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.