Stomp the Swamp 12K snowshoe race

This year's race brought an interesting mix of competitors. Snowshoeing is so much fun. What I love about the races is you see the same group of people over and over again. Friendships develop as you see the same people over and over again. I am thankful that my John Kann introduced me to this wonderful sport several years ago. It was a perfect day and the pictures were courtesy of my wife. She only got pictures of the start because she was inside when I finished as she said "I thought it would have taken you longer." I guess that's a good problem to have. . .finishing earlier than expected. This year I finished the course in 56:42 for second overall out of 16 racers. This was considerably faster than the previous year. I was almost five minutes faster by accounts of time although the race director said it may have been a couple hundred meters short. The lead runner finished under 50 minutes. I'd never heard of the guy before or seen him anywhere prior. I did the 12K race. Many people chose the 6K event. Many people probably were trying to relax and save their energy for the United States National Snowshoe Competition which was the next week in Syracuse, New York. Many people from this race were headed there. Jay Punke does the race up well. The soup is excellent, the brownies are to die for, and every race should finish with Leine's 1888 Bock as the post race drink.

Book Across the Bay

My favorite snowshoe race of the year by far, I had looked forward to the Book Across the Bay race all year. The prerace festivities included the usual. We stayed at a cabin with some friends, at some wonderful food both at the Delta Diner and cooked by some friends. I had my picture taken with the elevation profile for the course and I took a picture of my wife wearing a Book Across the Bay hat that I thought was cute. Since Angela was pregnant, she couldn't race this year, but I convinced her to do some tubing instead for a few times down the hill. She really enjoyed that. The race itself was awesome. A fast pace was set by eventual winner Greg Hexum. I matched his pace for the first couple of minutes, but knew that I could never hold his pace off. I was fifth overall with a time of 50:41 (The picture shows an unadjusted time of 1:00:41, which is ten minutes high since the snowshoers started 10 minutes after the skiers. It is corrected in the final results, but was not for this race sign, but the picture was still cool.). A friend of mine snapped a quick picture of me right before the race began and I love the cool colors in the picture. Postrace was followed by some great food and my wife losing her cell phone so we battled traffic to go back to where she had lost her cell phone. We missed the fireworks, but I heard they were good. We'll look forward to seeing them next time.

Badger State Games

I equated this set of races to the Olympics of Wisconsin winter racing. John Kann and I travelled to Wausau to participate in the Badger State Games. I had never participated in this race before, so it was a new experience. I was able to try multiple events. The first was the mile race (which actually was 1.2 miles according to the race director, Jay Punke). The first race was about 1/2 on open ski trails and 1/2 on singletrack through the woods. Starting out it was a fast start and I took off pushing the pace followed closely by Kris Borchardt whom I had met just prior to the race. I led up until about 200 meters before the end. With Kris right behind me heading through the final stretch of woods, I misread the trail and took 2 steps to the left in the wrong direction. . .enough for Kris to pass me and gain the advantage. He crossed in 6:46.7 and I crossed in 6:47.4. In all actuality the race was a dead stop at the finish and there was not 0.7 seconds between us. The 0.7 seconds is due to the fact the timing was manually done and the person pushing the buttons didn't have reaction time to press the buttons on the timer fast enough. Kris led by the length of a glove at the finish, so I settled for the Silver medal in the 1.2 mile race. In the 10K (which was too close afterwards, I found myself unable to hold the early pace due to pushing the limits of my running in the final stretch from the race just minutes before. I settled for a bronze medal with a third place finish, at 57:36.5. I was 4:03.9 behind the lead runner, but could not push the pace. My stomach was completely upset from the first race so I settled for a constant pace which would not upset it and could proceed no faster than what I was going. It was interesting that my pace/mile was under a 6 minute pace per mile for the first race going all out, but I struggled to maintain about an average pace of 9.3 minute/mile for the 10K which was a drastic difference. It would have been better to run the 10K first in my opinion while I still had energy to give.