Lauren Pineau was very good at hockey – and based on her recent 17th place finish at OFSAA cross-country, the 15 year old Lockerby senior is quite the runner as well.

Nordic ski, however, specifically of the classic variety – well, that’s near perfection.

“It’s weird,” Pineau suggested recently. “It’s just so satisfying to classic ski. It’s so perfect. It’s so graceful. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

The eldest of three children in a very sports-minded family, this talented teen was going to have a chance to test her limits across a spectrum of sports. “Baseball is more of the main sport in our family,” she said. “Dad played at university and that’s my brother’s favourite sport.”

“I grew up playing baseball as well.”

During the summers, Pineau was on the diamonds. Come winter, it was hockey and the Sudbury Lady Wolves. All the while, a love of the outdoors would somehow find her and the family squeezing in a little time to grab their skis and hit the trails.

“As soon as I could walk, I also started skiing,” she stated. “Well, I would mostly get pulled on that little chariot thing when my dad would ski. I would just walk.”

Jackrabbits programs in both Walden and at Laurentian would give way to her willingness to give racing a shot – despite knowing precious little about exactly what she was jumping into. “When I was doing jackrabbits, I had just one pair of what I would now consider rock skis,” said Pineau. “Now I have three pairs of each style of skis, three pairs of each style of poles.”

“It’s crazy – and I never knew anything about waxing. I had to learn all about that.”

Though she now has veered towards nordic ski as the sport of choice at the post-secondary level, Pineau was in no hurry to narrow her focus – not when multi-sport athletics could be so much fun.

“Both of my siblings do running and skiing – we just kind of grew up into it,” said the young woman who has earmarked a busy schedule of Ontario Cup races, supplemented by a separate trek to Quebec and culminating with a run at cross-country nationals in Thunder Bay.

“I thought it was normal to do both” - all three – if you also want to throw hockey into the mix.

“I didn’t realize that I wanted to make the transition until grade nine. That’s when I realized that I was pretty good at running. And then I did ski season and thought that I was getting pretty good at skiing too.”

The blend of those two pursuits is not terribly unusual, both benefitting notably from a strong base of cardio-vascular fitness. “As long as you have the endurance and athleticism, you just have to learn the technique of skiing – and it’s easy to just start skiing because you don’t have bad technique already, you don’t have to correct all of the mistakes that you already have.”

Where things get interesting, however, is the fact that the normal flow that one might expect from a hockey talent to the skating style of skiing is not nearly as normal as one might fathom. “Skate skiing and actual skating are really different,” stressed Pineau.

“When you skate, you push back and when you skate ski, you push to the side. My skate skiing technique is not perfected at all, but it took a lot of time to even get it to where it is now because it’s such a different stride. I am still correcting it.”

While Pineau is focused on really breaking through on the provincial cross-country ski scene this winter, there is still no escaping the fact that she has already garnered interest tackling the same trails in sneakers, long before the snow flies, as was the case in Uxbridge for OFSAA 2022.

“I was not expecting that placement at all,” said Pineau, who figured that roughly ten or so grade 12 girls finished ahead of her, leaving her in a top ten slot when ranked against her own age group. “It was a hard race, mentally and physically.”

Which is perhaps where the traction of nordic ski grabs hold. “I love them both (running and skiing) so much,” she said. “When you have a good running race, it’s so much fun. But when you’re not having a good running race, you just want this to be over.”

“The same goes for skiing – but it’s still skiing.”

Tough to mess with perfection after all.