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Alaska would deprive Miller of key ingredients in a well-rounded training plan, like a fully equipped gym or even hills she could run—not to mention working out with teammates.

Miller was a star on the team. She’d already become ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ’s highest-placing woman since the school started competing at the elite Division I level. But she hadn’t wanted skiing to be her life’s main focus—she was thinking about studying to be an Arctic ecologist. Many high-level coaches would have balked at an athlete planning a summer at a remote field station, but Miller’s coach at ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ, Nathan Alsobrook ’97, embraced her plans.

“It was like a personal challenge for Nathan to figure out interesting alternative training techniques. And I think part of him kind of enjoyed that,” Miller remembers. “You felt like he had your back in making it work.”

Miller set off for her Alaska summer with training ideas from Alsobrook, along with a shaving cream can-sized device called an Exer-Genie. It would hang from any door: Miller could train by pulling a rope through it to strengthen her arms.

That creativity, flexibility, and persistence has long been a hallmark of ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ’s crosscountry ski team.

With her coach’s endorsement, Miller’s summer in Alaska did not derail her skiing career. And her subsequent athletic accomplishments parallel successes for Alsobrook and the whole ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ team, which for the past decade has steadily pushed itself up the ranks of the competitive East Coast ski circuit.

Last year, three ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ cross-country skiers qualified for the NCAA national championships—its largest group ever. Jake Adicoff ’18 won a silver medal at the Paralympic Games in South Korea in a race for visually impaired athletes.

And Miller? Two years after winning her first national championship, she made the US Olympic team last winter. But not before she had to employ some creative training techniques at that Arctic field station.

Miller grew up racing in Vermont, and she was already a junior national champion by the time she arrived in Brunswick. Her ski-racing transcript was a better fit for schools such as Dartmouth, Williams, or the University of Vermont. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ fielded ski teams that were long on enthusiasm and work ethic, but comparatively short on talent and support. When Peter Caldwell ’78 qualified to race at the NCAA championships decades ago, he said, “I had to go ask for funds to race, and I think I had to rent a car.”

Over the years, the program managed to attract successful athletes sporadically. But many of those athletes came with a common thread: They didn’t want sports to be at the center of their college experience.

“I don’t think I could have lived that life of just skiing, eating, sleeping, training,” said Caldwell, who came from a family of elite skiers. “I didn’t do sports to get into college. And so, if the ski program wasn’t developing me as much as it could, that wasn’t my top priority. That was one of, like, five priorities.”

The current team conducts many of its workouts off campus, on roads and trails in rural parts of Brunswick and Topsham. While some schools have their own dedicated ski areas, it’s only in the past fifteen years that ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ athletes have had regular access to professionally designed trails. Even now, their winter ski workouts are a thirty-minute drive from campus at Pineland Farms in New Gloucester. Before that, the team made do with multi-use trails in Topsham, groomed by a coach on a snowmobile.

“We had our whole team pitch in, early in the season. We’d be out there with pulaskis and pulling out roots and stumps, getting those trails ready to go,” said Bill Yeo, who coached at ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ between 1994 and 1999.

Cross-country skiing presents an unusual set of physiological demands. It requires heavy full-body strength work, plus long workouts for endurance. Then there are lung-busting sets of hill repeats and higher-speed ski workouts.