They said it could never be done. (Wait, that’s a lie.) But it has been done. All hail the BirkieGuide Podcast!

UPDATE: It’s here!

In the first episode we spend nearly half an hour talking with Ben Popp and Al Serrano about the 2016 race. Want to find out about the new hill at Rosie’s Field? It’s in there. The new finish procedure? Yup, in the podcast. Some recording magic from our friend Sam of the Outside/In Podcast, who made the whole thing sound better than a skype conversation? That too is in the podcast. Basically, you should download the podcast, and listen to it a bunch of times. Don’t download it a bunch of times or my server might crash, though.

How do you download it? Well, soon, it will have a link in iTunes and you can download it there. For now, you can download the .mp3 file directly or copy the following link and go in to iTunes and select “File–>Subscribe to Podcast …” and then paste this link (http://birkieguide.com/podcast/feed.xml) and it will subscribe you to the podcast. Do you get your podcast somewhere else? I am pretty new to this so you may have to help me out, and I can submit the feed elsewhere, too.

Want to be a guest on the BirkieGuide Podcast? Email me. Seriously. We can talk.

Well, not really. And as usual I used the title here to reference a Seinfeld quote. But the New York Times has a data piece out about the NYC Marathon this weekend showing a time lapse of people running along the course:

Does that remind you of anything?

Well, I guess if I was two years ahead of the Times, that’s okay by me.

You may have seen that the Birkie is fundraising for a permanent start area. You may have gotten an email, or two, or three. The Foundation is pushing this start area, and we here at the Unofficial Guide think that it’s a good idea. So if you have some extra dollars floating around, maybe you don’t need another pair of Triacs this year, and can send a couple of bills over to the Birkie. (If you want to send a pair of Triacs to me, 175 cm, please, I’ll give you my address, and even pay shipping!)

Anyway, while a lot of us new-timers think of the Birkie as being a fixed route from Cable to Hayward, that has not always been so. Up until 1992, the race switched direction every year. In the ’80s, is started up Mount Telemark, before winding its way through the Telemark trails and on towards Hayward. The Foundation added a bit through Fish Hatchery this year (which probably needs to be widened), added the Classic Trail, and has rejiggered a few other sections as need be. The trails is a living, breathing organism, and change is not always for the worse.

The start isn’t going to change dramatically. It will be rebuilt near the current start, but off of the airfield, which the race needs an FAA waiver to use every year. The trail itself will bear the brunt of the change. It will lose about one kilometer of distance, so the Fish Hatchery joggle might be to keep it at 50k. And while the elevation will remain about the same, it will be much less steep. The first hill on the power lines—the one that separates the men from the boys—will be cut out, meaning there won’t be a gaggle of V1ers a kilometer in to the race, but a faster V2 start out of the gates. The main concern is that the course won’t be wide enough at the start, and hopefully the course designers keep it plenty wide. I would say the course should be at least 20m wide from the start to the power lines, especially since it’s climbing most of that way.

The major upside? A new start building. Tents are expensive, annoying, and can collapse when 18″ of snow falls on them. Having a building, however, would be supreme. Would it be able to handle 10,000 skiers on Birkie morning? Certainly not: you’d need an outright convention center for that (or at least the Hayward High School). But it would be an upgrade over a damp tent pitched on snow with a hay-covered floor. And, theoretically, it could serve other purposes throughout the year: a chalet during ski season and bike season, and an event center on weekends year round. What Birkie skier wouldn’t want to have their wedding at the Birkie start?

The Craftsbury Outdoor Center in Vermont is an interesting case study. It hosts the Craftsbury Marathon, a tiny ski race in New England (well, tiny by Birkie standards) but is similar to the Birkie in that it has low user fees, dependable snow and terrific grooming. It is basically funded by the Driessigacker family (of biathlon fame) and their family business: Concept2 rowing supplies. (They make the SkiErg, too. Why? Because they’re skiers.) Concept2 has done tremendous business in the past few years, especially since CrossFit has decided to use Concept2 in their “workouts.” (I speak only derisively of CrossFit, although now every time I run by a CrossFit gym and see people paying oodles of money throwing balls or whatever I smile and think of how they’re funding skiing.) Craftsbury has a huge new chalet and training center that the Birkie would be lucky to have, several large solar arrays, a fleet of groomers, and some of the lowest trail fees around. The Birkie doesn’t have such a benefactor, but it makes up for it with tens of thousands of skier-supporters Together, we can make that kind of difference.

With Telemark quite possibly past the point of no return, it’s time for the Birkie to decide its own future. Is it free? No, it’s not free. Can you gripe about how much the race costs? Sure, but I just paid $175 to run the Boston Marathon and wait to retrieve my gear bag from a tent in the pouring rain. And they didn’t have to groom the roads. If you want the Birkie to thrive, and you can step up to the plate, you should. This is just phase one, and a few dollars from each Birkie skier would go a long way towards assuring a top-notch experience for decades to come.

I posted this on Facebook earlier, but not everyone who reads this is my friend on Facebook, so here it is on the Internet:

This video is amazing:

If you have five minutes, watch it. If you have an hour, watch the whole race (start at the 1:00:00 mark) as the announcers realize that Caitlin is in position for a podium and are utterly shocked by it.

I’m not.

Caitlin is a friggin’ rock star who, through various happenstance, has been on the outside looking in way more often than she should be. She skied at NMU because back in the early 2000s, that’s what you did: ski in college. (I vaguely remember watching her start a race in Ironwood and smoking the field.) Then she was told she should have been on a development team, and was too old to be supported. She was selected for the Olympics in 2010—I interviewed her on a sketchy Skype connection for the Loppet newsletter a few weeks after—but only at the last minute after she had skied fast enough that they couldn’t rightfully leave her off (again she was “too old”), and then had to pay her own way to World Champs. In 2011 she won the Birkie (note to November Project types: the temperature—not windchill, temperature—was -11. Can you say ‪#‎weatherproof‬?) and 2013. In 2014 she was left of the Olympic team because of, among other things, internal politics, and she was too old, (although her husband got to go to Sochi). I asked her last year if she was considering another run at the Olympics in 2018 or hanging up the—well, not the spikes, bindings? let’s say bindings—and she was only a little non-committal: 37 is old even for skiers, but especially for US Ski Team selection. Good thing she kept after it.

This morning, I went out for a crust ski on the Charles River.

I’m not kidding. The river is well frozen, and the crust has seen enough sun and moisture that it’s pretty perfect. A couple frozen drifts here and there, and some ice under the bridges. It’s pretty great. I might call for a ski race on it some time this week.

Then I got to my office and turned on the Internet and Caitlin and Jessie had broken the Internet.

.@jessdiggs and @CaitlinGregg take historic podium at World Champs today. #Falun2015 http://t.co/shWHatf9rW pic.twitter.com/PzLkKXGsrG

— USSA Nordic (@USSA_Nordic) February 24, 2015

This is pretty awesome. Caitlin won the Birkie in 2011 and 2013, and Jessie the Korteloppet in 2008 and 2009. That’s four Birkie event wins! To have them both on the podium, and with significant payouts too ($10k and $6k), is really fantastic. A great day for US skiing.

This page interviewed Ms. Gregg last year, and maybe she and Jessie will join us again soon (maybe for a podcast; yeah, we might start doing podcasts).

I’ve met a lot of people in the past few days, and if I mention BirkieGuide, it’s amazing, but almost without fail, people say they’ve read the site and love it. That’s great—and heartening, this site doesn’t write itself. I’ve even had people who I guess heard my name and came up to shake my hand. Guys, go find the winners and do that. Or the guys who’ve skied 40 races (I’ve now done 10). But, yeah, thanks again! See you in Seeley!

A couple years back, I wrote about how the Birkie really needed to fix parking and busing situation. Then last year happened. I spent some time this past summer talking with the Birkie, and a team from Georgia Tech, about fixing the parking. (It helps that it’s kind of what I do for a living in the real world.) My idea was basically that they needed to split the parking and not have two streams of parking trying to access one road, and minimize the left turns and crossing traffic. The Birkie, using their new trailhead, did one better, parking northbound traffic at the Birkie Ridge trailhead.

And you may have noticed: it worked. It helped that there was 1.8″ of snow this morning, not 18″ inches. But, on a daily basis, I see traffic which increases by 10 or 20% and goes from free-flowing to gridlock. The Birkie was over capacity. By cutting it in half, they brought it way under capacity. It works.

I talked to Ben Popp and he said that, at one point, he saw a line of people waiting in traffic and was disappointed. Then he realized it was only 18 cars, and they were moving. That’s not an issue. The hour-long backups, those are the issues.

Last year, it took us 1:45 to get from Hayward to Cable. This year, we made the trip in 25 minutes (it helped that we were traveling with an elite elite racer who had a start parking pass, but even with the buses, it would have been less than 45 minutes, or an hour less than last year). It was a huge success. Parking is one of the biggest constraints on the capacity of the Birkie, and it has been dramatically improved. And, yeah, I’m taking just a bit of credit for that.

More on the race, of course, later. FWIW, 154th, best finish ever.

Looks like a pretty good day for the Birkie tomorrow. The temperature is now above 0, and looks to stay above 0 during the race tomorrow (it was certainly not above zero this morning, nor will it be above 0 on Sunday). The trail is in perfect shape: not as much snow as last year, but good conditions. The skate deck is very hard, but there are 2 or maybe 3 inches of powder on top, which should be incorporated in to give a nice pliable but firm skate deck. Conditions a la 2011. It’s likely to be a great race.

And the bridge. If you just went to the expo, you may have missed the Birkie bridge. But it’s impressive. No more will you just glide off the lake, around Marketplace and up Main Street: you now have a 20 foot climb. And then there’s a steep drop down on to Main Street for the finish before you have some momentum for the now-one-block-longer trip up to the finish.

Enjoy it!

Usually the Birkie posts information about the trail being closed some number of days before the race. This year I haven’t seen any information. So apparently the trail is open this afternoon. It’s probably a good idea to clear off of it by 3 or 4, as the groomers will be coming through for their final rounds to set down the skate lanes with the new snow. And to eat and get read to ski tomorrow.

That’s Norwegian for “Birkie Trail.” And today, on a rest day from Ski Orienteering World Championships, we drove up the road past the Lillehammer Olympic Stadium and, that’s right, skied on the real, actual Birkie Trail. Let me tell you this: if you haven’t gone skiing in Norway put that on your list. Even in the fog today, the trails were freshly prepared, fast and beautiful. And apparently there are views when you can see more than 50 feet in any direction. Two more races, then back to Snowtown a.k.a. Boston, Mass.

Also, if anyone wants, Triacs here are $320 (well, the equivalent in Kroner). None long enough for me, but if you’re skiing less than 170 cm, let me know. Taxes included.

Weather speculation: Cold. Dry and cold until the Birkie. Nothing on the horizon anywhere near freezing, so it should be skiing on what’s there, which is plenty. In the past people have said “oh, cold and dry, it will be rock solid.” Those people forget that there is a veritable Armada of Pisten Bullys preparing the trail. Expect it to be firm but pliable. And expec tthe race to go off as planned.

Of course, we could have 18″ of snow the night before. But the way this season is going so far, I’d expect that in Boston.