Field Report from the Birkie - CXC
All winter long, we've been testing and finding HF Blue with Jetstream Blue over the top to run extremely well in cold weather, and at the 2011 Birkie, this was proven once again - We went with HF Blue covered by JetStream Blue and had fantastic skis.
Looking at forecasts a few days out, we knew that the weather was going to take a dive from Thursday night until Saturday, so we held off on testing too much until 6am on Friday morning. After some quick runs on the skis at Boedecker, I came back to Telemark Lodge, assembled CXC's crack team of waxers, and we started running through skis. Part of the privileges of being on the CXC Master Team is getting your skis waxed for the Birkie, so we had 50+ pairs to wax for them, plus the CXC Elite Team skis. Between good organization, good tools and good workers, we were able to get the skis glide waxed before 7:30pm.
The Birkie classic has definitely grown, and we had about 20 pairs of skis to binder and wax. We used a mix of hard-wax binder and a few drops of green klister ironed in with it. Between the forecast and the length of the race, we went slightly warmer than starting conditions would call for -- a few layers of blue hard wax covered with green. As it turned out, the weather didn't warm up as much as we expected, but the kick definitely stuck around.
All in all, I was pretty pleased with the CXC Team's results -- wins in the women's skate (Caitlin Compton) and classic (Jennie Bender), with Maria Stuber coming in 5th. On the men's side, Karl Nygren and Eric Wolcott went 2-3 in the classic and in the skate, Bryan Cook came in 5th, with Brian Gregg 8th, Matt Liebsch 9th and Santi Ocariz 17th.
Jason Cork, Head Coach, CXC Elite Team
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