New England Nordic Ski Association

The Home of Cross Country Skiing in New England

Rollerski

NENSA Announces 2024 Rollerski Season Events

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In the heat of summer, you’ll often find skiers day-dreaming about a transformed landscape. It’ll be a pass by a cut in the woods or a breeze over an open field that makes you imagine what it’ll be like when the weather gets cold, the snow comes, and it all becomes utterly skiable.

To cool those thoughts (literally) this time of year, NENSA and our ski community have paired those daydreams of winter with another thought; instead of waiting on mother nature to bring us skiing to the landscapes we love, why not find a way to ski them in the summer? With rollerskis in hand then, and our 2024 rollerski calendar, skiers from across the East will get to go there. From the top of Whiteface Mountain to the shores of Lake Champlain, with some of the most classic features of New England in between, we’re going to go skiing, and we’re going to go together.

Our 2024 Rollerski Season includes 7 unique events designed to engage skiers in skiing wherever they are this Summer and Fall. We’re proud to have at least one event in every Eastern skiing state, bringing the opportunity for our local ski communities to gather before the winter, and to bring us all together for competition too. 

We’re also excited to continue in the spirit that our rollerski series has had since its inception – using the offseason to experiment, to grow, and to take on new challenges in competition formats. Outside of the competition season, there’s a chance to work on skiing that is truly cross-country, with turns, jumps, skating, striding, and more. From hill climbs to NENSA’s world-famous agility ramps, now is the time to find new ways to appreciate the joy of moving with skis underfoot.

What’s more, the rollerski season is already…excuse us…rolling! With our largest ever field of 114 at Craftsbury Outdoor Center’s Lost Nation Roll a few weeks ago (recap here), the nordic community came together to set an excellent competitive tone for the months ahead.

With more racing, and a full slate of offerings designed to introduce our BKL, youth, and Master’s to skiing in the summer, we hope that you’ll be able to join us at an event, or two, or seven, this rollerski season!

Upcoming NENSA Rollerski Season Events

Sun. August 11th – 17th Annual Climb to the Castle, Whiteface Mountain, NY

The oldest rollerski race in the East is back! A signature hill climb to the top of the High Peaks, promising a competitive field, and a challenge that all can be proud of completing, and the kind of summit view that will have you dreaming of miracles (which is to say, you get a great view Lake Placid).

Registration and more information HERE

Sun. August 18th – Rollins Roll Classic Hill Climb, Mt. Kearsarge, New Hampshire

A fast-growing staple of the NENSA rollerski calendar, featuring a reunion of New Hampshire skiers from across the Granite State, and farther afield too! A great day out with a fun uphill challenge too!
Registration and more information HERE

Sun. September 22nd – Free Fall XCX Sprints, Burlington, VT

Held on the shores of Lake Champlain in partnership with Mansfield Nordic Club and SkiRack, we’re excited to bring the popular XCX agility sprint format to a new venue in 2024! Are those bumps near the water rollerski ramps or Champ the Vermont Lake Monster? You’ll have to join us to find out!

Registration and more information HERE

(Photo: Steve Fuller/FlyingPointRoad)
Sun. October 20th – The Maine Event Sprint Race, Rumford, ME

Western Maine might be the best kept secret when it comes to experiencing those classic New England Fall colors, and at a classic venue like Black Mountain of Maine, they’ll be hard to miss! A full community celebration featuring sprint racing court-style for competitive athletes, and fun, agility work for younger and newer roller skiers alike, it truly will be…the Maine event!

Registration and more information HERE

Sun. November 3rd – Mt. Greylock Hill Climb, Adams, MA

Rounding out the offseason from the top of Massachusetts, the Greylock Hill Climb has drawn one of the largest and competitively diverse fields in the East in its past editions. The beautiful Berkshires, and the warm community feeling at this race cap off our rollerski calendar each year, and we hope you can be there to join!

Registration and more information HERE

Visit the NENSA Rollerski Page to keep up-to-date on all our rollerski programming!

NOTE: Registration will open for events approximately one month prior to event date. Please reach out to Ben Theyerl with questions, ben@nensa.net.

NONH/ME Rollerski Clinic

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We’re hosting an exciting introductory rollerski clinic in Fryeburg on August 10th, and we’d love for you to join us!  NENSA Rollerski clinics are geared towards BKL-age children and the parents, caregivers and coaches that support them. The clinic will focus on teaching the fundamentals of skiing, including stopping, turning, basic techniques, agility skills and course, and engaging games. Shortly following the BKL/Youth Clinic, we will be running a high school clinic session. It’s a fantastic way to get ready for winter, connect with the nordic community, and have a blast mastering a new skill.  Hope to see you there!

Open to all! REGISTRATION here.

BKL/Youth Clinic (includes parents, caregivers, and coaches of youth participants) – 9-11am

Junior+ Clinic (Age 14+) – 11am -1pm.

All participants will have access to NENSA Rollerskis, but please bring your own helmets and poles. Please see NENSA Rollerski Policies and Procedure for more information.

August 10th, 2024

Fryeburg Academy, Fryeburg, Maine

NENSA’s new Youth Rollerski Agility Kit hits the pavement

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NENSA tested out our new youth rollerski agility kit with a group of Ford Sayre middle schoolers last week! Click here to check out the reel, which highlights our new kit!

Club visits from NENSA are available to all of our member clubs, and are one of the staff’s favorite member benefits. We’ve got plenty of summer (and fall!) left, reach out to us if you’d like to bring a rollerski session to your local club!

2024 Regional Development Group Camp Recap

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The 3rd edition of Regional Development Group (RDG) Camp took place over the weekend at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center, in conjunction with NENSA’s first rollerski event of the season, the Lost Nation Roll.

The RDG camp is meant to complement the longstanding Regional Elite Group (REG) camp and expand the number of athletes invited to attend summer regional development opportunities. Athletes are selected to attend RDG based on the NENSA U18/U20 ranking list; NENSA U16 ranking list; New England Eastern High School Championship overall results, and New England U16 Championship overall results. This year’s camp had 27 athletes from many clubs and high school teams in the East.

While many camp activities look similar to other training camps(training sessions, technique advice and review, fireside s’mores, and talks about nutrition and skiing in college), the focus of this camp is education around the fundamentals of training and next step opportunities. The discussion of sports nutrition led by Megan Chacosky, the skate technique video review, and the panel discussion of skiing in college led by Annika Martell and attended by a handful of Craftsbury GRP athletes all fielded many interesting questions that made for a high-quality, robust conversation. We held a skate technique session, an OD run through Anna Schulz’s hometown woods, a double pole-focused session, a session in the gym that honed in on proper form for strength training movements, and the weekend’s highlight was the Lost Nation Roll race where 100 other skiers joined in on the Craftsbury fun! The camp environment also allows for more social connections to be built between athletes, where winter races or championship events may not, due to time and race-day pressures. RDG was made possible in huge part by the high-level coaching staff that volunteered their time to come work with our group.

We also had the pleasure of being based in the “summer camp paradise” that the Craftsbury Outdoor Center provides during the warmer months. We had all we needed for 3 days of awesome training sessions: a paved rollerski loop, lawn games, fire pit, lakefront access, bike trails, gym access, and much more!

Lost Nation Roll 2024: A Little Like Winter Under the Hot, Vermont Sun…

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Sunday’s Lost Nation Roll at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center felt like a reunion, and the start of something good and new.

The lush green, and the hot sun too, set a decidedly different scene than the bundled up, snowy cold most of the nordic community is accustomed to when they set their schedules towards Craftsbury, but the overall feeling created by clubs, volunteers, and a field of over 110 skiers was strikingly, excitedly, the same.

That last number is probably the one to fixate on for a moment. The first rollerski race of the summer in the East saw a field of over 110 skiers! And more than that, the characteristic quality, and variety, of where skiers came from was the kind of field that the East prides itself on in the winter. We had seasoned pros, we had members of our Regional Development Camp (RDG, happening concurrently at the COC), we had local club members and skiers just hop in for the fun of it too. It was really easy to catch an uncanny whisp of winter out on the Craftsbury rollerski loop among the humidity and the heat. From coaches carrying bundles of spare poles (while testing whether a radio harness is a good look over just t-shirt, rather than a big parka) to groups of skiers turning into spectators as soon as their race was done, Craftsbury felt like…well…Craftsbury.

 This Lost Nation Roll featured a 10 k individual start that looped in and out and back in again on for four laps on the Craftsbury rollerski loop. A 5 k, two-lap race was held for the U16 skiers as well. The podiums speak for themselves in terms of the competitiveness of the field: In the Men’s 10 k in went 1st) Ben Ogden (SMS T2), 2nd) Jake Brown (Craftsbury), 3rd) Zach Jayne (SMS T2), in the Women’s 10 k, 1st) Julia Kern (SMS T2), 2nd) Margie Freed (Craftsbury), 3rd) Sydney Palmer-Leger (SMS T2). In the Men’s 5 k, 1st) Sam Swartzentruber (BBA Nordic), 2nd) Donovan Van Citters (Ford Sayre), 3rd) James Langan (Mansfield), and in the Women’s 5 k, 1st) Astrid Longstreth (Mansfield), 2nd) Ollie Hanna (Ford Sayre), 3rd)Saskia Sullivan (Club Nordique Mont-Saint-Anne) . Full results can be found below.

The defining feature of the Lost Nation Roll though, wasn’t who was on the podium, but rather the nature of the podium ceremony itself. When we got rolling around noon with awards, it quickly became apparent that most of not just the top skiers, but the field, had gone down to the lake to take a swim. We’re thankful that word got around quick and we got some great podium shots, but there’s a neat little parable in there about why putting together a rollerski event the caliber of the Lost Nation Roll is worth it. The little individual love we all have for skiing, getting us outside, giving us a place to push ourselves together, they don’t just have to be defined to the winter. And in fact, when you come back to those virtues in the summer together, they can be as cool and fresh as a hop in Great Hosmer Pond…

NENSA’s rollerski series kicks back into gear next month, with the Climb to the Castle in Lake Placid, New York. Full details and Registration are HERE!         

Lost Nation Roll RESULTS

Thank you to our valued NENSA Partners