What are you doing on Sunday morning? Waking up in your bed after you drive back to the Cities? Waking up in a motel room after you sleep off the race? Waking up in someone else’s bed after you have a few too many Spotted Cows at the Sawmill (this should be your goal, right?).

What you should be doing is planning to come to the first-ever post-Birkie ski orienteering event at the North End Trailhead! What is ski orienteering? You put on skis, you get a map of trails, and you go looking for “controls” hanging in the woods based on the map. Basically, it’s an excuse to take a ski on the Birkie Trail and nearby. This is totally last minute and will be very informal, but you’ll get to ski around with folks getting ready to head off to the World Ski-O Championships in Kazakhstan (seriously) which is pretty awesome. One of whom just won the City of Lakes Loppet. No experience necessary. Just grab a map and go skiing.

(This is actually so low-key that we’re not going to have real controls or timing or anything since it’s too late to plan something “real.” But still, come. Details to follow.)

Right now, it’s cold. But the weather on race day, well, it might be cold, too (but probably not this cold). In any case, we’ve compiled data for every race day since 1973, and discussed what the weather might be. The race, in an average year, starts in the mid-teens. But it’s still probably a good idea to plan ahead and pack lobster mitts, a buff and some wind briefs.

Stay warm and ski fast.

I just bought a ticket to the Birkie. And with a month until the race, I’m pretty darned excited. The trail is—well—it has something frozen on it. My legs feel fast, and I’m flying to Minneapolis. One month to go! Get the fever.

A couple notes on this site. We had some questions regarding weather and have painstakingly researched the weather for every Birkie since time immemorial (1973). Results are being processed and will be posted soon. The long and short of it is that there has been, surprisingly, a slight cooling trend since the race started. Although the data are very subjective—the last Saturday in February is not a well-controlled data set.

Second, a note on the weather. This year seems to be shaping up, on the East Coast at least, like 2007. A very warm and snow-less start, followed by a prolonged cold snap. That was the last year the Birkie wasn’t complete. Hopefully this won’t be a repeat of 2007, and the models are showing cold and some snow for the trail in the next few weeks. Luckily the trail is so well maintained that a full race can be run with only a few inches. Although I think we’d all be happy with a few feet.

There’s another Birkie article out there, this time in Afar Magazine, but still by Bill Donahue (his brother, Tim, is an Elite Waver, Macalester grad and Manhattanite; Bill wrote last in the WaPo and previously about my coworkers in the huts, so basically he writes my life story). My main quip is that they have a list of “Birkie Enthusiasts” and I am not there. Has anyone read this site? (Probably not)

I’m not bitter.

It’s getting that time of year again. Snow is flying in the Cities (I’m not jealous at all) and a friend just wrote me Direct Message on Twitter (I know, so fancy):

Birkie: Where do you recommend staying? Hayward? Any particular place? Also, how do we get to Cable? Shuttle buses?

The answer was basically “check the site.” But I realized that we could provide more of a service by having some high-level suggestions of what to do if you’re coming from far away and have never been to the Midwest before. So there’s a whole new page, Traveling from Afar, in The Guide. It should answer some questions you had (where do I stay? where to I fly? when should I travel?) and probably some questions you didn’t have but should (mainly about beer, the race is in Wisconsin after all).

We’ve also gone through and updated the rest of The Guide with preliminary information for 2012. Now we just need snow (and lots of it!).

Last year, we posted about the Birkie closing to registrants on November 22. This year, the race has closed more than a month earlier, on October 15. The year before, it didn’t close until December, and the year before that, it didn’t fill until February.

It’s particularly impressive that the race is as popular this year given the dearth of snow last year in the Midwest, and pretty much the rest of the country, for that matter. The race went off without a hitch, but many other races were canceled, and very many skiers were relegated to patches of manmade snow for most of the season. Yet the Birkie, perhaps owing to pent up demand from a string of good seasons, keeps chugging along. The two main races will see 9500 starts this year (perhaps a few more as elites add in) in Cable. And if it’s a good snow year, we might be talking about the race closing before summer is over next year.

(Oh, but if you really, really need to get your application in, if it’s postmarked by today and you snail mail it you’re in. So, find a late-open post office, scribble in your details and send it away, all while supporting the US Postal Service!)

With the last of the snow melting in New England a couple weeks ago, I went up to Maine for a four lap, ice-to-slush 50k at Sugarloaf. It was my last day of skiing. At the end of the race, a friend (who skied her way to second; we’ll get her out to the Birkie one of these years) pointed out a skier who was wearing a Birkie age-class winner t-shirt (and it wasn’t bad-looking, either). I wondered how well he’d done in the race, so I took out my phone (ah, technology; many of the pictures on this site were taken with the same iPhone) and looked up the results. Not only was he an age class winner, but, by time, he’d beaten the winner of the classic race.

When it came out that Joe Dubay was DQed for winning the classic race (wearing someone else’s bib) the skiing world was up in arms. But there’s more afoot in the Birkie classic race. The man with the fastest time wasn’t David Chamberlain. Or even super-World Champion Vegard Ulvang. Nope, skiing two minutes faster than both of them were two skiers from the second wave. Thanks to the vagaries of the wave system, a skier can, conceivably, ski out of a later wave and ski faster than the front skiers, posting a faster time. Of course, since the race is not a true interval start, the winner’s circle is limited to the first skiers across the line. Even if someone skied several minutes faster.

(It is relatively unlikely, although not inconceivable, that this would happen in the skate race; one would assume anyone with a decent chance of winning would be able to petition their way in to the Elite Wave. In the less-lucrative classic race, this is less of an issue.)

Chamberlain and Ulvang skied the Birkie in 2:51:15, but that’s their time from the gun, so their time from the timing wire is likely about 45 seconds faster—2:50:30, just faster than the fourth and fifth place finishers. That’s fast, but a Latvian, Janis Melbardis, skied the race a good minute faster than that, as did a Granite Stater (but judging from his name and accent he’s got some Scandinavian speed) Odd-Aage Bersvendsen. They finished in a wire time in the 2:40s. Our Birkie Classic wave chart shows this quite well.

Since Odd-Aage was at the race, and I asked him how it felt to podium in a race but actually come in fifth (or is it the other way around?) and he was perfectly content—more so than I’m sure I would have been. He had enjoyed the race, and was happy with his age-class award. Still, he did say he asked the Birkie to seed him higher and his request was denied. I asked him if he’d be back the next year to defend his title, and he wasn’t sure. I hope he makes the trip back out, and goes for the win.