Zen and the Art of Skate Skiing

Zen it had to be, come away from a four day week of commuting 100km each day in a train of traffic, to then do a hundred klick round tour for snow, since the white hairline is receeding rapidly from lower lying areas.

It's a nicer drive anyway.

I was a little interested to see if there was still snow, yep 75 cm of packed snow which will maybe last until the very late easter we have (again) this year, who knows....

I took my ski bag with ALL my skis. 10,000 krones worth of carbon skis and poles ...plus 100kr worth of jumble sales waxless , i kid  you not. Ok i have bought all the carbon stuff on mega offer, half price or lightly used, but my broad, 1970s era wooden with plastic sole loppemarked skis are good value for money. When it gets all syrupy, those skis get going! My other narrow skis dig in.

Today though it was firm enough to be skate skiable, while having a good bit of softness to get grip in. With a bit of a head cold, I decided to concentrate on two things: technique and enjoying my day out after a less than perfect week.

The very best tip I have for anyone wanting to learn skate style, is to avoid using poles. Both the usual skate style on the flat and down hill, plus the paddeling style uphill, are absolutely best learned without poles. And indeed as conditions vary , it is good to see how it feels through the soles of your feet and your balance up over as hardness and glide duly follow suite and are up and down.

Weight transfer and coordination/ timing are the critical factors, and if you try and correct poor balance or power application with your poling, then you will never make it work.

Part of that weight transfer is bringing your 'flying' leg all the way over the centre line such that you have all your balance and weight on the gliding ski on the snow. This is quite counter intuitive because when you lay that ski down , it is over the centre line again, so the extra swing seems unnecessary and you will see some quite fast skiers not bothering. However doing this prolongs your glide and offers more chance to power out and over onto the next ski as you compress your riding leg back into a spring and push over to the new ski.

It means also getting used to lifting your ski toe first so to speak rather than heel first, which was my mistake before. Once again this is timing and coordination, not allowing your ski to get too far back from the push off before you recycle it when flying it over the centre line. It doesnt matter so much if the tail of the ski brushes the snow, but the nose brushing is potentially going to trip you.

There are some very good youtube videos on paddeling as we call it here, of V1 offset as it is also called. The point of it is this

1) have a fish bone approach to sliding up hills with the fall line infront of your body.

2)  offset against the fall line (path of most resistence, straight up hill) so that one ski is pushed with body and poles, while the other is easier.

3) use your body weight to your advantage rather than disadvantage by penduluming it with your hips.

One vid shows the three elements of leg movement. One, scissors, two hips moving side to side, three pushing off the old ski with a bent knee. This is enough to make progress up just about any hill in good conditions, but in either very soft or very hard, poles will help keep it going correctly.

As the hill gets steeper you need to bend your ankles much more, and your knees a little more, and maybe your body a little more forward, plus a slightly wider stance and more oblique ski angle.It should feel like you are scissoring up and not struggeling, ie you have selected the right gear by your posture and frequency. A better glide means you can point your skis more uphill, while a poorer grip will mean you have to go more sideways and up your frequency of hip swings.

Nose, knee, toes is a good rule of thumb for this as it is for the other two v1 and v2 styles, but you dont need to throw your head to violently around, and can avoid moving it so far over on the lighter ski side .

Standard skating requires your skis to come as near parallel as possible in fact, to make optimal progress. So this is also why drifting your leg in over the centre line towards your skating ski side is important. It allows you to choose how far forward or to the side you place the it for the transfer. Thus as the terrain and glide quality varies, so can your forward angle adjust for each skate side.

I find it is very much a case also of remembering to breath and pacing your effort out, as a person with L plates still on, and I have heard it said on TV and from a coach to two local team boys when they were doing a fairly challenging mountain route , "take the work rate down guys". A good way of 'gassing back' is to stop poling on lighter sections and just use your legs, concentrating on weight transfer rather than full coiled pushing, before you catch your breath, arrest any lactic acid build up, and get stuck into some full on exercise again. Paddeling is very demanding so, you should practice very light paddeling on steeper gradients where the hard ski hardly glides a tall, just a step really, but you get a nice little glide on the light side. Thus you can keep the wheel rolling if  you tire while on a bigger hill somewhere.

 Also the rather old fashioned technique of using a pole on each side consequetively as in classic fishboning, is quite fun and allows you to output small packets of energy while gliding as much as is possible for that input from arms and legs. It isnt cool or trendy, that is all!

Paddeling can be practiced in any slight uphill or indeed flats, but it is a bad habit to get into for reasons I mention above. You become over dependent on sideways movement for stability and rythm. Really you want to move to double dance as soon as you can when a slope eases, or conversely, keep it up as much as you can before going over to paddeling, But doing paddelign on a slight uphill and being aware that this is practice helps you understand the efficiencies of doing it correctly. That you are propelling one ski with everythign and the kitchen sink more uphill, while the other ski is a nice little reward for your efforts at an lesser angle to the hill. In practice the glide should be longer on the easier ski, and if not, then you should be going over to double dancing V2 to get your skis both more forward against what is a slope too gentle for using the paddeling gear set!

Practicing on your own is good because you can go at your own pace, but I find it a little easy to slack off, today I had a cold though, so it would be nice to have someone at the same level or someone who was prepared to hold back and let me ski at their pace so as to challenge myself and keep concentrating. I couldnt keep up with anyone very proficient in skate style yet without them being rather kind!

Skate skis being shorter and often stiffer than classics make for nice down hill skis when it comes to manoevring, not so great in plough, but ok. They are a lot easier to dab round corners in step turning, but need to be stepped often to steer withouth losing too much speed by ploughing, because weight transfer isnt as effective as in a longer ski with slight or moderate side cut. Skate skis have parallel edges!

Today though was also a perfect example of why to get a pair of skate skis. I think there must have been some new wet snow in the tracks because they looked shallow and soft. The centre lane was a little soft in the top 2 cm, but firm under that, so it was best of both worlds by in large, just the odd deeper bit of slush where the sun had maybe played longer I guess. I could see also that another skate skier had the wrong technique because they were landing on a tilted ski - their tracks were all edge instead of being a flat track folding over to a wedge. Aware of this, thinking they were at first my spor from an earlier run that day, I practiced getting my weight out on a very flat ski, and once in a while it dug on the outside edge in softer patches and threw me off balance and over in the snow twice!

Like most of my other sports and hobbies, bar dog walking, skate skiing is somewhat all consuming because I am learning it, and conscious of all my body movements, the snow and the terrain so it was a very good distraction on a free friday to get out in some quiet tracks and cut some Zs. Now for cutting the other sort, zzzzzzzzzzzzz