Fat Bike Birkie

The first year of the Fat Bike Birkie race was met with mixed emotions from the skiing crowd.  So many skiers were worried that there may be damage caused to the trails and therefore were worried about having fat bike riders going on the Birkie.  Organizers would soon find that there was nothing to be worried about as the trail held up beautifully.  The conditions were perfect.  In fact, there was some snow that fell the night before.  I went up and stayed with a group of bike riders, staying with a friend of ours who had a cabin within miles of the start of the ride.  The field limit was left to be 300 riders, but will certainly be increased in future years.  The use of fat bikes has exploded over the last few years amongst people anxious to ride bikes during the winter season.  Kelly Randolph is a photographer living in Drummond, Wisconsin, and took some photos he allowed me to use to report on this event.

 

I am the biker in the yellow jersey in the background on the left side (immediately behind the biker in the foreground who also has a yellow jersey).  I finished the race in 2:47:01.  I was 108th out of 155 for the 46 K race.  I can see this event becoming a major event in the future and look forward to seeing what happens with registration.  I agree with several other bikers who feel the race does not appear to have drastically impact the conditions of the Birkie trail, but this will have to be evaluated by experts of the trail to see what type of impact was noticed.

Lake Wissota Loppet

This was a last minute race I decided to enlist in.  Angela and Kaia were out of town for the weekend and that left me with the chance to catch up on work at home.  Well, a snowshoe race sounded like work to me.  Granted, it was fun, but I didn't just go out there to show up.  I had hoped to go out and have a great race.

I saw something in this race that I had never seen before in any race.  After reaching the halfway point, the race turns around and heads back to the start.  The return route is different than the first half, so the route isn't really an out-and-back course.  It was held on a lake, so therefore was entirely flat.  It was even more flat than the 2013 Book Across the Bay which had a small pressure ridge causing a slight variation in elevation this year.  Anyway, I was about a minute behind the lead two snowshoers when I saw them round the halfway point and the first snowshoer stopped and took a water from the water station and walk while he drank it.  Then, the second place guy who was probably about ten seconds behind did the same thing.  I have never seen the leaders of a race stop and walk while drinking water from a water stop.  I have seen people take water from water stops and drink it, but if you are leading the race or closely competed for second, it just seems like on a 10K race that competitors would not stop to drink.  Maybe I am being overly critical here, but I felt for a while I might have a chance to catch up if they walked long enough.  Unfortunately, they began running again.  There was a pretty cool bridge that we ran by and also under. 

 

I finished the race with my fastest snowshoe 10 K time ever.  My time was 46:57, which was good enough for third place out of twenty snowshoers (most people do the skiing event as the snowshoeing event hasn't built to the popularity level of skiing).  Below is some of the left over gear after the race.  Either some trusting people or many people forgot their stuff.  I must give credit to the race organizers that the post race soup and bread were great.  Temperatures were not bad either.  It was nice to be able to hold a snowshoe event in early March and not have it be cancelled due to lack of snow.  If anything, it looks like we might hold onto our snow for a while this year.  Special thanks go to the event hosters for the Lake Wissota Loppet for taking many pictures and providing these to me to report on this event.