Summer Recap

Welcome back!

It has been a while, but don’t worry, the athletes have been training even if the blog has been a little quiet!

First of all, we had an amazing crew of college skiers in town this summer. Thank you to all the athletes for taking part in being such great ambassadors and motivators in our community and for showing up every day to train well and hard!

I mean – look at these guys!

**Picture taken right after completing the annual 3k time trial!**

In addition to our Summer College program, our Pro and Elite athletes, our Marathon Team and Devo Team have been training and pushing limits as well. We have seen people getting faster, stronger and tougher! A big shoutout to our incredible team of coaches have also been pushing limits, showing up and supporting our athletes every day!

Below are a few short excerpts from some of our athletes and coaches on how their summers were.

Amanda Kautzer, originally from Plymouth, Minnesota joined the team this year and we are so excited to have her!
Here is a little summary of Amanda´s summer:

“This summer was a great start to working with Team Birkie. I got to spend a lot of time in the Midwest training at sea level, highlighted by helping coach the REG camp in Cable, helping with the College Team, including a 3km time trail as pictured.

Having people to train with when I’m home with my family has been a game changer and I´m excited to keep working with the Team Birkie Crew.”

Smiling after completing a time trial in the sun!

Zak Ketterson, third year on the team, originally from Bloomington, Minnesota is getting ready for the World Cup which starts already at the end of November, and we will be cheering him on!

Zak also provided a summary of how his summer was:

“This summer has been great. I have been to a variety of great places from Minneapolis, all the way to Norway. My first camp of the summer was in May when I went to Bend, OR with the US Ski Team for an on snow camp. Then, I spent a few months in Minneapolis before my June altitude camp in Park City, UT. From there I spent several months in Norway, specifically in Trondheim. I got to train with some fast local skiers there, including none other than Johannes Klaebo for a few sessions. While in Europe, I joined the US Ski Team once again for a camp in Sweden that included a week in a ski tunnel and a weekend of high level rollerski racing at Alliansloppet. My latest training camp was once again in Park City, and now I am back in Minnesota for the last few weeks before heading back to Europe for the winter season.”

Jake Stiele – one of our Marathon Team skiers coaching and training in Minneapolis has also been getting ready for the season. He provided us with a summary of what his summer looked like. We will look out for Jake in the upcoming marathon races in the Midwest as he is doing most of the big races!

“My summer was good! I was able to get some quality training in with the Team Birkie College crew. I also got to do a lot of coaching with Loppet Nordic Racing, traveling with them to training camps in Ironwood, MI, and Bozeman, MT. It was a busy summer and went by fast, but it was one to remember! “

Jake (3rd front from the left) from our team photoshoot earlier this summer.

Erin Moening joined our coaching crew this past spring and has been an amazing addition to the team. We asked Erin how her first summer with the team has been and below are her words and some of her highlights captured in pictures.

“When the new Team Birkie Leadership Committee met in May, I was uncertain how the summer would go. It can be challenging to bring together a new group of people who must learn how to work together and navigate each other’s strengths and weaknesses. It was my first time working with most of the coaching staff and athletes, and the summer could not have gone better. The college athletes brought a competitive, passionate energy that made it exciting to show up to practice every day. The older athletes were strong mentors and supported the team with solid leadership, helping the team form in the right direction as everyone learned to collaborate as one unit. My goal has always been to grow and bring together the elite Nordic skiing community in the Central Region, and seeing athletes from different colleges, clubs, and regions who all were chasing dreams and goals was inspiring.

There were many fantastic workouts in the Minneapolis Area – bounding in the Theodore Wirth Trails, rollerskiing around the Minneapolis Lakes, and under the skyscrapers in downtown Minneapolis, and running along the Mississippi River. Still, my highlight was the Twin Cities Metro Bounding Workout at Battle Creek. Eighty athletes and coaches from 6 different Nordic Ski Clubs, from middle schoolers to ‘master-blasters,’ came together to form a vigorous interval day in the hills just minutes from downtown Saint Paul. The Twin Cities Ski Community is one of a kind – and that workout was a statement to the support Team Birkie gets from the Minneapolis and Central Nordic Ski Communities.”

Farewell BBQ dinner for the college crew!

Chad Salmela took over as head coach this spring and has been an amazing resource for all our athletes this summer. Chad has an impressive background and has historically helped numerous athletes take the next step both in skiing and running. Together with the other three coaches, Chad promotes inspiration, guidance and believe in the team missions powered by the community.

Chad summarized his summer involvement with the team below:

“I have spent almost all of my coaching career working with developmental-stage, young adults. The prospect of just coming in to Team Birkie and digging around for what will work as a program model to support elite development of skiers with a base of operation in the Midwest, was almost enough to entice me. When I was told Zak Ketterson was bought into the forward motion of the program, I was fully in as well. If he needs this, we need this.

While my title is “Head Coach,” I feel like the most effective use of my time and experience, as well as what the program needs for forward momentum, was an approach more like a “sport director” or high-performance director” than an actual head coach. The day-to-day coaching has been done by Matt Clarke, Erin Moening, and Nichole Bathe.

Team Birkie is fortunate to have this cadre of younger coaches who want to, and are excited to make coaching a part of their professional lives. From exercise science degrees, to family culture, to first hand world cup racing experience, the three program coaches I am working with, have been one of the primary pieces of my job and focus this summer and fall with Team Birkie. They have great energy, caring, and focus on the athletes, which is really where coaching begins. Without that energy and caring, the program falters. I am there to help us all do our best, giving everything we do a critical eye from years of experience training endurance athletes.

I reviewed the foundational training plan for the summer college group and did some foundational testing on Pro-Team athletes, and attended summer workouts that were largely designed and managed by Matt, Erin, and Nichole. It has been fun to get back into coaching skiers since I moved to college running as my main coaching job in 2016. I have really enjoyed seeing Matt, Erin, and Nichole develop their coaching styles with the Team Birkie athletes, while also establishing rapport and trust with them and our Pro-Team athletes. I’ve been impressed with the detail of thought put into the training program, particularly with the periodized strength training model in that plan. I have been impressed with the technical level of the group we are coaching. I was equally impressed with the management of the training by our coaching staff; how engaged they were towards problem-solving and arriving at sound decisions on every challenge faced.

From an actual coaching perspective, I’ve had a little more direct-contact work with our Pro and Elite team athletes. Our pros really don’t need me in their stuff on a regular basis and I’ve tried to work on an as-needed basis, them bending my ear as we address challenges they face. I have been a sounding board to approaches to stress loads, timing and focus on intensity approaches within that macro stress load, technique adjustments, and challenges with overloads and subsequent responses. I didn’t really know how being the Team Birkie head coach would look when we started, but it has been all I’d hoped my role would be, and of course not entirely what I expected either, which wasn’t too clear. But the clarity is coming daily, and that makes me excited for the future!

Strategizing the future of Team Birkie with Director Yuriy Gusev, Sport Performance director, Piotr Bednarski, Matt, Erin, and Nichole, is probably the least expected and most rewarding work of the summer. We have looked to Team Birkie’s past and we are trying to embrace and deepen the things that have made several iterations of Team Birkie work well. But we are also looking for the ways in which we can create a stronger platform, that is more community-based, than individual- or personality-based. We recognize that the strongest organizations have foundations in a broad community that the club engages. That broad community cannot be too broad, as we engage the world, as an elite ski racing program, perched atop an immensely strong skiing culture in the Midwest. We have secured awesome athlete support partners and sponsors, and continue to look for an even broader base of support for this inspiring group of athletes. We hope to harness the excitement of the World Cup at our home base in Minneapolis, extending partnerships for success as broadly and deeply as the care for the sport reaches, from Minneapolis and Cable, to the World Cup circuit, and beyond.

It has been a fun and rewarding summer and fall to date, and we’re just getting started. The racing season is nearly upon us, and it’s so exciting to see the athletes putting in the work to succeed this fall.”

We are now turning gears towards the rest of the fall and pgetting in some good workouts before the season starts in not long! Our first stop on the way is the CXC Swenor Rollerski Championship in Cable this upcoming weekend, October 21-22.

Thank you for reading, keep training and we’ll see you out there!

Race Weekend in Birkieland

January and February Fun ☀️