Your Norsk XC Ski Season 2014: Late Start for Some, Early Bath for Us!

In all truth the weather has been relatively mild, stubbornly staying above -7'C. The windchill and humidity has been high, so it has felt pretty much like a normal cold january and we have been out of course clearing all that magic white stuff incessently, like the labour of Sisyphus.

Now however nature has decided to do out "måking" for us and melt the snow away, and the forecast is for sleet and rain and a temperature on average over the magic number null. How strange it is that water is so precise in giving us on the one hand, a winter wonderland, while on the other the drudgery of gray days with just the mere wavering of the thermometer.

I guess in the earlier days that this type of snow fall was more common. The effect of a run of Atlantic depressions spun in on the arctic stable circle tracking over the uk, but stopping up against the scando-russian high pressure has happened before. We have had a pile of occluded fronts which seem to have picked up more moisture from the Baltic and dumped snow on us. It has been like a mad conveyor belt here for upto 30cm per night of snow, while in the Uk and on the continent, it has caused more flooding misery.

I am popping off out after lunch today for a slide on my jumble-sale waxless skis rather than clistering up my good skis and using the best part of an hour to do this. After today there is sleet forecast with rain on the warm front side all week as the Atlantic anticyclones have beaten the scando' high pressure back to Siberia. So it could be an early bath for me , when considering any serious amounts of training on planks.

However for those of you ex-pats in much of the West Lands and Tronderlag you have not had a flake of snow near the main towns. However  you will be getting plenty I expect soon. So my next blog is for you.

In this short and over-killed snow season, I have learned to learn more than anything and to take out from the less than perfect conditions what I can. Read on in the next blogg.