Jay Richards: Super Bowl Live Wednesday Night Skate Sprints

When I saw the World Masters were going to be held in Minneapolis this year at Theodore Wirth Park, I thought it would be fun to attend. With many of the races during the week, it looked like it would work to go down. As it turned out, we ended up hosting a conference ski meet and Section 8 Nordic Ski Championships so I wasn't able to sneak away as daily trail prep was required to have the courses as good as possible the week and weeks later. One of the ski weekends I was talking to long time guest Becky Alexander who was at Maplelag with the MPLS Washburn ski team helping coach. She mentioned the craziness of the Masters, Loppet and the down town sprints. I didn't know much about the sprints so I looked on skinnyski.com and happened to see registration closing that night! I signed up for the Wednesday night sprints and hoped that it would work out to go.

The morning of was just like any other morning. Grooming.

Bemidji Nordic ski team came out in the morning for training on the Section course.

I had been talking to Bemidji coach Mark Walters about grooming and what not earlier in the year and found out the Bemidji Ski Club that grooms the area trails up there was looking to move a old Skandic as they acquired new equipment this year. Mark brought the sled down and I was a new owner of a used two stroke! They had done some tweaking for grooming and was just what I was looking for early season/low snow grooming. After grooming and taking care of some other chores, I headed down to the cities. Seemed strange to leave mid afternoon to go and race but my first heat wasn't scheduled until 7:30.

To make a trip out of it, I went to Theodore Wirth to get a hour ski in before the races. I knew there wasn't any place to warm up, not that it mattered much, but figured be good to ski out the car legs. The ambient light from the city with snow falling made for a awesome ski.

I took Uber to the start area as I didn't want to monkey around with driving. The driver wasn't able to get me to the start area so I had to walk 3 blocks...with my ski boots, skis over the shoulder among a couple thousand people. It was such a surreal experience for me from basically being in the woods all winter. The big lights highlighting the snow falling was extremely cool.

One of the first persons I bumped into was the girlfriend of Jakes's girlfriends brother Ben. Kate was on the super bowl committee.

I made my way to the start line after some direction from my good friend Bruce Adelsman who was taking pictures for his site. Again, it was an incredible atmosphere to see skiers racing downtown Minneapolis with people lined up watching along the sides.

The racing was short and intense and managed to be in the top 2 in my first wave to make it to the final.

Racing under the city lights, fresh snow doesn't get any more epic.

Definitely one of the highlights of ski racing for me. Kudos to the Loppet folks, the Birkie folks for pulling it off. Pretty crazy they brought the Birkie bridge to the city, closed off a street and had people racing on it.