A mountainous journey for this running family

EAGLE RIVER — Running has become a way of life for Brooklyn natives Dorian Gross and Linda Rao since moving to Alaska with their three children.

In 1999, Gross and Rao moved to Alaska for the first time, bouncing around from Palmer to Talkeetna, to Eagle River and Anchorage. The family was “bi-coastal” for a while, traveling back and forth from New York between 2004 and 2008 — and they currently live in Anchorage — but their love for Alaska and the running scene here was born in the Mat-Su Valley.

“I was doing 1-milers to the coffee shop to get a smoothie, and that’s how it kinda started,” Gross said at an Eagle River café recently.

At the time, the family didn’t own a vehicle, Gross said, and running became their quickest mode of transportation in the tiny town of Talkeetna. Soon, the children were running right along with him.

“It wasn’t until we started running that we started to really see Alaska together,” he said.

The Grand Prix

In 2010, Gross and Rao joined a Talkeetna mountain running club, which inspired Gross to take on the Crow Pass Crossing that summer, followed by the Matanuska Peak Challenge a week later. Rao had heard that these were tough races, and “couldn’t believe” her husband was doing both, she said, but still expected him to finish the Challenge in a couple hours.

The Crow Pass race is about 8 miles longer than Mat Peak at roughly 22 miles, but the finish times are usually about the same, given the significantly greater amount of climbing in the Palmer race. So when Gross finally came running into the Lazy Mountain parking lot at almost 5 hours flat, Rao said she was “so relieved because it took him so long.”

“I saw the mountain but you don’t really grasp it until you go out and do it,” she said.

Rather than be intimidated by the sight of her husband running ragged into the finish with a bleeding gash in his leg, Rao found herself intrigued.

“Something in me was like … what happened out there, what made him did do that?”

Rao decided to join her husband for the next race in the Alaska Mountain Runners’ Grand Prix series, the Alyeska Classic in Girdwood, and then she was hooked.

“I said, ‘Wow, this is something completely different.’”

Their sons, Bodhi Gross and Ali Papillon, joined them at Alyeska the following year for their first mountain race. Dorian Gross’s brother, Jose, and his son, Roman Gross quickly followed suit.

“We had done a few hikes before that, but not that many,” said Bodhi, now 15. “We were interested in what it was like.”

He and Ali, now 11, both ran the gamut this year, completing all seven Grand Prix races, including Mount Marathon. In the Alyeska race, Ali beat his dad by four minutes. “That was an eye-opener,” Gross said. “I got dusted by an 11 year old.”

Gross remembered being surprised in the first couple years by the strength of the 50-plus, female mountain runners especially, inspired by regulars like Ellyn Brown of Anchorage and Patty Foldager of Seward. He and Rao have also come to admire families like the Foldagers, Kopsacks, Connellys and Marvins, for example, who have passed their athleticism down to children and grandchildren.

“It’s just part of their life, like anything else,” Rao said.

Growing up in it

Despite the fact that the parents still have “this greenhorn sorta feeling,” Gross said, Bodhi, Ali and their 13-year-old sister, Ziyi Rao, are growing up in the Alaska mountain running scene. Ali did his first 9-mile run on Kesugi Ridge at age 5, and now the boys regularly do 20-mile runs between and around Anchorage and Eagle River, no matter the weather.

Even Ziyi, who wants to be a professional ballerina, enjoys cheering her family on from the mountainsides.

“It’s really fun to get out there,” she said. “Even though I don’t do the races as much I do enjoy getting out there.”

Gross said he and Rao were never really concerned about the miles their children were racking up at a young age, though they were sometimes worried about inclement weather.

“The danger zones came on ridge lines, when there was snow,” Gross said. “Those were stressful factors, but then at the same time … you can’t really hold their hand.”

Rao remembered struggling with that the first time she went hiking with the boys.

“I’m like screaming, ‘Guys, stop!’ and Dorian’s like, ‘Leave them alone, they’re completely fine. You’re gonna distract them and that’s when they’re gonna get hurt.”

As parents, Rao and Gross will always worry about their kids on some level, she said. But they’ve come to recognize how truly Alaskan their children are becoming.

“You realize that they’re actually more comfortable than you are,” Gross said.

The family’s running and racing habits have also played into the children’s education, Gross said. Not only do they learn survival skills and how to traverse different types of terrain, but they’ve learned to calculate pace and how much ground they can cover in a certain amount of time.

“Each race is it’s own particular monster, so you end up learning a lot of different things,” Gross said.

The family has also developed an understanding of how much and what kind of fuel their body needs to feel their best and achieve their goals. Rao and the children have various allergies and intolerances, she said, and it takes effort to conform their needs, as athletes, to an all organic, meatless diet that emphasizes the use of native plants.

Apart from missing eggs and having a hard time finding suitable places to eat out, though, Gross said it’s been a positive, healthy development for the whole family — challenging, but not impossible.

“You learn to be innovative,” he said.

‘It’s getting harder to stay inside’

As the family gets more acclimated to Alaska and the children are able to do more physically, Rao said they’re at home less and less these days.

“It’s getting harder and harder for us to stay inside,” she said, especially when the weather is good.

“When we see a nice day, we’re like, ‘We have to go out today,’” Ali said.

Rao said they’ve probably run the most races in one year ever this year, with at least one member of the family running just about every mountain and trail race in Alaska. Gross competed in the 6-hour “Day at the Beach” race in Chugiak on Sept. 3, too, and he and Rao said they were also considering the inaugural Glacier City Trail Marathon in Girdwood on Oct. 1.

“This year, we didn’t plan on doing as much as we’ve done, (but) we end up getting hungry each time,” Gross said. “We just miss it.”

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.