As snow piled up in Northeastern Minnesota this winter, and with nearly 20 inches still on the ground, Duluthian Eric Hartmark took his racing snowshoes elsewhere. And he found warm temperatures and relatively little ground cover.
The 2013 World Championships in January in Fondo, Italy, and U.S. Championships on March 16 in Bend, Ore., turned into adventure racing.
Temperatures were in the 50s in Italy and snow had to be trucked in to create a 15-foot-wide ribbon of white over a 5.6-kilometer course (that was planned to be 10K). Dirt was on either side. Hartmark, 34, finished 36th in a field of about 3,500 after a handful of mishaps derailed his hopes. He placed second in the 2012 race in Quebec City, Quebec.
"Because the race was shorter, it was a mad sprint from the start," Hartmark said last week. "I saw an opening where I could make a move toward the leaders, and was feeling good when two racers collided. There was an elbow and a shove and people were on the ground, and when I went to jump over someone, I got knocked to the ground."
He was stepped on once, had a snowshoe just miss his face, yet rejoined the race and was moving up when one of his snowshoes came loose and flew off his foot. It happened a second time. He fell a second time. His first European racing experience had deteriorated into a black comedy.
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"I just thought to myself, 'You have to be kidding me,' '' said Hartmark.
The former Duluth East and University of Minnesota athlete has had success at various distances, primarily as a runner on roads and trails. He's won the Superior Trail 25K, the Half-Voyageur Trail Marathon, the 10-Mile Road Race in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and holds the best road marathon time for a Duluth native of 2:21:44.
The weather in central Oregon also was warm nine days ago, nearing 70 degrees, which left a sloppy, slushy 10K course with many bare spots for the U.S. Championships. That didn't bother former Minnesota Duluth runner and International Falls native Brandy Erholtz of Evergreen Colo., who has built a reputation as an international mountain racer.
Erholtz, 35, finished second among 42 women entrants in 1 hour, 2 minutes, 47 seconds, while Hartmark, the 2011 U.S. champion, was second in a men's field of 66 in 50:04.1.
Among other items, snowshoers had to handle hurdling large downed trees on the course at the Virginia Meissner Sno-Park in the Cascade Mountains, about halfway between Bend and Mount Bachelor that starts at 5,000 feet elevation and tops out at about 5,700. Josiah Middaugh, 34, of Vail, Colo., a former Central Michigan University athlete, won his sixth U.S. title, completing two 5K loops in 47:08.2.
"This was a technical mountain course, which was more to my liking," said Erholtz, a high school teacher who won U.S. women's snowshoe titles in 2009 and 2011. "I had never been to Bend and I thought this would be a fun trip. I had only been on snowshoes once or twice this winter, but I'm a competitor and when the (starting) gun goes off, that gets my competitive juices flowing."
She ended up chasing another Minnesotan, former all-state high school runner and Nordic skier Stephanie Howe of Forest Lake, a resident of Bend, who is pursuing a doctorate in nutrition and exercise physiology. Howe, 29, won in 1:00:14.8.
Howe, a former Northern Michigan University Nordic skier, told the Bend Bulletin that the race represented just her second time on snowshoes: "It's like running, but just slower. You're working really hard and you're not moving very fast."
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The two had met in December at the North Face Challenge Endurance Challenge 50-mile race in San Francisco -- Howe was second in 6:41:41 and Erholtz seventh in 7:14:55.
Metal racing snowshoes are about 22 inches long and weigh about 1 pound per shoe. Hartmark kept both on along the single-track trails in Bend, yet fell five times, including on an extremely steep, icy downhill.
"Snowshoeing is so great in Duluth, just to get out in the woods and out of the wind on cold days," said Hartmark. "Some days it's nice to go out in the deep snow and just make your own path."
