Training Log Archive: biggins

Event: American Birkebeiner
 

morning freezy jog

Birkie! A foot+ of cold snow on Thursday night meant the trail was super duper soft, plus it was down around 0 for the start. We managed to get there on time, but the lodge was closed and the warming tent had fallen over, so I just ran around a bit for the half hour I had to kill. There was a lot of complaining going around about how cold it was and hour bad the snow was going to be, and I couldn't decide if I wanted to wait until the last minute to dump the poofy jacket and duck into the back of the start line, or if everyone else was going to wimp out and I should go through the chutes and stand in the wind in a race suit at 0 degrees for 20 minutes to get to the front row of the line. In the end common sense lost and I was shivering my ass off on the front row of wave 1. Totally worth it. By the time we got off the runway at the end of the field I was only 100m behind the front of the wave, there were no accordions going on at all, and I had snow to myself for pretty much the whole race. It was night and day from last year. Also got a big bonus from being towards the front, as only a couple hundred people were in front of me in total, so the soft snow was still reasonably solid now and then, which gave some good rest now and then. Most of it was still junk, but not nearly as bad as it would have been at the back of the wave or in any of the later ones.

Race went really well all things considered. I felt mostly fine the whole time. The wax was squeaky the whole race, but I don't know if I could have done much better. I'd get bogged down in the soft snow where it was bad, but decided I'd just beast mode through it and hope there was solid snow soon to drop the heart rate back down. Worked most of the time, but on some of the long stretches of bad snow I'd fall off behind the packs of all the stupid skinny guys.

The lake at the end sucked, it was soft and drifted, and straight into a really cold headwind, enough that I was only doing 4:30/km on a dead flat lake. There were other people around, but they were either short or slow or both, no good for drafting at all. So I pulled a couple people across all by myself, and then dropped them on the last half km into town, which felt good.

Got to the finish and my bag hadn't arrived yet (along with most of wave 1's). You'd think the trucks would go faster than we were skiing, but no. (also see: Alex and Ali's epic morning bus failure). So I hid sopping wet in front of one of the heat blowers for 40 minutes while Alex chased down every new bag truck looking for my dry clothes.

Generally happy with the race. The times were super slow, but I finished in 218th, up 30 places from last year.

C • Nice race, and a good job m... 10

Made it to minneapolis ok, both flight were right on time (it's 1:30am). Except the jetway in MSP was encased in ice, so they couldn't get it to move over to the plane. So we sat on the plane at the gate for half an hour while they ran into it with a pickup truck until it broke free.

C • ETA? 3

Up around the lower top loop at TD. There's not really any snow left at the bottom, so they've groomed a frankentrail randomly up through the snow patches to get towards the top of the mountain.

A couple laps around ASC. They got all the rest of their main trails open, so its pretty nice up there now.

C • Hayward 2

Ski with Carol up at Royal Gorge. It froze nicely last night, so the trails were actually ok (and they didn't groom in the morning!). Lots of snow up high, enough snow but lots of open water in the meadow, and mostly dirt around the ski lodge.