheriff’s Office said in a search warrant affidavit filed in Hennepin County District Court.
The driver and two other people in the SUV survived their injuries, according to the affidavit, which the Sheriff’s Office filed to collect Johnson’s medical records at HCMC as part of its investigation.
According to the affidavit:
Deputies arrived at the crash scene and spoke with the car’s driver, Christian Kabunangu, of Brooklyn Park, who said he was heading west on County Road 37 and found himself behind two vehicles traveling below the speed limit.
“He was late for work, so he decided to pass them,” the affidavit read. Kabunangu said he saw the oncoming SUV and estimated it was about a half-mile down the road.
As he attempted to pass one of the slower vehicles, he explained, the other driver “sped up, preventing him from getting back into the westbound lane,” the filing continued.
As the Honda drew near, he swerved to the left, but the SUV did the same and they collided.
Star Tribune
University of Minnesota researchers find that native plants can beat invasive buckthorn on their own turf.
If the invasive buckthorn that is strangling the life out of Minnesota’s forest floor has a weakness, it is right now, in the shortening daylight of the late fall.
With a little help and planning, certain native plants have the best chance of beating buckthorn back and helping to eradicate it from the woods, according to new research from the University of Minnesota.
The sprawling bush has been one of the most formidable invasive species to take root in Minnesota since it was brought from Europe in the mid-1800s. It was prized as an ornamental privacy hedge. All the attributes that make buckthorn good at that job — dense thick leaves that stay late into the fall, toughness and resilience to damage and pruning, unappealing taste to wildlife and herbivores — have allowed it to thrive in the wild.
It grows fast and thick, out-competing the vast majority of native plants and shrubs for sunlight and then starving them under its shade. It creates damaging feedback loops, providing ideal habitat and calcium-rich food for invasive earthworms, which in turn kill off and uproot native plants. That leaves even less competition for buckthorn to take root, said Mike Schuster, a researcher for the university’s Department of Forest Resources.
When it takes over a natural area, buckthorn creates a “green desert,” Schuster said. “All that’s left is just a perpetual hedge, with little biodiversity.”
Since the 1990s, when the spread became impossible to ignore, Minnesota foresters, park managers and cities have spent millions of dollars a year trying to beat it back. They’ve used chainsaws and trimmers, poisons and herbicides, and even goats for hire. The buckthorn almost always grows back within a few years.
It’s been so pervasive that a conventional wisdom formed that buckthorn seeds could survive dormant in the soil for up to six years. That thought has led to a sort of fatalism: even if the plant were entirely removed from a property there would be a looming threat that it would sprout back, Schuster said.
But there is nothing special about buckthorn seeds. They only survive for a year or two.
