Race Report Guidelines

You skied the Birkie. You told all your friends about it. Why not tell the world on BirkieGuide.com?

Well, why not? Because you send me a PDF with embedded images. Or a Word Doc with weird alignments. Newsflash! Every race report sent to me gets parsed manually to HTML and then posted. So if you send me a PDF and it has weird line breaks, I have to remove those by hand. Which means your race report doesn’t get posted, and the world doesn’t find out about how you totally smoked that dude in the feed at OO.

So please, send me your race reports, but please do so with the following in mind, with the overarching goal of making it as easy as possible for me to take your report from email to the web:

  • Please send me text with as little formatting as possible. I have to get it Internet-ready, so a PDF with in-line photos really doesn’t work. Sending the text in a plain word doc or the body of the email is best. I’m drawing the line this year. If I have to pull out carriage returns and such, I’m not posting it. Sorry.
  • I’ll post photos, but please send them as separate attachments.
  • Proofread! Please proofread. I have to proofread, and if there are fifteen spelling mistakes on the first page I might give up.
  • Consult a style guide. Use em dashes (—) and elipses (…) not double hyphens (–) and treble periods (…). And single spaces after punctuation. I’m amazed that is still a thing.
  • Keep it clean, and not ad hominem. If you want to call out a person who didn’t let you pass on a hill at 20k, don’t mention their number or name, unless it’s a buddy of yours.
Note that we are looking a the possibility of setting up a blog-type interface where you can input your Birkie story (and anything else under the sun or moon), but haven’t yet figured out if this install of WordPress supports that. For now, please email stories to ari.ofsevit @ gmail. And I promise we’ll get them up faster than last year.

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