Thursday 22 January 2015

No backing out

Today the official confirmation arrived. I have already paid, booked the flights and everything else, so there is no backing out.

This set me thinking why I do it. It is simple - every year I ski the RR, it is another year I can avoid thinking of myself as "old". They say that age is a state of mind. It is also a "state of body" and so anyone who can ski 450km in 7 days is not old, regardless of the age on their papers!

Next week I am training in Norway and I will be looking at skis. This was prompted by someone asking my advice. When I was skiing the RR for the first time, I went into the ski shop in Kuusamo and told them what I was doing, that I was not very good, and they sold me skis. A couple of years later I bought a similar pair in Helsinki. But prompted by the question, I began to wonder a bit more about skis. Am I really skiing on the best skis? So I looked them up and found that both are racing skis for up to intermediate skiers. Thus, they are narrow and parallel. This means they glide well. But also they are probably intended for well (heavy machine) groomed tracks.

This set me thinking. At times, because I am heavy, I feel the tracks sinking below me. Much of the RR is prepared by snowmobile rather than the heavy machines, and is prepare for the first time, compared to being groomed on a regular basis over the winter and thus well compacted. Also, not having much opportunity to train, I do have a bit of a problem with lateral stability with the ankles, especially on the sections with soft snow and, as Jon described it last year, "skiing over a ploughed field".

So when I am in Norway, I am going to look into whether I might do better with a slightly wider ski, with a modest waist - thus spreading my weight better, better lateral stability and a slight amount of flex for turning more easily. The downside may be that they are slightly slower, but I guess there is only one way to find out.

There is always the option of renting a pair as an experiment, to at least confirm the principles of what I am looking for.

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