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.
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