Powersox United States Snowshoe Nationals

My family and I travelled to Cable, Wisconsin, for what would probably be the closest Nationals Snowshoe Race I will ever participate in. Less than a 90 minute drive brought me to the beautiful Lakewoods Resort for a wonderful weekend of snowshoe racing. As always, the race brings the best of the best to one location. Being that I was involved with helping to design the race course, I was sure to put in plenty of hills into the mix. To be honest, knowing that this would be a race that would be dominated by some of the country's top snowshoers, I felt that they should at least be challenged to the fullest extent and let them remember that Wisconsin actually does have plenty of hills. We may not have all of the elevation changes of the mountains, but the hills would provide plenty of challenge. I started off more conservatively this year. I didn't want to duplicate the feeling of going into oxygen debt and redlining within minutes of the start like I did at Nationals last year. My strategy was just to pick a few snowshoers and try hang with them. I also made a concerted effort to have a better second half. The race went through a checkpoint about halfway through. I passed four snowshoers in the final half of the race. Only five snowshoers made a bigger jump ahead of the competition over that same section of the race. My final time was 53:46, which was good enough for 9th in my age group and 49th overall (exactly the same place as last year). My time was significantly better this year, but my overall placing was exactly the same. I was proud to see that I knew some of the top racers personally. I have raced against the top snowshoer from the male race, Eric Hartmark. I also went to college with and attended the same church as the winner from the female race, Brandy Erholtz. My wife, daughter, and parents were able to attend to see the race. As a race director I received several complements about the 3-4 inches of snow we received the night before and during the event, as we had been having some warmer weather the week prior. Following my race, I got to watch my wife do the citizen's 5K race. She had a blast and ran for only the second time this winter. As you can see from the picture of her, she was all smiles. This tends to be the case when she snowshoes. She takes a pretty relaxed look at snowshoeing. My parents and daughter joined in watching the festivities as shown above. Some pictures were taken from local newspaper reporter from the Rice Lake Chronotype, Dave Greschner. Another friend, Adam Speer, took a few pictures for me to post as well.