Birkie Birkie Birkie: Unpacking the 2024 Course, via Strava and YouTube

By Gavin Kentch

I said in yesterday’s preview of the elite field how impressed I am by the efforts of the American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation in making this race happen this year, in any form. I will largely not repeat those praises here, but do let me say one last time that they seem to have spun straw into gold when it comes to enabling ski racing in northwestern Wisconsin in this snow-starved winter, and I am quite impressed by that.

That said, the course that they have devised is maybe — through little fault of their own, because they had to use the terrain available near the snowmaking equipment — not all that hilly. This year’s loop course clocks in as having 68 meters of climbing per 10-kilometer lap, according to a profile that went up on Trail Genius earlier this week. That profile, which you can view here, is very slick, but also it feels like that 68-meter figure simply cannot be correct. Keep in mind that there are 51 meters of gain just from the start line to the powerlines, per the relevant Strava segment. And another 21 meters for the single climb up Mt. Bauer (see below for both). Something doesn’t add up here.

So how much climb does the course actually have, if it’s more than just 68 meters per lap? Strava, once more, may start to provide the answer.

Lauren Jortberg and Gus Schumacher are among the boldface names who were out on the course today. And who have publicly available Strava profiles. Their posts from this morning are embedded here; click through to the video in Schumacher’s post to see impeccable snowmaking loops passing through brown fields on either side.

Schumacher skied two entire laps of the course today, then on lap three went to the top of the powerlines and back to the start. This may potentially slightly overstate the climb on the course as a whole, because the opening 3.5km here have the most sustained climbing. Subject to that caveat (not to mention larger cautions about the amount of climb picked up by a watch versus the amount of climb that figures in a full homologation inspection), Schumacher skied 24.4 km today and gained 428 meters, which works out to 17.5 meters of climb per kilometer.

I would characterize this as “gently rolling hills” levels of climbing; if you live in Anchorage, Margaux’s Loop has roughly 21 m/km of climbing, for perspective, and Jodphur 22 m/km. If you live in Minneapolis, Sunday’s distance course at Wirth had 33.1 m/km of climbing, according to the homologation certificate. Draw your own comparisons from there.

For her part, Jortberg did effectively three complete laps of this year’s 10km course, much like everyone in the 2024 Birkie will save for the 300ish athletes in the elite skate race. Jortberg’s watch, and Strava posting, state that this was good for 583 meters of elevation gain over 32.4 km of skiing, or 18 meters of climb per kilometer. The fact that this figure is in the same ballpark as Schumacher’s feels like a good sign for the potential accuracy of this thought experiment.

In conclusion, someone who is on site this week please ski the course and create the relevant Strava segment, so we can all stop guessing.

Tuesday evening update: Thank you, anonymous reader on site. The segment is in. It is 10.3km (for the elite-wave version), and, per Strava, contains 213 meters of climb, or 20.6 m/km of climbing. Neither Ari Ofsevit nor I was precisely correct about this, but I still think his approach was more creative than mine.

Here is the relevant segment. Expect this to see a lot more than 27 attempts by this time Sunday evening.

Wednesday morning update: And here is the segment for everyone else (“commoners,” per the title): 10.26km, 201 meters of gain, 19.6 m/km of gain. This concludes my attempt to crowdsource Strava segments from a distance. Thank you to all who responded.

Finally, above is this year’s course map, and below is a deeply chill preview of this year’s course. Consider watching at double speed so you don’t fall asleep.

Top of powerline climb is at roughly 8:20 into this video, on my reading. (Caveat: I’ve done this race once, in 2016, and I was busy racing at the time rather than taking notes, but I have also spent a lot of my life poring over course maps and am pretty good at faking it from a distance.) Skier loops back through the stadium at 15:00. Climb up Mt. Bauer starts at around 38:30. Fill in the rest from there; after a cumulative tens of thousands of laps this week, a lot of athletes are going to know this course pretty well pretty soon.

Skiing in Cable starts with open track events tomorrow, bonus “alternate start day” on Thursday, then Kortelopet & Prince Haakon on Friday. Elite skate race starts at 10:30 a.m. local time Saturday, following an early wakeup time that morning for skate waves one and two (7 a.m. and 7:10 a.m. starts). Classic races go out on Sunday.

Update: Course video from Tuesday afternoon. White snow, brown fields.

You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love project dedicated to publicizing American nordic skiing. Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in year one of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year two of Nordic Insights for you to be reading now: I was okay with working for very little money to get this love letter to American cross-country skiing off the ground, but I didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing so. If you would like to support what remains a brutally shoestring operation, this season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.