En route

3am coach to Heathrow, uneventful, but surprisingly full - only a handful of spare seats.

Arrived Helsinki for a few hours before the connecting flight to Kuusamo. Only a hint of snow in the edges of the fields coming in, and nothing at the airport. There are usually remnants of where the snow has been ploughed, but not today. This means it has been above zero - at least on and off - for some time.

The weather forecast for the RR route several days out is still fluctuating quite a bit, but it is clear that there is some warm air around both this week and during the event.

Just saw an airline I had not previously heard of - Corendon - so Googled it. Interesting, as it does not list flights to Helsinki, which makes you wonder what it is doing here.Hanging around airports has been much less tedious since my bank upgraded its lounge access as part of my banking package to Priority Pass. Before you only got free lounge access if you booked your flight through them.

Still, hanging around the airport is a good time to review what I want to get out of my last few days training. The first objective is to determine how the skintec skis compare on the test track I use in Kuusamo (Tolpanniemen valolatu). By using the heart monitor and GPS, I can measure the effort used for a lap. To be representative of real use, I need to do a set of comparisons

1. Skintec (waxless) with professionally applied glide wax
2. Skintec (waxless) with well worn glide wax
3. Waxed with professionally applied glide and kick wax
4. Waxed with worn glide wax, but kick wax reapplied

(3) should give the best performance and (2) the worst performance. The interesting comparisons will be (1) and (3) which give the starting point for a day's skiing and (2) and (4) which are indicative of the latter part of a day's skiing.

I will try to aim to ski at approximately the same speed, and do the circuit in roughly the same time. Observations on how well the skis grip uphill will be partly subjective and partly from analysing the data afterwards (bit like in F1 racing).

Comparing effort is quite difficult - my normal Saturday 16km run takes about 93 minutes when I am at full normal fitness. But if I push on, and reduce it to 90 mins - a 3% improvement, it takes 30% more effort (according to the Polar training load). You very quickly get into the realms of diminishing returns. For skiing 60-90km a day, finding the right pace becomes important.

The Tolpanniemen training loop has very varied terrain packed into a short track - up and down, so in later analysis, I will be able to compare the terminal glide velocity on some of the hills - both steep and gentle - to compare the glide performance of the skis. I will also look at how they compare on the flat run to/from the training track, as this is typical of a lot more of the RR in practice.

Armed with these results, and the weather forecast each day, I can determine strategy on a daily basis. If the difference is significant, then waxed skis may be the better choice on colder days when the temperature is stable e.g. mornings and the skintecs in the afternoon, when the temperature is warmer and conditions are fluctuating more. Somewhere around the upper end of the blue kick wax range is probably the dividing point where the more reliable grip of the waxless starts to outweigh the reduced glide performance. The time lost messing around in some conditions trying to get a kick wax to work should not be underestimated. Stop for 6 minutes, and you lose a kilometre! One year, on that day's last section, I lost a good half hour or more. I had three kick waxes covering the range, but whatever I tried, I either had no grip, or was stuck to the spot. Hopefully I am now better at waxing, but there are always conditions where you just don't seem to be able to get it right.