Things have been crazy since the last time I posted… We finished up racing the second half of spring series, which ended up going really well for me. I held my own in that brutal hillclimb up the SugarBowl alpine resort, and actually moved up a spot to finish as the 9^th overall male in that whole Tour, which was great for me. I was pretty psyched about that, because hillclimbs are not my strong suit.

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But I was even more surprised, and even more stoked, to finish as the 4^th American in the 50k National Championship race!! I went into that race with absolutely no expectations, and my main goal was just not to think about the race at all and just ski. I ended up keeping it pretty relaxed, and after a while I was skiing in the lead pack of six of Kris Freeman, Andy Newell, Tad Elliot, Erik Bjornsen, Norwegian Einar Ulsund, and myself:

I’m in the back of this pack… (pic from Fasterskier video)

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It was arguably one of the best distance results of my career, and although the conditions were so slow, so hot, and really agonizingly uncomfortable, I was able to push through it. My APU Nordic wax crew did an absolutely phenomenal job with my skis that day, which beyond just the physical feeling of the skis working well underneath you, gives you so much confidence in the middle of the race. This result was really good for me because it will give a lot, lot more confidence for future marathon races.

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After getting home from all that racing in Cali, I headed up north for another week with the NANA Nordic rural ski program. If you haven’t heard about this incredible organization, I did a photo-blog about a trip I did with them earlier this year, which you can see HERE. I will be posting another blog dedicated to this most recent trip sometime very soon… I hope you will check it out.

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The crust skiing around here has been unreal. We have tons of snow again this year, and the conditions are just getting good. It is so fun to rip around through the mountains and glaciers on race skis, and you can get back into some awesome terrain in just an hour or two. Here is a really sick video (its mandatory that you watch it) that my good friend Eric Packer made from a couple skis we did a couple of days ago. (Change the quality to 720 or 1080 if you have good internet, it looks SOOO good that way, by clicking on the little gear icon in the lower right of the video)

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I also have been doing a bunch of backcountry and alpine skiing, and the conditions have been unreal for that. I will be posting a really, really awesome video pretty soon about a day I went… PLANE SKIING!! (Imagine heli-skiing, but with an airplane). That will be coming soon in another post too.

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Thanks for reading! Hope you’re having a good spring!

Yesterday, nearly every one of us xc racers previewed today’s hill-climb course… on alpine skis! Since the SugarBowl resort wouldn’t allow us to xc ski on the course, which takes up a few of their alpine runs, they made up for it by hooking everybody up with lift tickets and rentals so that we could get an idea of the monster that we would be going up.

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Heres a very quick video of a few of us skiing the hill-climb course:

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More to come, thanks for reading!

About a week ago, I traveled down to California to get ready for the very last big races of the year. The season always finishes up with a series of SuperTour races called Spring Series, and they are usually some of the most fun races of the year. The weather is usually warm and sunny, and so although everyone is pretty exhausted from a long winter with so much racing and travel, we all usually find a way to get psyched again.

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On the way down here, I had a flight cancelled, which was a bit of a bummer… but I got to hang out with my uncle for a day on Seattle, and drive his Harley Fatboy around. After the first few minutes on that thing, I started calculating how much I could sell my fleet of skis for…

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The races are going to be happening in Truckee, and the first couple days here at this high elevation meant some pretty easy training. This area is famous for its incredible snowfall (after all, this is where the Donner Party got buried in a storm and resorted to eating each other), and also its great weather.

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Because of all this snow and great weather, I was able to go crust skiing with a few of my teammates on one of the first days here. Here is a little video with some highlights from that gorgeous day:

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Skipping rocks on Donner Lake after a morning ski:

photo – Becca Rorabaugh

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Because it’s high up in the mountains, the night skies can be pretty impressive. I went out on one of the hills overlooking Donner Lake and the highway, and took this 3 minute exposure looking West. The color hasn’t been enhanced at all; the yellow on the left is either vague city glow from Sacramento reflecting on the high clouds, or some sort of night lights at the SugarBowl ski area, and the blue on the right is the moon rising behind the mountains, lighting up the clouds:

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Due to combination of this areas insane snowfall and sunny weather, even down low there are little pockets of snow everywhere… like the one just below our deck. It makes a great landing:

photo – Erik Bjornsen

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As you can imagine, being on a ski trip during April fools can get interesting… Here, Forrest sits proudly as Pete inspects the frozen dome that contains all of his underwear:

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The first week of training here has been a very mix of weather, but a lot of it has been nice. I would really like to give a shout out to one of my biggest sponsors, PDC Engineers, for their support of my racing this season. It is very difficult to support myself as I travel to all of these elite races, and support from my sponsors is absolutely critical to making it all possible. THANKS PDC!!!

photo – Forrest Mahlen

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Today was the first race, the prologue (3.3k skate individual start). It was an incredibly wet, rainy, and sometimes snowy day out there. Personally, I had a pretty decent race, and besides a minor crash, executed it pretty well. My team-mate Erik Bjornsen laid down an incredible run, winning by about 15 seconds. So I am pretty content with where I ended up in 19^th, about 14 seconds out of 2^nd.

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Tomorrow is a 15k mass start which should be both exciting and excruciating. I will post more about the races soon.

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Thanks for reading!

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After spending some time in Fairbanks, I got to be a part of one of the coolest things I get to do as a professional skier. As an ambassador for the NANA Nordic program, which was founded by Olympian Lars Flora and had its inaugural season last year, I get to be involved with something incredibly inspiring.

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The idea behind the program is to introduce and promote skiing to the kids who live in the villages of the Norwest Alaska region. There is a lot more to it than that though, and you can learn more about this one-of-a-kind project HERE, at NANANordic.com.

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About two weeks ago, I went up to the village of Kiana for the annual NANA shareholders meeting, and to ski with all of the kids that were in town for the weekend of events. Kiana is way, way up there in northern Alaska, and to get there you fly through the hub of Kotzebue, which I think has around 3000 people. Here is a map of Alaska with both of those places shown:

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Kotzebue is right on the coast, with nothing but thousands of miles of sea ice in one direction and thousands of miles of barren, snow-covered arctic land in the other. Flying into Kotzebue:

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While hanging out there in Kotzebue for a couple hours waiting to get on our small plane flight over to Kiana, I got invited in to a locals house, where I got an glimpse inside Alaska’s biggest sporting event, and one of its superstars. John Baker is the current course record holder for the Iditarod sled dog race, which is the biggest sled dog race in the world, and he lives and trains his teams in Kotzebue. I got to see the impressive meal setup that he and his food manager have devised for quickly fueling himself for weeks out on the trail during a race. His meals are a mix of traditional Alaska Native foods common in the northern regions, and the nutritional balance is carefully considered, as well as being setup so that the meal can be eaten as quickly as possible or even while piloting the dog sled:

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And I got to visit his dog lot… It is awesome to see the absolute best endurance canine athletes in the world. These dogs can run, pulling a sled, for weeks on end through the most intense winter weather. These are record setting sled dogs:

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After that stop-over, we flew to the village of Kiana, which sits on a branch of the Kobuk river:

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Landing in a village is a pretty unique experience. The locals drive out onto the strip with their snowmachines and help unload the plane, piling the gear into traditional sleds or maybe one of the few trucks in town. And then you jump into one of the snowmachine sleds and they pull you take you to wherever you need to go.

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As part of the program, we bring a full fleet of skis, boots, and poles from village to village, so that we can be sure to outfit every kid. The goal is to make the skiing a sustainable activity, and so last years fleet was split up and sent to the school in each village to keep, giving the kids a way to go skiing any time they want. Of course, it gets pretty crazy to be dealing with hundreds of pairs of skis, boots, and poles at a time, and so a huge thank you goes to Fischer for their awesome support of this project.

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Laying out a fraction of this years fleet:

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The biggest reason for this whole operation is to bring a fun, positive activity to the kids in these remote places. Many of them have never skied, despite living in wintry conditions for a majority of the year. It is hard to describe how fun it is to watch these kids tackle something new and to succeed in their challenges. I consider myself very lucky to get to opportunity to help inspire these kids; it’s very rewarding to hang out with them, and to show them that although something may seem difficult at first, that doesn’t mean it won’t be worth it. They get so much joy from something as simple as skiing, and its infectious.

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Coach Erika with a few of the kids:

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One of the reasons this program has been so successful is in the approach. We aren’t there to regulate or reprimand these kids; only to hang out, have fun, encourage, and teach them how to ski, and they indentify with that incredibly well. The world that they live in is very different from ours, and it’s great  to keep it simple and just connect with them through skiing.

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Me, hanging out with some of the kids between ski sessions:

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It’s also incredible to get to see a part of their way of life. They have lived a subsistence lifestyle for so long, and there are a lot of those traditions that still survive. Like the eating of muktuk, which is just the chopped up layer of whale fat and skin. It is eaten raw, and has a chewy texture and can taste anywhere from super strong to somewhat neutral. The black part is actually the whale skin, which is at least 1cm thick, and the pink part is an outer layer of fat. I got to sample plenty of it, and this version was very good:

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All in all, it was an awesome trip. We had great weather (meaning cold but sunny), and I got to hang out with a lot of awesome kids and do some fun skiing. I will be going back up to the region for another trip at the end of April, and I am really looking forward to it!

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Now I’m down in California getting ready for the last races of the season, Spring Series. We are going to be racing at Auburn Ski Club and Royal Gorge in Truckee. I will be posting a blog from down here very soon.

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Thanks for reading!

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I am doing one more quick post letting people know about two cool things that are still in action from Junior Nationals in Fairbanks…

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First, if you are one of the countless people who wanted to buy one of those sweet custom Junior National commemorative E’Klaar beanies but weren’t able to because of the fact that they all sold out before the first race even started… don’t worry, there’s another chance! E’Klaar is doing another run of them, and you can order them HERE.

right photo – Bert Boyer

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And if you weren’t there, but maybe your child was, and you want to remember the event through something cool and hip that will actually get used, instead of another grey race t shirt, then you are in luck too!! Again, click HERE to get yours, or go to EKLAAR.COM

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photo – Bert Boyer

And also, the above photo of my brother is by Bert Boyer, and is one of thousands of his amazing photographs of the events that are for sale HERE, with all proceeds going to the National Nordic Foundation (NNF). Bert takes great quality photos, and was incredibly thorough that week, loading thousands and thousands of photos onto his site. If you knew someone who was there racing, there are pictures of them in action at http://bertboyer.zenfolio.com/f490643483

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Thanks for reading! Ill be putting up another post with some adventures from the far North soon!

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After racing the Madison Super Tour sprints, I returned to Anchorage and have just been in decompression mode a little bit. I had been traveling on the road for quite a long time, almost 4 months, basically since the 10^th of November. When you go that long, racing twice a weekend for weeks on end, its really hard to do much training. So it was nice to take a little chill when I got back home, and then get back into some solid training with my focus on Spring Nationals in April.

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In the last few weeks, I’ve gotten to do some cool media events here in Anchorage. First, I got to be part of a ConocoPhillips advertisement shoot, where we did some posed waxing and skiing. It’s going to be a TV ad featuring some of us APU Nordic Ski Center athletes and ConocoPhillips employees. It was the biggest scale shoot I had been a part of, and it was sweet to see how it all happens; so many people, cameras, and light setups everywhere.

Waiting to run through another “waxing” shoot

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Part of the film crew watching me ski through the viewfinder

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I also got to drop the first puck at an Aces game. If you aren’t from Alaska, the Aces are our pro hockey team, and they have been at the top of the league in the last few years. They had a whole APU night there at the game, and we got to hang out in the VIP lounge before and after the game, eating the unlimited food, which was pretty awesome. Fellow Elite Team member Lauren Fritz and I walked out to center ice and got things rolling with our ceremonial drop:

photo – Alaska Aces

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Now, I am up in Fairbanks at Junior Nationals, watching and cheering. It’s been fun to hang out with all my friends and get them pumped for their races. My brother is racing in his last JNs, and its been fun to be a part of.

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Local photographer and longtime ski parent Bert Boyer is taking his usual awesome pictures of these races, and is doing something awesome… they are for sale on his website, and he is donating all of the money to the NNF. This is an amazing, gracious gesture, and I hope that all of you athletes and parents that want photos from JOS will buy them from Bert. You can see them, and purchase them, HERE, or go to:

 http://bertboyer.zenfolio.com/f490643483

Thanks for reading!

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After returning to the States from racing in Europe, I spent a few days in the Twin Cities before driving to Madison for the SuperTour Sprints there. Besides being totally wacked out on Euro time, I was pretty stoked for the weekend of city sprinting in Wisconsin’s capitol city.

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Driving into the city and seeing the capitol building that we would be racing one block around made me realize how sweet this was going to be. The race course is between here and that incredible dome:

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They trucked in a ton of snow that had been purposely made for this event, and laid it down the night before the first race. The course was a perfect square, meaning that we would make four 90 degree right turns, keeping the massive stone capitol building, completed in 1917, always on our right during the race.

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Saturday was a classic sprint, which was perhaps a bit optimistic given the extreme flatness of the course. In truth, it was a double-pole sprint; I don’t think anyone used classic skis, choosing instead to just go on skate skis. There was one very slight uphill, but it was far from necessitating striding.

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Double poling the qualifier:

photo – Renee Callaway

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One of the tricks with a double pole sprint is resisting the urge to skate. It’s inevitable that there will be a lot of very aggressive, shall we say, turning technique, out there. Here, leading my quarterfinal:

photo – Renee Callaway

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In the end, I had a pretty good day, ending up third overall. I was impressed with how well the course actually skied, and how fair it really was. The tracks themselves were about as fast as out of them, so people were able to make passes and change order without being totally blocked by whoever was in front. The Russian guy that won was very strong, and I was happy to be able to keep it pretty close and get on the podium:

photo – Renee Callaway

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There are a lot cool things about racing in a city. One of them is that you get to have some unconventional experiences that you don’t normally associate with ski racing. For example, because there is no place to ski besides the race course, you do a lot of running for warming up and cooling down. This means that that in a trendy, active town like Madison, you are running down little streets packed with cafes and restaurants and shops between races. It means you can duck into some little hole-in-the-wall and grab a hot pasty for $4 within 5 minutes of crossing the finish line:

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There was a lot of cool stuff going on in that town. There were a lot of cool things to do, places to go, and culture to experience. But I had a hard time believing there was that much culture… Pizza drivers with health insurance and 401ks? What!!??

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Sunday was a skate sprint… I think I can say that it was the shortest sprint I have ever done. We did the qualifier in 1:40, and the top 8 were within 1 second. In the rounds, I was feeling really snappy, and made it through my quarter just fine. Disaster struck in my semi, when Karl Nygren and I went into one of the corners together and made some serious contact, and he just leveled me. I had both poles and a binding shattered in a single instant, and I slid to a stop near the cement street.

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Ripping the gradual climb, just before the big wipeout:

photo – Renee Callaway

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So, I didn’t make the A final, but I was a weird mix of bummed and fired up, so went for some revenge and won the B final. I was pretty bummed not to get to show my stuff in the A final, but hey, what can you do… In all, it was a pretty good weekend. It was an awesome event, and I was content with my 3^rd and 5^th places. I want to say thank you to CXC for being great hosts, and especially Igor and Andy for waxing my skis. I have huge respect for coaches who help out athletes from other teams.

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Driving back to the Twin Cities, getting yet another “Midwestern cultural experience” at a Culvers… fried cheese curds as fast food! What!?

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In other news… if you are in Alaska and you like skiing, you should come to this sweet thing we are having on Thursday at APU. We are going to hang out and watch the World Champs, eat a ton of good pizza, and just have fun! So come!

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Thanks for reading! I am now heading back to Alaska for the first time (besides 4 days) since November 10^th. It will be nice to be home and not be living out of this tiny suitcase.

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After flying into Riga, Latvia and then driving to the small town of Madona, I had about a week to try to adjust to the time zone and eating schedule changes before we started racing. It’s amazing how the nuances of completely flipping your bodies cycle on its head can linger, all of it affecting your athletic performance in some way. The daily cycle of training can be a strong catalyst for helping your body to adapt though, so I tried to keep the workouts regular.

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That means skiing in the morning, and running in the evening, often exploring the nooks and crannies of these very Soviet, communist feeling places on foot in the dark.

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The local, apparently sod-burning powerplant at night:

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Compensating for all of the cold cement and brick structures, is the bright hardwood of some of the newer buildings. And the gravy; the Latvians are the kings of gravy. Potatoes, rice, macaroni… fish, schnitzel, pork, beef… all doused with a heavy dose of gravy, every meal:

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While that may almost classify as comfort food, there are still some strange flavors out there. Forest mushroom potato chips:

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The races are part of the Scando Cup series, which is the Continental Cup for the Scandic area. The start lists are full of Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Estonians, and Latvians vying for spots on the World Cup, and the competition is intense.

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Eric Packer and I with our favorite gloves! You can see more cool image of Toko athletes and operations around the world HERE:

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I raced a 10k classic first, and that actually went surprisingly well. I think I ended up 24^th, which was the first time I had made a top-30 at one of these Scando Cups. The course was very difficult, and so I was really happy with that result. I was only about 20 seconds out of the top-10, which is encouraging because with small improvements, I think can be competitive with some of the best.

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The mens leaders, including multiple World Junior Champions, World Cup skiers, and Tour de Ski athletes, charging into the final few kilometers of the 20k skate.

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There was this sweet van that would come on race days… At first glance it looks like an ambulance, but then, why the rooster? Mobile high-viz timing unit?

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Next it was on to Estonia, for a weekend of sprints. The ski venue was kind of out in the middle of nowhere, with its own hotel, so we had to stock up on some extraneous goodies before we got there, which including the famous European stroopwaffle, which a good portion of our crew can consume by the handful daily:

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These sprint races didn’t really go as I was hoping they would. I have been close to making the heats in these races before, and so I was really hoping to do it this time. However, with fields this deep and this competitive (hands down the best field I have ever raced in besides World Cups), it takes everything going 100% right to be in there, and I just couldn’t quite get it all together. For example, in the skate sprint I was 7 seconds off the leader, in like 44^th place. However, it is always good (in the long run at least) to have these kinds of experiences, the ones that are not rewarding but do offer small glimmers of hope.

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One person who’s glimmer of hope is insanely bright right now is Sophie Caldwell. She is on a roll, and is heading into the Davos World Cups and World Champs skiing very well right now. She had an awesome day in the skate sprint, making it through to the final and getting 2^nd place!

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One last, but very important thing… we made a video. A music video. Basically, when youre kind of out in the middle of nowhere in the Baltic countries, you can get bored. So, we tried to be un-bored. Ridiculous:

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Thanks for reading!

So, I have been all over the place since posting last. After nationals in Utah, I spent about a week and a half in Steamboat Springs, CO. It was actually my first time there, and I was impressed; although it was pretty cold, the skiing was great and the setup that the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club has there is awesome. I have been racing multiple times a week since November, and so it was really nice to just take a little block to train and not have to get fired up for racing. One of the goals was to regroup after my lackluster Nationals and get ready for the Tour de Twin Cities that was coming up.

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Driving to Denver to fly east:

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My next destination was also a first, sort of. I headed out to Minneapolis to race there for the first time, in the 5 race series of Supertours called the Tour de Twin Cities. Skiing in the middle of such a huge city is certainly a very different feel than normal. Not exactly Rumford:

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Being a series of races held over two weekends, it gave us a little time to check out the city and to get some of that culture!

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Like a Timberwolves game… Nothing like watching guys make tens of millions of dollars doing something that is about as demanding as testing a few a few pairs of skis before your race:

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We were staying really close to the trails at Wirth Park, which was nice. It’s pretty sweet when you are in a 3 minute circle that contains the ski trails, the grocery store, and a nice house to live in. Our hosts has an awesome cat that was obsessed with milk, and would jump over some sizeable gaps to get it. I took some pics of him mid flight, which you can see HERE.

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There were five races, but they were also all part of a mini-tour, which means that the times from each race are added up, and places awarded that overall cumulative time as well as each individual SuperTour race (or stage). There were 4 distance races and 1 sprint, and I was hoping to do really well in the sprint. I did end up having a pretty good day, getting 3^rd overall, but it was even more surprising when I won the 10k the next day!

photo – Mark Iverson

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That was my first distance SuperTour win, and only my second win ever, so it was pretty fun to do something that felt new. You can read more about the race HERE.

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That week of racing was really fun because a lot of my teammates were doing so well. Mark Iverson put together an impressive string of races to finish 2^nd overall in the whole Tour, and Rosie Brennan won the women’s tour.

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After all of those races, I got my stuff together and did the long travel over to Europe. I am over here for some Scando Cup races, which are basically one step below the World Cup. It will be a pretty short trip, just about two weeks, and the travel and jet lag are pretty intense, but hopefully it will be worth it.

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Hundreds and hundreds of millions of people wanting to go places, to do things, every day… requires a lot of infrastructure. Machinery at work in Amsterdam, building some more of it:

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I arrived in Riga, Latvia a few days ago and have been training in the small town of Madona since. And petting the local stray cats:

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I realize this post is very cat-heavy. Newell, you reading this?

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There’s a group of Americans over here getting prepped for these upcoming races, which should have pretty competitive fields. We have some distance races mid-week and then two sprints on the weekends. I will be posting more from here shortly.

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Thanks for reading!

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