The Results

That’s my man. His goal was to finish in 4-5 hours. He finished in 3 hours, 53 minutes and 54 seconds. Of the 1431 people who skied the Birke classic style, he finished 354th. (There were about 8,000 people in the Birke, but most people ski it using the skating style.) Knut does both, but his newest and nicest skis are classic, so he wanted to use those.

Here’s him racing into the finish line, downtown Hayward. I think you can click on the picture to enlarge it. Yes, Hayward does truck in a bunch of snow and shuts down their downtown roads to host the finish of this race. Isn’t that wild?

What’s even more wild is that in a crowd as large as there was at the finish line, we ran into our friends the Mousers, and I got a picture of Knut and Matt. I believe this was Matt’s 9th Birke.

I took some pictures of the hundreds if not thousands of skis leaned against anything that stands and speared into the snow at the finish line. Knut tells me it is nothing compared to the lines of skis at the start. I was just waiting here, watching people as Knut changed back into street clothes and picked up some soup they were handing out to the racers.

He finished. We are happy.