We’re now three weeks from race day. Well, a little more, but in three weeks festivities will be kicking off in Hayward! The long range weather models go out about two weeks, and, so far, there’s really nothing on the horizon except for cold. Cold, cold and more cold.

Which is good. There’s plenty of snow on the ground. Cold will keep it around. I haven’t seen the GFS model print out a temperature above 20 in the past few days, so the trend looks good. One question is whether some folks in Wisconsin and Minnesota will have seen lower training volumes because of the cold: if it’s -25, it’s hard to psych yourself up for a two-hour long ski. Out here in the east, we haven’t quite had those temperatures. Of course, we haven’t had a nice thick cover of snow for two months, either.

For the past couple of years, the Birkie has adopted a start wire timing system. Except for the top six skiers, all skier times were based not on when the gates were raised and the gun went off, but rather on when you crossed a set of timing apparatus embedded in the snow 300 meters from the start line. There were several reasons for doing this:

• Getting to the very top of your wave was less important, meaning people would place less of a premium on “pen jumping” to make sure to get to the very front of their wave (although skiing out of the front of your wave is still quite beneficial to your overall finish time).
• Wire timing allows people to start in later waves, perhaps with a friend or family member who had a slightly different qualification time, without a time penalty.
• Wire timing gives us an extra data point to play with at the start of the race. Oh, wait, that only benefits me. (If you’re interested, this site looked at how well your “time to the wire” predicted your overall finish (in 2012) here. The long and short of it is that while there was a correlation, it was not nearly as tight as the correlations from later points in the race, since only about 0.7% of the race has taken place to that point! So moving to a gun time will relieve us of some data points, but will make for less confusing timing.)

We’re down to the home stretch! The Birkie is counting down the days as “k’s” from finish (50) to start. They’ve crossed Mosquito Brook and they’re not looking back! It’s OO or bust!

As far as the snow goes, things look good. Hayward peaked up over freezing for a few hours on Sunday, but it was to no real detriment to the still-1-to-2-foot base. (Let’s not get started on the meltdown on the east coast, mmkay? And complaining about warmth and rain is petty in light of California’s snow-free winter. Here’s to hoping they can grow things in the Central Valley this spring.) And the next two weeks look pretty superb. A few inches of snow look to fall overnight, and there’s a chance for a few more on Saturday, which could add up to a half a foot of snow. From then, there’s a chance that the region will once again drop in to the grip of the dreaded polar vortex but it seems like it will be slightly modified, and in Hayward, 25 below overnight is pretty much normal. If anything there does not appear to be a major meltdown coming to the Birkie area in the next two weeks.

With snow cover down to Iowa and Illinois, it would take quite a warm-up to wreak havoc on the Wisconsin snow pack. Things look good through the end of the month. From there, it’s just three weeks to Birkie. You ready?

Back in 2011, you may remember, the Birkie was held on a chilly day. The race started around ten below, and the temperature barely made it above zero later in the day, the lowest observed temperatures in the history of the race. Of course, it could be worse. On Monday, the high temperature in Hayward was -15. In other words, there’s a good reason why the race takes place in late February. There’s no way you could run the Birkie with temperatures varying either side of twenty below.

In any case, the temperatures in the Midwest have bottomed out, and look to increase in the next few days. By the end of the week, it could be nudging up in to the low 30s, a tropical paradise compared to 30 below. Luckily, temperatures don’t look to run any higher than that (aided by extensive snow cover) so the 12-to-18 inch base in Birkieland should be set for some time. And while it’s been dry recently, some snow appears on the horizon, to freshen that base, and add to it.

(Here in Boston, it’s been cold enough that they’ve blown in a mile of snowmaking and some of our higher-grade mental citizens are biking on the Charles.)

I’ve been salivating recently. Not because of anything I’ve eaten, but because of the Birkie Webcam at OO. Conditions look gorgeous, and the early snowpack looks to stay in place at least through the New Year—hopefully it will grow and flourish. Ski reports I’ve heard have been fantastic, and I kind of wish I was headed to Birkieland even with a good thump of snow coming to the Northeast. Oh, well. We can’t all be lucky enough to live in Hayward.

Flying to the Birkie from afar? If so, there is a major fare sale for flights in to MSP. Sun Country has posted fares under $200 from most cities round-trip, and Delta has matched most of these. These are non-stop flights right to MSP. This is a great deal, guys.

I’m seeing $178 from Boston and DC, $198 from NY and Seattle and $218 from San Fran. If you are booking air travel and have not yet done so, do it today.

You can thank me later.

The dog days of August are upon us. With the Birkie early next year—February 22nd—it means that we’re almost at the halfway point to start counting down to the next Birkebeiner rather than up from the most recent one. I was going to have a Halfway to Birkie party with local skiers to drink beer and tell lies but then was offered a position as hutmaster at Lakes of the Clouds Hut, on the high alpine reaches of Mount Washington. So instead, I’ll be getting paid to go hiking for a month. That’s not a bad thing.

Next year, I won’t be working 5000 feet on the side of a mountain, so we’ll hammer this out (also, it turns out that I’ve been trying to schedule a call with the new Birkie director for about two weeks and it keeps falling through). So stay tuned for that!

Anyway, I’ll be getting back to more Birkieguide soon. I hope everyone’s training is going dandy. I’ve managed to rollerski twice in the last week, totaling more than 60k. This is good! Slightly higher in the Elite Wave, here I come.

It’s coming. I’m having some issues/fun with getting everything uploaded without crashing the server. It’s not the tippity top of my priorities by now, but I’m hoping for some time in May. If I’m lucky, hopefully before the last snow melts out of the Midwest (and, jeezum, before the Larium Glacier melts out up in the Keweenaw).

We have been able to wrangle the data and now have a one-minute long time lapse of the Birkie. It’s posted on Youtube. We might tweak it as we finish posting the data and fully launch the 2013 stats site, but I can’t not post this now, right?

An obscure Simpsons quote notwithstanding, it’s time for me to brush up on Unix time. Why? Because I have a dataset with close to 20,000 rows of Birkie data, and the split times are in Unix time. It’s exact, yes, but kind of kooky to sort in to real-life time.

In any case, look for data updates in coming days. Data!

Updates: we’re getting some really fun data for the number of people each skier passed and was passed by, split data, and the like. Stay tuned!