Cross-country skiing booming — 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.”