After years of trying, Kimberley’s Marielle Ackermann has qualified and will be going to the World Junior Championships of Nordic skiing in Lygna, Norway this February.
Ackermann has been cross country skiing and racing for as long as she can remember and she’s had her sights set on the World Junior Championships for the past four years, but some misfortune over the past few years has prevented her from achieving that goal until now.
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Canada holds trial races that mirror what the World Junior races will be like, and Ackermann, 19, has only been to two: this most recent one in Canmore earlier in January, and one when she was in Grade 11.
This was also in Canmore, and she said that although she was quite young at the time and didn’t have any expectations on herself, she performed quite well.
The following year she then had much higher hopes, especially as one of the races was sprint skiing, which is her strongest race. She was very excited to go, but the day before she was supposed to fly to Quebec for the races, she came down with a cold.
“I was not allowed to go on the trip, which was pretty brutal, so close to the departure time,” Ackermann told the Bulletin. “Then I thought, it’s fine, I’m still young, I’ve got two more years to qualify for this race, but then of course COVID happened.”
What wound up happening was that Nordic Canada announced that their selection for World Juniors would be based upon the results of the previous year’s qualifiers, the year Ackermann had to miss because she was sick.
“So I was not even on the board in terms of selection,” she said. “I didn’t even have a chance and that was really tough, because it’s one thing to throw your hat in the ring and see what happens and it’s another to just completely be out of the game.”
Though she tried not to dwell on it, it’s been looming over her ever since. There was no racing in Canada last year because of the pandemic, which allowed her to focus on good, quality training. She worked with her father Frank Ackermann, who she’s worked with for years, as well as the provincial head coach to maximize and optimize on her training.
She finally got another chance at the qualifiers earlier this month, again back in Canmore, and once again the first race was skate sprint, what she was excited for back in 2020.
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She won the very first races of the weekend, automatically qualifying for World Juniors.
“I was able to just relax the rest of the weekend,” she said. “I obviously still pushed myself hard in the races, but I didn’t feel that pressure of I need to get perfect results every single day, I could just enjoy myself, which was an immense relief after three years of trying not to think to hard about it.”
Before going to Norway, Ackermann will first head to the U.S. on Wednesday, Jan. 26 to compete in two weekends of racing at the U.S. SuperTour at events in Lake Placid, N.Y. and Craftsbury, Vt. From there she will fly to Norway on either February 8 or 9.
“It’s a little stressful, it’s a lot of emails going back and forth and waivers to sign,” she said. “Then I have college on top of that. So it’s a lot going on, but I know that as soon as I begin travelling, everything will just calm down and I’ll be able to enjoy everything. I’m very excited.”
This trip represents not just the hard work and overcoming of obstacles over the past few years, but an entire lifetime of dedication. Ackermann still remembers her first Kimberley Bulletin newspaper clipping she put up on her wall when she was eight, after making the front page competing in the Kootenay Cup.
As well as the sickness that forced her to miss qualifiers, there’s been injuries over the years as well, including a stress on her left foot fracture she suffered this past fall. She did this while training on a treadmill to avoid the summer smoke, and then went to an altitude training camp on a glacier and pushed it a little too hard. All of this just makes finally getting to go to these championships all the more worthwhile.
“It’s just something that I’ve always loved to do and would like to keep doing as long as possible,” she said.
“This is the first World Junior qualifier that KNC has had out of our club, and I think it’s really important to us as a community, because we’re all really excited for her, but she’s also going to do a great job representing us over there,” said Nikki Gilman, coach at the Kimberley Nordic Club. “It definitely means a ton for her to have made this trip. It was definitely a goal of hers for the last few years.”
Gilman said that Ackermann trains around 600 hours per year; going out usually six times a week, putting in 20 hours a week or so; essentially it’s a part time job. This is in addition to Ackerman’s schooling at College of the Rockies, where she’s currently taking sociology and philosophy courses, trying to see what interests her most, and intentionally not taking too many courses as she planned to qualify for the World Juniors.
Ackermann said training with Gilman, who moved here from Boise, Id. last June, has been a great experience.
“It’s the first time I’ve had a coach who’s a woman and in cross country skiing there are very few female coaches, so it’s really nice to be able to connect to someone on that level,” Ackermann said.
“She’s from the states so her experience is slightly different than a Canadian coach, but she’s been fantastic, I really enjoy having her and she works incredible hard for not just the race team, but the whole Nordic Club, it’s really amazing what she’s doing.”
Following World Juniors, Ackermann hopes to, pandemic allowing, compete in the Nationals in Whistler in March, the big, week-long finale to the season. From there it’s back to spring and summer training.
As she will soon age out of the U20 division, she’s starting to think of her future, and while she doesn’t have a solid plan locked down just yet, she said she’s looking into going to the States to do NCAA, getting a good mixture of great skiing and academic studies at the same time. Another route would be to do to a training centre somewhere in Canada, either in Canmore or Quebec.
Ackermann has started a GoFundMe to help cover the costs of the trip to Norway, and if you want to support you can at this link: https://gofund.me/275e6783
Ackermann wishes to thank The Nordic Club and the Kimberley Nordic Racer wax technicians, her coach Nikki Gilman and her father Frank Ackermann.
paul.rodgers@kimberleybulletin
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