The post Sophia Laukli: From Skis to Trails appeared first on iRunFar.
It’s hard to imagine an athlete winning races like Sierre-Zinal and Marathon du Mont Blanc when trail running is their secondary sport, but that’s exactly what Sophia Laukli has done. Primarily known in the sports world as a cross-country skier, she burst onto the trail running scene in 2023 with an overall win of the Golden Trail World Series, which included the previously mentioned two races.
Results of that caliber would most likely encourage any athlete to go all-in on the sport of trail running, but the 24-years-old remains focused on her ski career and believes that she’s found a good balance between the two sports that allows her to race at a very high level throughout the year.
While most athletes would burn out with the continuous level of training, travel, and competition of racing two different sports, Laukli embraces a growth mindset in both her skiing and running careers.
Coming into competitive sports relatively late in life, at least when compared to other cross-country skiers who she lined up next to when representing the United States at the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, China, she believes she’s still on an upward trajectory of improvement. And when it comes to running, it’s a chance to escape the high-pressure culture of the ski world and have some fun while still embracing her competitive side.
Fresh off winning the 2024 Eiger Ultra-Trail 50k in July, the defending Sierre-Zinal champion lines up again for the iconic race this weekend, ready to see where her unique approach to two very different sports will take her.
Growing Up Skiing: The Ski Career That Almost Wasn’t
Laukli’s parents were avid skiers and had hopes of instilling their love of the sport in their three kids as a way of spending time together as a family. Growing up in Maine, she and her siblings were on skis early, and Laukli says, “[We] started just recreational and doing fun races if we wanted to.”
In middle school, Laukli’s parents, who were both All-American skiers in college, became the ski coaches at her school. Laukli speculated this was because “they knew more about skiing than probably any of the other parents.” In hindsight, she realizes, “It was just because they loved skiing, and they wanted to have that still be a part of their life.”
But Laukli didn’t thrive under their coaching. She fairly bluntly says, “[I] found out pretty quickly that I did not love having my parents as my coaches. I think I took it then as pressure or just that there was too much involvement. And so it made me pretty hesitant to see if I wanted to continue skiing.”
In a theme that would continue to play out in her athletic life, Laukli needed a life outside of her sport as well. She says of the time, “You’re being told what to do when you’re at home, and then it’s also at practice, and that it’s just too much.”
But once in high school, her older sister convinced her to give competitive skiing another go with a different coach and team. Laukli quickly realized that she was actually quite competitive and enjoyed the team atmosphere. Of her parents’ reaction to her newfound joy, she says, “I think they were just happy that we had skiing trips as a family.”
Laukli thrived under the coaching of Bob Morse at the Yarmouth Ski Club in her hometown. She says, “He kind of created this team that made you really love skiing, and that was a lot to do with the team. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a team since where you actually have so much emphasis and motivation with the team factor. It was always about state champs. It was training camps and doing well as a team. And I think I took that for granted in the moment, but I was just like, oh, the skiing is so fun. I get to care about myself, and it also means something bigger.”
Collegiate and Olympic Skiing
Laukli also took advantage of the team atmosphere of skiing in college, spending two years at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she was an All-American. She finished off her collegiate skiing career at the University of Utah in 2022 and 2023. She appreciated that while the average American may not know much about cross-country racing at the World Cup level, they understand college athletics.
She says, “It is something that I’m really grateful I got to live because World Cup is obviously the top level, but having the college and being NCAA champion, everyone in the U.S. knows what that means, and not everyone necessarily knows what cross-country skiing is. So having the NCAA college sports environment is super unique and is super cool.”
She was an All-American both years at the University of Utah and won the NCAA 15k freestyle in 2022. In the middle of her college career, she was selected to represent the U.S. at the 2022 Winter Olympics, where she raced the 30k mass-start freestyle and placed 15th after making a wrong turn on the final lap. It was a result that left her wanting more. After graduating, she used her Norwegian citizenship from her dad’s side of the family to move to Norway and pursue skiing full-time.
All-In On Skiing
Going all-in with skiing in Norway has given Laukli perspective on her own athletic career.
She says, “There are points where I can see that I’m playing catch up in a sense now. The first thing you realize is why they’re the best country in the world. It’s because they have this professional mentality when they’re 12 years old. But there’s a trade-off to that, and that leads to a lot of burnout, and everyone who’s there winning today, they made it through that.”
And while she may feel like she’s catching up in the ski world, Laukli isn’t upset about it. “For me, I’m super glad I didn’t have my whole childhood in Norway. And only because I know that I don’t think I would’ve handled that professional intense training at that young age. I don’t think I would be enjoying skiing and racing today.”
Instead, she views the gap in technique and training as opportunity and motivation. “There’s so much I can improve on because I haven’t been committed to this for 10, 15 years. I’ve put four years into this full-on. And so that just means that I have so much more room for improvement.”
The success has Laukli curious about where she can go in the sport. “Originally, I didn’t think I was going to ski after college, and then I got World Cup starts, and then I went to the Olympics. And so it’s kind of all taken place so quickly that now I definitely want to go to the next Olympics, and then maybe I don’t even want to be done after that because I can see I’m not done yet with how good I can be.”
Introduction to Trail Running
In 2021, Laukli raced some of the Cirque Series races in Utah as summer training. Then in 2022, she entered the Stranda Fjord Trail Race 25k in Norway, which was part of the Golden Trail World Series (GTWS), and won. Later that year, she placed third at the high-altitude Pikes Peak Ascent in Colorado. She finished the year placing fourth at the Madeira Ocean Trail, the final of the GTWS.
In 2023, she won the GTWS outright with wins at the Marathon du Mont Blanc, Sierre-Zinal, and the Pikes Peak Ascent. She finished third in Golfo dell’Isola, the series final.
Laukli’s training for running is primarily her ski training, and she has two very different relationships with the sports. She says, “My relationship with skiing is much more professional. My team in Norway is pretty small, and we meet a couple times a week with super-focused interval training, and then the rest of the time, I’m training a lot on my own. And then in running, I’m training for running, but I’m doing it through skiing.”
It’s partially the novelty of trail running races that keeps Laukli motivated. “I realize that I’m not in the running world 90% of the year, but I get super excited to go to each race that I do because with skiing, I’m in the life 24/7.”
She also appreciates the relatively laid-back atmosphere of the trail running world when compared to the hyper-focused atmosphere of World Cup ski races. “I get that break when I go to the running races because — not that it’s not professional and not intense — but it’s like the second the race ends that goes away and it’s just everyone’s there and everyone just kind of forgets the race if it was good or not and tries to have fun.”
But Laukli is still there to race. “I get very competitive with the runners I’m running against, but it’s a little bit less high-strung, and that makes doing the two sports much more manageable.”
Training for Year-Round Racing
With the addition of trail running, Laukli races throughout the year and has found that the ski training she does translates well to the shorter and harder efforts of the races in the GTWS. She’s inspired by the highly successful trail runners who’ve come from a cross-country skiing background, including Courtney Dauwalter, Scott Patterson, and David Sinclair, who won the 2024 Speedgoat 50k.
While Laukli once tried to train as a more traditional runner, she’s found that focusing on the training for skiing has led to better results in both sports. She’s also learning to cope with the differences between the trail running schedule and the cross-country racing schedule.
She says, “It’s a blessing and a curse in the winter where you’re just racing every weekend. It means it’s super easy to move on from a bad race — you have a race and another race in four days, where in running, you have five, six weekends at least when you’re doing the shorter stuff. And so there’s, for me, a lot more pressure on each of those races. It’s a lot of time to get better, but it’s a lot of time to wait around and kind of hope, which is super different.”
Laukli has found that while ski training is great for her fitness, she does need to spend time on trails to develop the technique for moving over technical terrain at speed.
She says, “When I was injured this spring and I couldn’t run, I remember the first few running workouts I did, I felt super good and had really good times, and it was a big eye-opener where I realized how well my skiing works for that. And I think the limit with that is where it comes to trail running and you have to actually run on trails to be good at trail running.”
Appreciation of Trail Racing
Laukli is embracing the unique aspects of trail racing. For example, she says, “The nice thing is if you fall in a ski race, you’re like, ‘I just lost seven seconds, and that’s 20 places,’ and you faceplant in a running race, and you don’t really think twice about it.”
She’s still learning to accept the less intense atmosphere of trail races. “I was racing the [Eiger Ultra-Trail] 50k, and we had to stop for a train, and it felt like forever and I was freaking out, and they’re like, ‘It’s okay, it’s only going to be a minute or two.’ And I’m like, ‘A minute or two, that’s so much time.’”
The similar duration of cross-country ski races and shorter trail races makes them complementary sports. Of the difference, she says. “I always try to think which is more painful, but with running, you get distracted by where you are. And I think that’s why I’ve never tried road running. I don’t know if I would have the same enjoyment. In trail running, especially when it’s a point-to-point or a massive loop, it’s just so satisfying to be able to do that.”
Laukli suspects that once she’s done ski racing, she’ll move to longer-distance running. “I think it will be quite a while because this 50k, it was fun, but that was too long.” She goes on to say, “I didn’t think a marathon versus 50k would be that different, like 10k, that it can’t be too much. And I was shocked. It was a serious roller coaster. I normally start a running race and within 10 minutes I know if it’s going to be good or not. And then in this race, it was like I started, Okay, this is going to be good. And then I remember from hours three to four, I wanted to drop out. I was feeling horrible. And then I just was hoping that maybe this will go away though. And then at four and a half hours, it did go away.”
Future Ambitions
Laukli understands that one of her weaknesses is in trying to do too much and that can affect her recovery, so she tries to be selective with her running races. “I have a hard time saying no, and I always want to do everything. With ski races, I want to do the whole ski season. With running, I choose the races. I really wanted to do Zegama this year, but I have to finish the ski season. Sometimes I’m not totally realistic on what’s actually possible and what my body can handle. I need to mentally and physically rest.”
But even with a few setbacks this spring and summer, Laukli is looking forward to what’s to come. “I’m getting equally excited for every race, and currently I’ve never enjoyed training so much.” She says, “I’m excited for the next races to try to prove myself more. I think that in itself just solidifies that I am enjoying this and I want to be doing it.”
As for future goals, Laukli is excited to see where both sports take her. “I’ve already accomplished way more than I would’ve ever thought, and I’m going to keep doing it because I see that I can get better.”
And if her current view of the trail running world is any indication, she’ll most likely stick with the sport for a long time. “Running, you basically have an after-party at every running race, which makes it really fun. With running, it’s so easy to come back to because, yes, I want to do well, but I know that if I don’t have my day, then it’s a really fun group of people to hang out with afterward.”
With the 2024 Sierre-Zinal on the horizon, it’s fair to assume that Laukli will make the most of the opportunity — both the racing and the atmosphere afterward.
Call for Comments
- Have you found that training multiple sports has made you a better runner?
- What other runners do you know of who’s successfully combined multiple sports?
