Snowshoe Racing Debutante

Wintertime in Upstate New York can be conducive to a number of outdoor activities. Cross-country and downhill skiing are abound, along with winter hiking. With the volume of snow dumped across the region this winter, one thing that became difficult is trail running. With that in mind, I signed up to race in snowshoes for the first time.

The Finger Lakes Runners Club holds a snowshoe race on Hammond Hill annually, always the day before the Super Bowl. The Super Frosty Loomis Snowshoe Race 10k course is essentially the FLRC's Thom B course run in reverse, minus a 1.5-ish mile section of red-blazed singletrack on the forest's southeast side. The event has a 5k race concurrently with the 10k. At 1,700 to 2,100 feet elevation, Hammond Hill always has more snow than the surrounding valley at this time of year.

I was originally hoping to run Goose AR's Cast-a-Shadow 6-Hour race on this day instead, thinking there might be little enough snow west of Rochester that it would become a trail race sans snowshoes. (As it was when I ran Cast-a-Shadow in 2017.) But nope—it was full-on snowshoe season this year at CAS and I was unable to find a pair to rent or borrow on short notice. I instead