Now in Oivanki ready for RR1 again

The last few days have been testing equipment. I discovered that I am quite hard on equipment and this was obvious when I had new bindings on the Skintecs - they now have racing bindings and it just goes to show the difference between touring bindings and racing bindings. The touring bindings grip the middle section of the NNN bar at the toe of the boot. The racing bindings grip the bar at either end. Thus, this is a batter grip, and it doesn't allow the lateral wear leading to the play that I ahd experienced. But as always, there is a downside - racing bindings will only lock down if all traces of snow and ice are removed - this makes them more time consuming putting skis back on after crossing a road, but this is something that you don't do when racing!

This was a real eye opener and I changed the bindings on my other skis as well. I finally switched to the new skins for the Skintec skis - I had been saving them for the RR rather than use them in training. They are supposed to last about 2,000 km, but mine are pretty worn at 1,000 km. I did discover that worn skins are better for skating, and even though they look badly worn, they still have a decent grip.

So now I am here; equipment all tested, a better build up training than normal - instead of a frantic 3-4 days, I have done 245km over 8 days, with today being almost a rest day - just a quick 11km this morning.

It turns out that the two Australians I met at Nordseter bus stop a couple of years ago liked the idea and have come along this year, and they told some other people. The RR generally gets spread around by word of mouth - someone hears about it from someone else, and so it goes on.

The conditions are good; the temperature not so great - it was +1C yesterday evening, although -1C this morning, later rising to 0C. With no wind, and the drier air here, it was quite pleasant outside in just a long sleeved shirt.

The forecast is generally for just below 0C and as I look outside now, it is gently snowing. In the UK, the kids would be going crazy over the thought of snow.

So I now look forward to the start and see if the improvements I have made work out.

Training now in Kuusamo

Today it snowed on and off. On the downside, this made it slower. However, with the well worn inserts in my Skintec skis, it was possible to skate - only about 300-500 metres at a stretch. But it does demonstrate that my balance is coming back and that an old dog can learn new tricks!

Finnair had removed every last liquid from my ski bag, including ones they have let pass many times before. One is a citrus base remover - non-flammable and non-pressurised. I guess they were just bored on a Friday might. They also swabbed both me and my carry on rucksack for explosives.

At least they didn't get my anti-icing spray - Jussi's father is driving up so we gave him all the stuff that we thought Finnair might steal based on past experience, so it was even more galling that they took stuff they have been happy with previously.

Finnair must be the least cross country ski friendly airline in existence - they have lost my bags more than every other airline put together - losing my bags on about 1 flight in 5, and now they are taking even safe liquids. Maybe I should put the citron base remover in a perfume bottle, as that is more or less what it is. Considering how many gallons of alcohol and perfume they carry on the plane to try and sell us, it is farcical.

Frequently cross country skiers are flying in to places where some of these things are not easy to get. If you arrive the evening of the RR briefing, you are not going to be able to replace anything Finnair take before you have to start skiing, and you will be 4 days into the RR before you see a shop (Ranua) so even getting the stuff is difficult. So it is the time and inconvenience that it costs that are the biggest annoyance.

Getting the bags here was hard enough - my ticket to Helsinki was Finnair, except the return leg was a codeshare with British Airways. So the outward flight had no baggage allowance, and I had to pay €15 per bag for 2 bags (€30); but the return flight, because it is a codeshare, you are under BA's baggage policy, which is one bag included and £60 (€85) if paid in advance (more if paid on the spot).

Thus you are between a rock and a hard place - BA charge you 5x or more than Finnair charges, but Finnair effectively take that amount out of the skier's bags (at least if you are a cross country skier). SAS seem to be better for baggage - you get one bag included, so with two of us we had one bag and one ski bag, and no excess charges (and they didn't raid my bags either).

RR1 2016 - coming soon to a trail near you

Well here we are again - another year, another RR.

Each year is different, and after two years of being injured in the run up to the RR, I have taken it very carefully. I had a week of training early on - back in mid-December in Norway, when snow was a bit thin on the ground. Fortunately where we were staying, there were a few kilometres of good tracks thanks to snow making, but the other tracks were challenging, being reminiscent of the RR in a warm year.

Having made good friends over the years on the RR, I have travelled to Finland a few days earlier than I normally do, with the intention of spreading my training over a longer period of time. What I learned in Norway was that some of the ankle muscles that were giving me a problem became better after about a week. However, regular running made them twinge again - it might be down to the fact that many of our local roads have a significant sideways slope on them.

The best intentions of the treadmill and the rowing machine, and even running club fell away as we have been replacing the kitchen, and I know better than to go away leaving a job unfinished. I keep thinking that as I get older, work will dry up, but instead find myself busier than ever, and it is interesting work.

So I find myself in Finland probably slightly less fit, but I have managed to lose weight, so I may yet be my lightest RR starting weight.

I have been staying with Jussi just north of Helsinki for a few days, and have go three days skiing in. I am advised that I have managed to get some of the nest weather recently for it as well. The first day, Tuukka - another RR regular joined us.

Having other people observe your skiing is helpful. Both observed that they thought my ski poles were too short, especially for double poling. Those of you who have followed my saga over the years may remember that I started with 150cm, on the advice of one trainer, then dropped to 145cm and last year I returned to 150cm.

So the following day, we were skiing where there is a rental shop, so I rented a pair of 155cm poles. My height is 182cm, and above the poles, it recommended 150cm poles for a height of 181cm, so the rental guys thought I was on the right length of pole. However, I rented some 155s and off I went. On the level, it was hard to tell - certainly no feeling that they were any worse. They were clearly much better when double poling, and generally an improvement also going uphill. And longer poles help on the odd occasions I try my balance with a few skating steps.

So new poles it was, and at this time of year, the ski season is winding down, so I got new poles at a good discount. Generally the more you pay, the lighter they are. As a skier with not the greatest balance, I probably stress mine more than a good skier would, and a broken pole in the middle of nowhere is not a great experience, so I pretty much bought the best.

But it also set me thinking of the Dave Brailsford approach. For those of you who don't know, he was, until recently, the head coach of British cycling and the Sky Team that took British riders to Tour de France wins. So he knows a thing or two about how to succeed. Part of his philosophy is to make hundreds of tiny improvements; each by itself may have little significance but several hundred 0.001% improvements start to add up.

I had previously calculated that I plant each pole about quarter of a million times on the RR (half a million in total). So I started thinking - what does a lighter pole mean? Well suppose it is 1g lighter - then over the 7 days and 450km, this equates to 250kg less that you lift each time as you bring your pole forward. This is 1 ton per 4g, and it is not unreasonable to see a difference of 100g between mid range and top range poles. 100g equates to 25 tons of effort extra on each arm over 7 days - an average of 3.5 tons per day.

When you look at it like this, that is a significant effort, and I now understand that what may seem trivial, when you look at it over a longer period of time, can be very significant.

Although other people had also told me that they thought I should use longer poles, and in any case I can always use the others I brought with me, I was heartened to chance upon another skier taking his daily exercise in Helsinki - none other than a fellow RR skier who I hadn't seen for a couple of years - Tor-Frederic. Tor is about my height, a little younger, and although a better skier (he is a Finn) not hugely faster than me, and I have skied alongside him many kilometres over the years. So I was quite encouraged when checking his poles that he is skiing with 160cm poles.

Another point was made to me by my fellow skiers - I have actually improved, and I might now have improved some of my techniques (very definitely NOT all of them) where a different pole length may be now better for me than the standard advice, which is typically given to novice and gentle recreational skiers.

There is one other thing that has changed - my eyesight. What, you may well think, has my eyesight got to do with skiing? Well, I have been wearing variofocals, where you have to look through the upper part of the lens to get the distance in focus. But as the difference between distance and reading prescriptions has got greater, the distance vision gets more and more limited. So I recently had a pair of glasses made with only distance vision. Thus, I now have to look more through the centre of the lens, so my head is now being held higher. As a result, my body angle has changed a little, and as a result longer poles may be a better fit for my revised "stance".

Of course, now I am an "expert" (NO, not really, just know slightly more than I did before) I am now more critical of the poles - despite being "large" on the hand grips, these were very tight with thin gloves, and would be impossible with thicker gloves when it is colder. Also, the baskets were very small, and had a lovely two dimensional curve - great on well prepared tracks, but not big enough for the softer non-compacted snow more common on the RR. So I had a good lesson from Jussi in how to change them. You need a heat gun, a pair of welding or heat resistant gloves and special Swix ski basket glue. You carefully play the heat over the basket and end of the stick until it loosens the bond and you can pull the old basket off. Then you melt new glue on, push up the new basket and align it with the grip before it cools and sets. The point to watch is that poles have different diameters - we measured 10mm at the top of the old basket, but when it was off, a 10mm replacement was too big and the actual end of the pole was 9mm and we needed a 9mm basket. How they are labelled (or not in many cases) leaves you not being sure exactly what will fit until you are half way through the job.

Still it is all done, and I now have a custom set of ski poles for the RR - make me feel like a pro, but not like one if you have ever seen me ski.

Naturally we have all been watching the weather forecast evolve for some time now, and each day the forecast gets a bit warmer and we have been debating waxed, zero or skins for our ski choice.

So far, I have probably defied my family's expectations that I will return with yet another set of skis, but a set of zero skis may be calling to me. For those who don't know what these are, they are skis that only work around 0C plus or minus a degree or so. Six years ago, I wondered why anybody would want, or would want to spend the money on, more than one pair of skis. As someone who has bought 4 sets of skis since my first RR, I don't think I can argue that case any more.

So I am now sat in the departure lounge at Helsinki waiting for the late flight to Kuusamo for my final training. That is where I will also do some comparative testing in the conditions we expect for the RR.