A Month of Many Highlights....

Wow, it seems as though quite a lot has happened since my last update at US National Championships!

The biggest news is that I will get to become a student at University of Utah's doctorate of Physical Therapy program, which is my top choice for grad school! I will begin the 3 year program in May and I am psyched!

I realize an update is long-overdue, but Im going to touch on some of the highlights from the past 5 weeks:

Spending time with my teammates and getting to see them dominate the racing scene! Above a number of us are with Betty, our B&B host in Maine.

Here's Fitz, Holly, and Morgan after their Supertour podium sweep the former Olympic ski jumping complex in Lake Placid, NY.

Discovering teammate Kikkan Randall climbed to the top of the overall World Cup Sprint standings! (Associated Press photo).

Getting to see the enthusiasm from the skiing community at the Fast and Female event in Maine. I joined many of the nations top female racers after US National Championships to volunteer-coach the up an coming skiers of the east coast.

In addition to skiing, doing Zumba, yoga, eating, and speaking with the girls in the full-day event I enjoyed the unexpected moments, such as:

Me: "Hi, I'm Katie. What's your name?

Nina: "Nina"

Me: "Did you know that there was an American Olympic xc skier named Nina too?"

Nina: "Yeah... I'm named after her. She won US National Championships here the day before I was born."

It is pretty awesome to see such an enthusiastic skiing culture all over the country. I also enjoyed hearing comments like, "That 4 hour drive this morning was so worth it for getting to be here!"

Here I am signing autographs. There were plenty of shirts and posters to go around, so we had happily sore hands from signing those by the time the day was over. Thanks to all the sponsors and organizers (especially NENSA's Abby Weissman) for making the event happen!

After my interviews in Utah getting to go on the "Interconnect" Ski Utah Tour with Deb Lovci (one of my generous hosts) and Chrispi as our guides. Pictured above is Morgan, myself, and Mindy... Check this out if you're in Utah-- it's an incredible tour that connects 6 resorts in one day, starting in Deer Valley and finishing in Snowbird down near Salt Lake.

Visiting my boyfriend Justin and backcountry skiing among the highest mountains in Southern California...
while hooting, hollering, and laughing all along the way with Morgan and Stefanie.

Racing in the co-ed Team Sprints in down town Sun Valley, Idaho.

I paired up with Mikey Sinnott (#1), who may be Sun Valley's Olympic Development Team (a different club team), but we have grown up racing and traveling abroad to represent the USA on J1 Scandinavian Cup trips, World Junior Championships or European Cups for more than a decade! (Geez, Im only 25 but am starting to sound old...)

It was very fun to race a city sprint again, with live music, fire pits, and lots of people cheering!! Thanks to Joshua Wells for taking all these city sprint photos!

After the preliminary races, we had the "finals", where each of us raced a fast 1k loop 3x. The guys started us off and Mikey tagged off to me into a perfect position.

The ladies got to take the final glory lap, where the win was $1,000! Here I am getting to bring in the win for our duo!

A few days later I got the chance to participate in the 32k Boulder Mountain Tour, the big marathon ski race for this region (Photo Credit Ian Harvey). Congratulations to Sylvan Ellofsen and Evelyn Dong for their stellar performances!

After being on the road for all but a week since mid-November, I am thoroughly enjoying being HOME! I'm coaching as much as I can, preparing to move to Utah, and trying out the alternate varieties of Atomic skis....

It has been fun and refreshing to shift gears and shift my energy, time, and focus on to challenging new tasks and projects. I hope to update with a couple of these projects as they work themselves into fruition (hopefully) in the coming months!

THANK YOU to sponsors, family, fans, and friends who have given me constant support to make the pursuit of my skiing goals a reality. Also, thank you to those of you who have helped prepare for a future as a health care provider.

Until next time,

Katie

Ski Buddy Sign Up

Hello APU Devo, Junior skiers, and Parents,

The racing season is in full swing and we have APU skiers racing well all over the map! We may be in many different places racing at various levels, however we are ALL part of the same team-- doing incredible things in the pursuit of the fabulous sport of skiing.

I thought that a great way to stay connected and support each other would be to implement a ski-buddy system between the Elite Team and the up-and-coming racers in our junior program. The focus of this is to offer inter-team inspiration and encouragement.

This is how it will work:

*We will pair up our Elite skiers with 1-3 junior/devo skiers. All year-round and winter session members are invited to participate. The main form of communication in this "buddy system" will likely be through email, since many of the Elite/Uni skiers are often out of town racing. However, when both “buddies” are at the same ski function, they can have a chance to say "hello", cheer and support their buddy.

*You can anticipate on ~1 mode of communication per month from Jan-March 2011.

*If you are interested in participating *please email me at katieronsse(at)gmail.com ASAP. You can say for example, "Bobby Smyth is in."

Parents-- if you would like to be cc’d in your child’s buddy correspondence, please let me know.

As soon as we get a roster of everyone interested in participating, we will pair you up. You can expect to receive an email from your buddy, letting you know with whom you are paired.

*If you have any questions, concerns, or comments throughout the project, please don’t hesitate to email me at katieronsse(at) gmail.com. If you not hear from your buddy by Jan 30^th, please let me know.

This is going to be fun! Keep racing fast and hope to see you on the trails!

~Katie Ronsse

US National Championships: Classic Distance

The classic distance races kicked off here in Rumford, Maine. I can't help but brag about my teammates, since they took 1st and 2nd in both the mens and women's races and had many outstanding performances off the podium too.

Women's podium: Morgan Smyth (APU), Sadie Bjornson (APU), Morgan Arritola (US Ski Team/SVSEF).

It was Sadie's first National Championship (Kris Dobie photo). A little known fact is that Sadsarue was also a World Record holder back in the day...in the 100m skate! Sadie is a young lady loaded with talent and will likely be a big part of the future of US Skiing.

It was also great to see Morgan Smyth (above in a Kris Dobie photo) back on her A-game! Morgan is a former National Champion and former US Ski Team member but in the past has spent more than a fair share of time plagued by sickness and injury. She joined the APU team in the spring and has contributed to making our inter-team dynamic playful and fun and she has been racing wicked fast.

Here's our coach Erik Flora giving a splits and encouraging James Southam (APU) as he skis to a 2nd place overall finish. Lars Flora (APU) won and David Norris of Fairbanks, AK was 3rd! A great day for AK.

10k Classic. photo credit: Ian Harvey of Toko

As far as my personal race today, I executed my race as planned and raced my heart out-- even though my finishing result was a less than desirable. As my wise Dad once told me,

"Everyone who has ever trained hard, expected great results, and got something less knows humility was purchased for the price of a race bib."

Any day with a race bib on is a good day. A good day to test my limits and challenge myself, and a good day to celebrate the success and fitness of my teammates and competitors, if not my own.

Great job to all the racers today. Thanks to everyone out on course cheering for me, taking pictures, giving splits, and to the volunteers and coaches who made it happen.

Here I am, flattered to have Lynne Zimmerman's support. Lynn has been making the trip out to Rumford each race day to cheer me on, volunteer as needed, and take pictures! I met Lynn's daughter, Heather Zimmerman, when we both studied abroad in New Zealand and she instantly became one of my lifelong best friends and an irreplaceable adventure buddy. Since Heather retired from the CXC Elite Ski Racing Team, she has been able to fulfill her desire to devote her energy to service work in an underdeveloped nation. After working non-stop at a "real" job for a year, she saved up enough money to spend a year on a 1-year volunteer service project where she is teaching English to the Tibetans in the foothills of the Himalayas. I agree with her mom when she said, "I couldn't be prouder of her".

Thanks for reading and expect more updates soon. I can't wait to sprint again on Saturday!

Katie

The Bug

Our team chemistry this year has exceptionally fun and positive which has made training, traveling, and racing very enjoyable. As a whole, the team's results have also been outstanding. One of my teammates wrote about this very thing and explained it quite elegantly. I wanted to share it with you.

"The APU girls team definitely has something special right now. I've been trying to boil it down, put my finger on it, & identify it but I can't..... People have asked me what it is, wanting to create the same thing amongst their team(s) but I don't know that it's reproducible. Some how we have the right people, with the right chemistry, at the right time. We have great coaches, hard working, professional wax techs, and good attitudes. We live for hard workouts, we switch leads in intervals, we give each other feedback on ways that we can improve. Most people view cross country skiing as an individual sport but it can be so much more than that.

I think that good results and good attitudes are infectious and we have the bug. Once someone breaks through, everyone else starts doing well. There is a domino effect and it's awesome." - Holly Brooks

In fact, her entire blog post is very well done. You can check it out here.

Brent Knight, another teammate of mine and fellow Atomic athletes, just posted a great video introducing many of the APU athletes. Thanks for putting this together Brent. Check it out!

US National Championships: Classic Sprint

It was a phenomenal day for our women's team on the first day of US National Championships in Rumford, Maine. Teammate Holly Brooks came home with her first National Championship title and Morgan Smyth, Sadie Bjornsen, and myself were the next three Americans! As training buddies and very close friends, we were all ecstatic to get to excel together at a high level.

Morgan Smyth, Holly Brooks, Katie Ronsse, and Sadie Bjornsen right after the A-final of the 1.3k Classic Sprint (A Flying Point Road photo). Those are some truly happy smiles.

Ronsse, Brooks, Bjornsen, Smyth. Eliska Hajkova of CU actually finished 2nd, however since she is from the Czech Republic and since its a US National Championship race, they did two medal ceremonies, one in which Morgan and Sadie were awarded the silver and bronze medals. I just missed medaling as the 4th American (5th overall), but was happy to contribute to the 1-4 APU sweep!

Morgan Smyth and I giving a congratulatory hug post race (Flying Point Road photo).

Teammates Kate Fitzgerald and Becca Rorabaugh lunging for the line in the Women's B final (Andy Canniff photo).

Other members of our team had some great results as well-- both on the men's and women's side-- and results can be found at the Chisholm Ski Club's website.

APU Ladies Women's elite team: Kate Fitzgerald, Becca Rorabaugh, Katie Ronsse, Holly Brooks, Sadie Bjornsen, Morgan Smyth. We took 6 of the top 11 spots! Kikkan Randall (also an APU athlete), is the lone American woman representing the US at the Tour de Ski World Cup series right now so she couldn't be here...but she surely would've added to the teams dominant performance.

Ronsse, Brooks, Bjornsen, Smyth

It was a very rewarding day of racing, and a day I felt very fortunate to be able to share "high-fives", hear cheering, and get messages/emails from so many close friends. For example, Jan Buron and Ben Arians who coached me from age 10-20 on the Alaska Winter Stars team were out there cheering (in between supporting their current athletes), as well as my former college coaches, Dave Stewart and Hennie Kashiwa of DU. Throughout my years of training and racing, there have been a great number of people who have supported me, so I felt lucky to get to share one of the more memorable days of my skiing career with many of those people in addition to my current team.

Erik Flora (my coach) with Casey Fagerquist, Carl Schauer, Eric Strabel, Mike Matteson... a world class waxing squad. They keep very busy preparing and testing fleets of skis for each of our 26 APU athletes racing here at Nationals. I couldn't ask for better waxing support. I am also fortunate to get to choose from a rocket fast fleet of Atomic skis.

The next race has been postponed until Wednesday, as the weather is getting colder and the race organizers are expecting to be able to make snow. The organizers have done a lot of work to battle the warm temperatures and rain, which has included bringing truck loads of snow. The course wasn't exactly pristine and white, but they did a great job at making it suitable for race skis and putting in solid tracks.

Here's what the sprint course afternoon before the sprint race (fasterskier photo). This was after truck loads of snow were dumped on it, and they did A LOT of work after this as well to make the tracks race-able. I can only imagine how much work goes into putting on a high profile race such as this one. Thanks to every volunteer who is making it possible for us to race!

Here's our team having fun doing a little shoveling.

Thanks for reading,

Katie

Getting up to Speed...

I suppose its time to put up a blog post when I hear through my teammate that a junior skier approached her saying, "Katie hasn't updated her blog since November 25th! Tell her she needs to post again soon!"

A Silver Star in Silver Star, BC. An HBrooks photo.

Sometimes I feel as though there's so much higher-quality ski-racing media out there, so I push posting to the back-burner. But when I get positive feedback from others it rekindles my desire to post! As long as aspiring racers are excited to hear what I have to say and my friends and family enjoy hearing about my experiences, I will maintain this blog.

So, without further adieu, here's an update to fill you in on the highlights from the past month....

Here's the our team that was fortunate enough to spend almost 2 weeks training and racing in Silver Star, BC. Within the month of living together "on the road" there was been no shortage of good times...

And great racing too! As a team the athletes in the blue suits have been turning some heads.

Here's a shot from the start of the women's B-final at the Silver Star NorAms. We had three APU ladies in the heat-- Fitz, Wrecka, and myself-- going up against the Canadians. In the women's A-Final, we had Sadie, Holly, and Morgan representing in 2nd, 4th, and 6th!

Morgan Smyth. Rob Whitney photo.

From Silverstar we traveled to Rossland, BC to race in the 3-day mini-tour. The racing fields were small but stacked, since it served the Canadian World Championship Sprint Trials. The winner of the sprint finals on both the mens and womens side would secure their spot to race at World Championships in Oslo in February. Much of the American Supertour field also followed the circuit to these trials, because it was the best nordic competition on North American soil at the time. I think the more the top skiers in the US and Canada can challenge each other, the better we will become.

Here I am in the prelim. Thanks to Rob Whitney for all the great ski photos and cheering.

Here is the stacked quarterfinal I raced in with Taz (former National Champion), Britney Webser (2010 Olympian), Jennie Bender (3rd in Silver Star NorAm the week prior), Myself, Sadie Bjornsen (eventual race winner), and Caitlin Compton (2010 Olympian) L-R respectively. I was glad I could to advance to the next heat!

Here's my biggest fan out on course. After taking the Part-2 National Dental Board Exams early, Justin flew to Seattle, drove 7hrs through much of the night to get to the race venue, slept for a couple hours in the car at the trailhead parking lot, and was ready to enthusiastically cheer his lungs out for all 3 races. He also gave me some great tactical advice after watching all the sprint heats, which helped me win in the B-final.

Here are Casey and Erik, our coaches who are still smiling after many sleepless nights of waxing and testing our fleets of skis all month long. You wont find any harder working coaches out there.

After being on the road for quite some time, I was excited to get some R&R at home in Alaska. I was only home for a week, but couldn't have asked for a better break.

My brother, Nathan, also made it home for Christmas. Here we are cutting down our Christmas tree from my parents' backyard.

Jus and I after riding on the on our borrowed "fatbacks". The -12F temps resulted in some frosty eyelashes! I was blown away with how easy and fun it was to maneuver the snowy single track trails. I will always love skiing more than anything, but winter riding is an awesome way to mix things up and have a new mode of exploring and experiencing other trails! I am already hooked...

Nathan excited to slide tackle the 'flats.

My favorite playground will always be the mudflats behind my parents' house...

Here I am surrounded two of my favorite guys (Nathan and Justin), two of my favorite dogs (Coda and Bently), and two of my favorite features (the ocean and mountains).

Before too long, I re-packed my bags for the next racing tour, which will be at least a month long. We are staying at a beautiful farm house in "South Paris, Maine", which is about 50min from the US National Championship courses in Rumford. There will be many more updates to come, but for now I will tell you the dollar stores are awesome (we dont have those in AK) and I will leave you with this:

Happy New Year from our team at US Nationals!

That should "bring you up to speed" to where I am at right now. Im working on bringing myself up to speed as well. I've been doing some short speeds at sea level, will get a good night sleep on this New Years eve, do a solid "race-prep" workout tomorrow, and be ready to race fast in the US National Championship 1.3k Sprint on Sunday!

Check back for more updates! Good night and all the best for 2011,

Katie