Cool Running
EC teen among Flying Eagles with sky-high ski-jump dreams
jumping junior nationals in Alaska.
While you were spending the Winter Olympics watching 10-hour-old prime-time replays of the action on TV and fretting over how to shovel seven inches of some of the most dense snow we have seen around here in some time, 15-year-old Fred Running was making like an Olympian in Alaska and ski jumping.
We may head out for a couple days to Silver Mine in January, but most of us otherwise ignore the sport save for every four years when the Olympics come around. For Running and other members of Eau Claire’s Flying Eagles Ski Club for juniors skiers, ski jumping is ever-present throughout the year.
I knew Fred’s mother when I was a kid; Sarah Running was a piano student of my mother’s. When Fred was six, a “Learn To Ski Day” flyer came home from school that, pardon the pun, launched his journey. In fact, Sarah thought the flyer was for downhill skiing – not jumping – and, having downhill skied as a teenager, she thought her children might find the sport interesting. It turns out that Fred was a natural on skis – no wonder, when the family discovered that his grandfather, great-grandfather (an early Flying Eagle) and great-great-great-grandfather all jumped. Also helping was his reaction to the sport: “I realized I liked it when I went off a jump the first time,” he says.
Five years ago, Fred Running began competitive ski jumping, and in 2012 was Club Champion and Most Improved in the Flying Eagles; by now he was training at the Olympic Training Center in Park City, Utah. The competitions have continued to accumulate over the years, and this past winter marked his first at the Silver Mine Invitational, jumping 65 meters on an 85-meter jump on the day before his 15th birthday. What do his North High School peers think of his burgeoning career? “They think it’s pretty awesome,” he says.
You look up at a jump like Silver Mine and think, “How do those people do it?”, sitting on a beam with one of the tallest man-made views of the Eau Claire area, nothing but a steep incline down in front of you. You know the fear of heights that would stop many of us before even beginning the climb up the structure? Fred admits that was an obstacle he needed to overcome, yet after awhile, the task at hand becomes the routine: “I just get on the bar and jump.” From there, the act itself is a little different than what we non-jumpers might imagine. “The jumps don’t go straight up in the air – it’s not aerials,” he explains. “The take-off of the ramp isn’t flat, it angles down a little bit.”
Two ski jumping sites exist in Eau Claire: Silver Mine and the shorter Mount Washington jumps on the north side of that hill, which you can usually see illuminated on winter evenings from Clairemont Avenue. Running prefers the Mount Washington jumps – “It’s my home club. I know it better because I’ve been jumping it longer” – while noting the older age of Silver Mine, featuring a tower that used to be based at Silver Mine’s pre-1969 predecessor, Hendrickson Hill, and in other locations nationwide dating to the 1930s.
February brought the 2014 Jumping Junior Nationals near Anchorage, and western Wisconsin was well-represented. Ben Loomis claimed a national championship, and other locals placed, including Fred at 32nd. The source of this local talent? Sarah says the parents are a critical element: driving to multiple practices, volunteering, and traveling to tournaments.
The potential exists to produce future Olympians, as The Flying Eagles have done in the past; might Running add to the list? Fred’s mother thinks he has the potential to get as far as he likes and while Fred is still deciding on an ultimate goal in his jumping career, his most immediate objective could help him reach such a goal: a desire to return this summer to Park City.
Ski jumping is healthy and growing among the younger generation of the Chippewa Valley. Some February evening four, eight, maybe 12 years from now, that kid down the block might be on an NBC Olympic broadcast near you.
