I don't know about you, but I'm really enjoying the new GPS tracking system the Iditarod has this year. It's added a whole new level of information and I think the "real-time" data really adds to the excitement. So, good job Iditarod!
The sorting functions do seem to be a little wonky, to me at least. I can get the mushers sorted by bib number and name, but I can't get them sorted by mileage. So, I find myself doing a lot of scanning up and down the trail and counting tags to figure out relative positions. I also end up doing a bunch of math to figure out how much distance there is between teams and up to the leader. I don't know whether this problem/behavior is ubiquitous, but it's been bumming me out a little and I hope they make improvements to the data handling next year.
In the meantime, I've come up with a workaround of doing a copy/paste of the tracker data into a little spreadsheet I've put together which sorts the mushers by their route mileage and calculates the distance back from the leader. I've pasted an example of the output below. Let me know if you find it useful. If so, I'll be happy to include it in future posts.
Meanwhile, go Aliy go!
Labels: Iditarod, Macgellan, Races
