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.

Actually, a lot of it is here. If you check out the “stats” menu on the menu bar above, you’ll find that many of the pages in the 2012 page have been populated. So, have at it, take a look around, visit our sponsor Gear West, which not only is awesome but also shipped a replacement boot cuff up to Hayward for the race for me, and who knows, that could have made a couple seconds worth of difference versus the duct-taped one I had.

What’s not posted yet are the state-by-state competitions (because I have to figure out how best to get a table to display within WordPress) and the search for “special data”—like the time to the timing wire or how many miles each participant traveled—which we had last year for each skier. Because I have to figure out how to make a php database run within WordPress.

That being said, all the charts are in the new site format, which is far superior, I think, to last year’s version. We have nearly all of last year’s data updated (and only didn’t update things which didn’t really change) and a bunch of new stuff, like correlations (all together: “correlation does not imply causation!”) between timing wire place and finishing place by wave. Yes, very nerdy.

Rest assured, we’re working on the rest of the data. It’s 75 in New England so ski season is over (which didn’t keep me from skiing an ice-to-slush 50k this weekend, however) but the hiking trails are still slushy or muddy (not for long, at this rate) so I should have some time to have at it.

Thanks for the patience, and comment on a previous post if there’s anything you really wan to see (no guarantees, of course).

If you thought Joe Dubay was a big deal, this is bigger. (Okay, not really.)

I am in a tricky position. If anyone gains a place in to the top 200, I fall to 201st and I am relegated from the Elite Wave. So, I check the results more than anyone, I’d bet. I was copyediting my race report today and decided, well, what the heck, let’s check those results. And here’s what I found:

That’s right. The unthinkable had happened. Now, instead of making the Elite Wave by 1.5 seconds, I had missed it by half that much. I promised a full investigation on Twitter and Facebook—I wanted to find out who had been inserted in to the results three weeks late. I have the finishing data which shows me at 200th, and compared that to what’s online. I looked at 100th in that data, and that skier had moved to 101st. So I looked at 50th. 51st. 25th? 26th. 12th? Twelfth place was still in twelfth place. So I started reading down. And something stuck out.

The 14th place skier only shows up in the online results. But that’s not what sticks out. Apparently, this skier made it in to 14th place with a four digit bib number. Now, it would be conceivable that a First Wave skier could go out and only have to pass a handful of Elite Wavers and have a hell of a race to 14th. Possible. I doubt it’s ever happened. But from the Fifth Wave? To finish in that kind of time, they’d have to pass, give or take, 2500 other skiers. That’s one every 20 meters. Or one every three seconds. A fifth wave skier would have to somehow get through congested feeds and up bunched hills—and still ski only five minutes slower than the best skiers in the race.

Maybe Petter Northug could do that. Maybe. But a 50-year-old from Latvia? Doesn’t pass the sniff test. (Here’s a picture of him finishing next to a Second Waver who finished in about 3:10, which would validate his 2:39 finish time if he indeed started with the fifth wave but—see below—he seems to have mistakenly started in Wave 2. This would also explain why he was in first place at Timber Trail and OO) Want more? 5342 has no wire start time, so someone put the wrong time in for his start, and he jumped up in the results. I guess. I plan to let the Birkie know about this, so if you finished between 14th and 350th and wondered why your position changed, it should change back.

Either that, or Rosie Ruiz jumped off the trail at the Power Lines and got back on the lake for an almost-victorious ski in to Hayward.

(Okay, it’s a clerical error most likely, no one cheated or wore the wrong bib. And we can not complain about a minor error in a race of 10,000 people where all the timing equipment is buried in snow. But it’s fun to throw around hyperbole, right, 75 commenters about Joe Dubay at FasterSkier?)

Update: I have it from another Wave 2 skier that:

As I waited for the start, a guy with a purple bib [someone who’d skied more than 20 Birkies] tapped me on the shoulder and said I should tell the guy beside me (a 5th waver) that he was in the wrong place.  I told purple bib guy that he would be a little more authoritative than me, so he approached him.  After realizing he spoke no English and had traveled a great distance to participate, [he stayed] and start[ed] with wave two.  There really wasn’t an alternative as the start was less than 30 seconds away.

which makes perfect sense. And that means the Birkie should assign him a start of 8:45 (well, probably 8:46 to account for the minute to the line) which would put him finishing in 3:10. Which is exactly an hour slower than the issue above. In other words, someone must have typed “9:45” instead of “8:45” for his start time, and that got the whole snowball rolling. Okay, for me it’s a snowball. For everyone else, no one cares.

That’s how many lines of data we have from all the finishers. And more than a week ahead of last year, too! We’re working hard, rest assured, to bring you all sorts of charts, graphs and other stats to the site. Soon!

Colin Reuter, he of internet cycling fame, always wears a GoPro. Because he is awesome. He had a less-than-stellar race, and wrote about it (it’s SFW, but not safe for the dinner table) and there’s a video at the top which is basically a video of all the downhills to OO or so. Good fun to watch.

We’re waiting on data before we can start full-on stats runs. Once we get it, rest assured we’ll drunkenly stay up until 2 or 3 several nights to bring it to you.