Birkie Prep!
Hi Team Birkie fans! Emma here. Checking in from Hayward as we get ready to race the American Birkebeiner! Here’s a look into what we’ve been doing to get ready for the Birkie over the past few weeks:
20km Skate Mass Start in Houghton
Non CCSA-podium for the 7.5km Classic, Gretta, Anabell Needham, Emma
After our trip out to Bozeman for the Crosscut SuperTour, we had a few weeks of recovery and training at home in Minneapolis. During this time we did some longer L3 intervals to get ready to race 50k. We also used these intervals to practice our feeding for the Birkie. Our goal was to figure out ways to get as much sugar and carbs into our systems as our stomachs could handle without losing too much time. GU products work great for this!
This past weekend we headed up to Houghton, MI to hop in some college races and tune up for the Birkie. It was especially fun for me to hop back into the college circuit that I spent the last few years racing on. It’s always a treat to race with my old St. Scholastica teammates! My brother skis for Michigan Tech so I also got to spend time with him as well. Overall it was a fun weekend full of friends!
Team Birkie had some good races in Houghton with Gretta taking the win and Henry getting 9th in Saturday’s 20k mass start. In Sunday’s 7.5k classic, I felt like I finally got my classic legs under me and was the 3rd non-collegiate skier! The conditions were pretty typical of the Upper Peninsula. It snowed the entire time we were there! While this made for some tough, slow races, we were psyched to be racing on natural snow! We were also stoked to hear that it was snowing in Birkie Land!
After racing in Houghton, Gretta, Jake, and I headed down to Hayward to continue our Birkie prep. All of our Birkie training is done at this point so we’re focusing on rest and recovery this week. For us that means lots of knitting, reading Twilight, and watching New Girl. We’ve been skiing for about an hour every day to keep the legs moving and check out the Birkie course. This will be the first Birkie for most of us so any little bit of the course we can learn ahead of time will be helpful!
Birkie Fever is strong on Team Birkie right and we can’t wait to get out and race this iconic race! Good luck to all our fans who will be out there racing with us! We hope to see you around this weekend!
Coach Jake getting his glitter on in Houghton
Frozen cookie? No problem!
