Been there, dune that: UAA athletes get a gritty workout at Kincaid Park

Dunes Day II was every bit the worthy successor to Dunes Day I, and then some.

For the second year in a row, dozens of UAA athletes from multiple sports trekked to the sand dune in the southwest corner of Kincaid Park for a gritty workout.

Gritty, as in sand in your eyes and your shoes. Gritty, as in a dozen oxygen-depriving, lactic-acid-producing uphill sprints that pitted gymnast versus basketball player versus skier versus hockey player versus high jumper.

The brainchild of cross-country ski coach Andrew Kastning, last Friday's All-Athlete Sand Dune Sprint Sufferfest was announced in an email from Kastning to his fellow head coaches.

"Eating a light breakfast is strongly encouraged!" he wrote.

"I have in the past succeeded in losing my breakfast" while doing sand-dune sprints, Kastning later confessed. "You get so flooded with acid and (it) can go to your stomach."

The Sufferfest serves up a simple form of misery:

— Six sprints up the steep side of the dune, a climb of 20 to 30 vertical feet that requires scrambling on all fours through soft, deep sand.

— Six sprints up the less steep and more firm side of the dune, a still-punishing dash covering about 200 feet in about 20 seconds.

"It was completely exhausting," said freshman basketball player Tobin Karlberg of Anchorage. "You give as much as you have, and at the end you just want to do nothing but sit there.

"It was cool to have that shared suffering."

And it was suffering. As soon as athletes reached the top of the dune, they had to drag themselves back down to the bottom so they could make another run up.

Athletes were divided into waves based on what month they were born to ensure inter-sport competition.

Gymnasts with superb upper-body and core strength got a demanding workout for their legs; basketball "bigs" – forwards and centers who tip the scales at 200 pounds – used all of their strength to carry their weight uphill as their feet sunk into the sand.

"For the short hill I was with a lot of hockey guys, and they were doing a really good job in those sand dunes because they are used to those short, quick intensity runs," said senior Yvonne Jeschke, a heptathlete on the track team who finished the day as the top woman.

"I think it was amazing to see everyone out there and having at least one workout in the year where all the teams get together," she said. "Obviously it wasn't easy. But everyone did an awesome job and everyone was trying to push just a little harder against everyone."

The competition, intense yet collegial, was apparent.

"Everyone wants to show that their team's the best, you know?" said hockey player Nicolas Erb-Ekholm, the day's top man.

Pucks players proved particularly proficient sand people, reigning supreme for the second straight year. That's not a surprising outcome, considering that hockey is all about all-out bursts of power and energy, followed by brief breaks between shifts.

"We're used to the intervals," Erb-Ekholm said. "Every day we play in shifts, so we're used to going hard for 45 seconds and getting off the ice and then getting back on."

The top five or six finishers from each wave advanced to a final elite wave, which Kastning said was about 50 percent hockey players.

"The hockey team really excelled," he said. "They finished about 1 through 8 before I had a nordic skier in."

The workout drew about 80 athletes, Kastning said. Most of UAA's teams participated — hockey, men's basketball, gymnastics, track and field, alpine skiing and nordic skiing. The volleyball team and cross country teams were competing out of town, and the women's basketball team will hold its own dunes day next month, Kastning said.

The plan is to make the Sufferfest an annual event.

"Last year (the track teams) did it with the alpine skiers, and I know the nordic skiers did it with hockey and basketball, so we already took it one step further this year," Jeschke said

"I can see it becoming a tradition. Everyone had a great time – maybe not while actually doing it, but afterward."

The workout left an impression on Greg Myford, UAA's new athletic director.

Myford spent several years as an administrator at Penn State and later became familiar with several other universities as part of IMG's marketing team for college sports. He said he's never seen anything like the All-Athlete Sand Dune Sprint Sufferfest.

"(T)here are not many athletic departments at any level that pull their students together for the combined purpose of a demanding workout and fun," he told UAA's head coaches in an email. "Most department-wide gatherings are more social or procedural meetings. And when you add in the scenery, camaraderie, competitive and supportive spirit on display today — we've got a winner."

Myford, 54, showed his school spirit by doing a sprint up the steep side of the dune. He called it "a rewarding kind of painful."

The effort did not go unnoticed.

"I don't think any of the athletes expected to see him out there and to even make a trip up and down the dunes," Karlberg said. "That definitely earned my respect."