Handmade trails, Lack of snow doesn't stop Seeley's Biathlon

Under a sky threatening rain, Chris Lorentz was explaining to some Seeley Lake Elementary students what they were about to do. Tuesday before the Seeley Lake Biathlon on Feb. 3, Lorentz set up targets on the Seeley Creek Nordic Ski Trails and Friday the students were given a preview.

"These are our local kids," Lorentz, race director of the Seeley Lake Biathlon, said. "I don't mind giving them a little bit of an edge."

On Tuesday, the snow was thin, but Lorentz was confident in pulling off the race.

On Friday he explained to the assembled students, Nordic ski coaches and shooting aides that the originally planned distances - 22-kilometer, 9-kilometer and 3-kilometer races - had to be cut short. Now, biathletes will attempt races just shy of 10K, 5K and 1.5K. Lorentz and a handful of volunteers basically had to hand-make the trails.

"Because so much snow melted we literally shoveled every foot of trail that we're using," Lorentz said on Friday as the sound of rifles popping from practice shots filled the air. "We had to haul snow in - we stole it from a snow plow pile across the road - put it in a mini dump truck, hauled it out here, dumped it and spread it out on the trail and the groomer machine will groom it."

"Good job on letting us do it!" a woman in the Friday crowd called out.

One hundred and forty-eight biathletes took to the trails on Saturday, Feb. 3, and 39 volunteers signed up to help.

The modified races had the same structure despite different distances - ski a loop, "flop down on your tummy," as Lorentz put it, shoot a rifle at five targets, get up and ski another loop. A penalty lap is normally added for each missed target, but due to lack of snow, this element was gone. To keep the difficulty level up, each shot missed added 30 seconds to a racer's time.

Lorentz said he intended to make the originally 22K race, now around 10K, more challenging this year because in the past, some of the local skiers were so good that they could miss all the shots, do all the penalty laps and still win. So, the idea was to make the laps shorter - about 4.4 kilometers - and increase the shooting - shooting four times, or 20 shots total. Biathletes would shoot the first ten shots laying down and the second ten standing, which Lorentz said is "noticeably harder."

"When you add twice as much shooting, that's the potential for twice as many penalty laps," Lorentz said.

But, with the lack of snow and no penalty lap, adding time for shots missed was the new ante upped.

Despite having been involved in about 12 biathlons, Lorentz has never raced one himself. He got involved initially because his kids were interested. He volunteered at a race in 2013, "And I inherited a job I didn't even know I was applying for," Lorentz said.

His kids ended up doing quite a few biathlons in Seeley after Lorentz got involved, and his daughter continued target shooting as she grew up. Lorentz said she received scholarships for her aptitude and shot for the rifle team in college in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Seeley's biathlon draws participants from all over the state - Missoula, Helena and Whitefish to name a few places. Bozeman hosted its own biathlon, the Bangtail Biathlon, the same weekend as Seeley's.

Lorentz said the Glacier Nordic Club in Whitefish started a youth biathlon team with a 4-H group. It was a great arrangement, Lorentz said, because the skiers didn't know how to shoot and the 4-H kids didn't know how to ski. Nineteen kids from Whitefish signed up to race Seeley's biathlon this year, Lorentz said.

"That's the kind of stuff that keeps me doing this," he said.