A few weeks ago I had the pleasure to ski 50k on the Birkie Trail. Along the way, I took out my phone and made a series of “Trail Moment” videos of certain notable features. There’s some video of the new start, and then points of interest (hills, mostly) the rest of the way.
New podcast is posted, this one with Gary Crandall of the Chequamegon Fat Tire Festival. He is also the founder of the drum corps playing up top of the Power Lines. He’ll be out there in February pounding again!
Our esteemed producer, Doug the Subway Fugitive, Not—oh, wait, that’s Car Talk—Sam Evans-Brown has a Podcast. He did an episode about a ski race. What’s easier than making a new podcast (we did that, too)? Playing someone else’s. I had to twist his arm a little, but I think you’ll enjoy it. You should download his podcast, too, and listen to it.
Want to hear his podcast in ours? Download it on iTunes (or wherever) or listen right here.
A all new, hot-of-the-presses BirkieGuide Podcast will be coming soon (Saturday, if we’re lucky).
In 2017, as has been well documented on this page and elsewhere, the Birkie will split off the Korteloppet and run it on Friday, leaving Saturday alone for the Big Race. It’s a question of congestion: the Birkie has grown from 4,500 to 7,000 participants in the past 10 years. The start has been congested, but the real rate limiting factor is the finish; there are only so many people you can process through a town like Hayward, Wisconsin. Which got me to thinking: are there any other large, long-distance races which have such a high ratio of participants to local population? And, no, not just ski races, but races of any kind at least marathon distance.
I found a list of the 50 biggest marathons in 2015, with about 2000 or more participants. The Birkie, if ranked among these marathons, would rank the 11th biggest race in the country. But the other marathons are in big cities. 50,000 people run New York, but that’s just 1/165th the population of the city. Even races in smaller cities (like Grandma’s in Duluth) account for less than 1/10th of the local population. (There’s a marathon in DisneyWorld which has a very small official population, but the park itself hosts 50,000 visitors per day, and is basically in Orlando, so it doesn’t have crowding issues. Also, why in God’s name would you want to run a marathon at 5:30 a.m. in Florida? No, please, someone explain this to me.)
Anyway: Hayward? There are three finishers for every resident of the town. It would be as if 24 million people ran New York, or 250,000 ran Grandma’s. The only other race close is the Bataan Memorial Death March race in New Mexico, but even it has only two finishers for every resident of the town of White Sands (and while an official marathon, many finishers spend eight or more hours on the course, so it’s a bit more spread out). Otherwise, Big Sur has about a 1:1 ratio, and every other marathon is at least 7:1 or more. So by this measure, the Birkie is, relative to the size of the largest town on the course, the biggest race in the country.*
* that is, relative to the size of the town it finishes in.
I got a little fever and the cure was to update the Guide. Lots changing in 2017. It’s not all set in stone (there’s some conjecture about busing, for instance) but there was some stuff which hadn’t been changed in, let’s just say a while. Happy skiing!
A few weeks ago I sat down (electronically) with Birkie director Ben Popp to get the lay of the land for this fall’s race (and to preview the trail run, which has already happened; I’m good at getting these posted, apparently). The trail has survived the summer rains, and now we need some cold and snow. Hear about all that and more on your favorite streaming service, or download the episode here.
Caitlin Gregg has won the Birkie four times. Four.
If you’re keeping track at home, that’s four more times than I’ve won the Birkie. Or you (well, almost all of you).
And she came on the fourth BG Podcast! (See what we did there?) It’s pretty great. Hear about the Birkie, and last year’s World Champs, and all else.
Oh, and when she says the second place woman’s name Dabudyk and it sounds like “dabooty” and I don’t laugh, it is a testament to restraint on my part (or we edited it out, you’ll never know). So enjoy that moment.
It’s happened: the Birkie has outgrown two races on the same day. (Remember, as many people skied the Birkie alone in 2016 as skied the Birkie and Kortie combined in the mid-2000s.) So starting in 2017, the Korteloppet will be on Friday. There are certainly pluses and minuses to this and while I think the Korteloppet would do better on Sunday morning, I understand why that might be a no-go. But with Telemark closed, it certainly makes sense to shift the finish of the race towards Hayward for all the races, and the recent additions to the Birkie trail help as well.
Update: here’s the official announcement email from the Birkie. We’re talking to the Birkie about a longer podcast discussion about these changes; stay tuned!
In any case, here are some pros and cons for having the Korteloppet on Friday:
Pros:
Cons:
As a Birkie skier, I am mostly unaffected by these changes, but they will by-and-large be positive for Birkie skiers. The main issue is that many Korteloppet skiers may not be able to take the day off on Friday for the race. However, there are probably just as many who will come early to ski Friday and watch Saturday, people who are now spectators but may decide to ski as well. It will be an interesting experiment, hopefully the Birkie will pull it off.
This year, the Birkie was held a week “early”, i.e. not the last full weekend in February.
It’s probably a good thing. Here are the temperatures in Hayward for today the 27th (clear and sunny the whole time):
7 a.m. 28˚ (and several hours under 28 overnight = frozen and fast)
8 a.m. 31˚
9 a.m. 34˚
10 a.m. 41˚
11 a.m. 46˚
12 a.m. 49˚
1 p.m. 51˚
2 p.m. 54˚
3 p.m. 53˚
4 p.m. 46˚
So, that would have been a pretty fast course for the elites, but even some of the south-facing hills (downhills, mostly, like the one at 34k and a couple after Mosquito Brook) would have probably been baking and slushy. But for later starters, anything out of the shade would have been corny. Which isn’t bad: it would have been fun, spring skiing. But no “better” than last week.
On the other hand, it would have been an excellent day for drinking beer on Lake Hayward.
It’s hard to believe that it’s already been a week since the Birkie. Well, six days. With the leap year, it’s only 365 days until Birkie 2017. But who’s counting.
By now I usually have a race recap up. And I will! But I’ve mostly been working on two (2) more podcasts. And by working I mean sending sound files to the producer and saying make these sound happy! By the way, you are now legally bound to listen to his podcast, Outside/In, because I want him to love me and if he doesn’t, my podcast would sound terrible.
Okay, so podcasts. You can find podcasts here, or click the button up there that says “podcast” or use this iTunes link. If you are having trouble downloading them (maybe because people after the race used some bad language and we had to put an explicit tag on them) here are links to episodes 1, 2 and 3. Episode 2 was recorded at the pasta feed that I have attended for 9 years or so (and it’s been around longer than that!) and episode 3 is me talking to people on Main Street. This was a lot of fun, and no beer was involved in the making of the podcast either!
One other thing: The Birkie maybe could have been held tomorrow, since it’s still the last full weekend of the month (I’m not sure why it wasn’t; it might be because the Gatineau Loppet was pushed back because of the Canadian Ski Tour, or something). If it had been, it would have been interesting weather. It is going to freeze overnight tonight, but tomorrow should be sunny and top out in the mid-40s. That would have been about as interesting race weather as we had last week. But it would have made for great spectating.