Why Get Skate-Skis ?

Today was another perfect example of why it pays to get skating-skis.

It must come as a surprise to many from less be-snowed lands,  that there are even two types of sport-skis for xc. I had seen people using poles with roller blades but it never crossed my mind that on the one hand you needed a diffeerent set of planks, while on the other that skating style had caused such a near schism in the sport.

A schism which continues today with the growth of double poling the whole way round the course, a side for a tad fishbone,  and the downhill of course.

Today though it was a personal schism, out on a farmland course which is barely ten meters above sea level. Hence there was sleety snow and thaw back followed by clear skies...crunchy. I had thoiught it would have softened up, so used my mid season waxing-buster Start GripTape TM no less. It was ok in the less icey stretches but otherwise it wsas not the best in comoairson to clister, and it grabbed once in a while too. Usually it is a mid season savior, coveeing harder stuff from blue to red wax and into a lillac clister. But it is not red clister or even universal adhesion - and tha is of course why i use the damn stuff in the first place.

Anyway I wenr through the ice a couple of places where it had spread over the wet patches ocveernight. Kick was unpredictable, double pole seemed slow and the whole thing was noisy like brand new waxless patterened skis.

In the mid lane the churned snow was softer - and that is why i write dear reader. A slip of a lass turned up and skated nicely round the one convoluted one mile course round the field boundaries. I had something still in the bag, madshus ultrasonic skate.....so 5 miles with ski-swap it was.

Immediately the new choice felt weildy and like an extenaion of my feet. They are probably 2013 model or eaelier perhaps, old stock maybe sold off through coop. Guessing they were around $250 , a steal in any denomination at 1200kr.

It all went muxh better with only some slight issues with a bit of fishbone duck walking on a cambered corner uphill and a caught edge on the down hill. For any decent skate skier it was a perfextly acceptable day at about +3 'C. .

I have a texture on my skate skis straight from Madshus's stone grinding machine with a layer of cheap base glider and some dear flouro rub on over that. At the extremes of usual skiing here in the 'deep south' , -12 and +6 air temp, skate skis begin to misbehave themselves with an out-of-box texture - cold, hard snow flakes don't get mashed by a the uneven texture wirth mid do-it-all wax. While in wet snow there is not deep enough channels to break surface tension of the water mass nor shed it off the edges. However here skiable courses are nearly always available only betweenn-8 and +4`C with colder weather being snowless and milder bringing rain in the winter.

So you can avoid a lot of hassle with clister and really concrete like tramlines by checking out skate skis. Now where werenthose youtube links on hownto actually do it properly.