Several years back I made a valiant attempt to create a good elevation profile for the Birkie Trail. Since then there have been things like Strava, and what with everyone and their uncle skiing around with a GPS, we’ve gotten better data. But if you wanted to see the Birkie Trail on Google Maps, you had to monkey around with looking at various Strava segments or activities (or something of the like).

Well, now, if you go to Google Maps, the Birkie Trail is right there! Someone at Google (or whoever is responsible for their data) went and traced the Birkie Trail from start to finish. It’s not perfect. My 2008-era attempt—which cuts off after 38k for whatever reason—is better, as is most any GPS track of the trail (like this one). And, for instance The Google’s trail mucks up something around Mosquito Brook and then going across Rosie’s Field. But it’s not a bad start—are there any other XC ski trails on Google Maps (they have all sorts of gravity ski trails, but those are for suckers).

A bit of a surprise storm sure tied things up in the Twin Cities (although not to an Atlanta level) but put down a good bit of snow in the Cities. Reports from Birkieland are of two to three inches of snow, but this will nicely freshen things up. Long range? There’s still no sign of a thaw, and there should be a pretty darned nice base in place for February.

If you’re skiing the Loppet, so am I. See you on Sunday afternoon after racing 90k in Minneapolis. If I survive.

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.)