Cross Country Skiing

[lph]

Anyone following the Nordic Ski World Championships? Marit Bjørgen is such an AMAZING athlete, I'm speechless! Maybe I'll even go jostle for the pleasure of seeing her live on the womens 30 K on Saturday.

[lph]

Anyone following the Nordic Ski World Championships?

I guess not. Oslo is going a bit insane here now so I tend to forget that nordic skiing barely exists outside of Northern Europe, at least as a spectator sport.

New question: anyone try the Kuzmin steel scraper on their skis, instead of glider? You basically scrape away all the worn surface until you get to fresh, "new" sole - and leave it that way. Just refresh with a light scrape-over once in a while. The afficionados say it's at least as good as glide-waxing, and a lot less mess. We've bought one and tried, but so far I've just played around with it on other peoples skis . Mine are that new still that the original sole is pretty good. Curious to see how the treatment holds up over time.

www.kuzmin.se if anyone is interested. The guy has written a whole thesis on the subject...

[Susan]

Anyone following the Nordic Ski World Championships? Marit Bjørgen is such an AMAZING athlete, I'm speechless! Maybe I'll even go jostle for the pleasure of seeing her live on the womens 30 K on Saturday.

I do, whenever I can. However they tend to show only the mens runs and not the womens, sadly. Unless, like in the Ski World Championships, the men don't win anything and the girls do, then they hype them for 2 weeks and forget about womens sports afterwards

[lph]

It's rare that I break off a ski trip because of bad radio reception. But today my plan was to ski about 15K listening to the mens relay (they were doing 4x10 K ) for inspiration. Once I got over the hill though the reception was so bad I had to go for plan B - turn around, zip home, and plonk myself in front of the tv. So I got to see Northug do the winning leg... hushing the audience and braking over the finish line.... Men. I much prefer Bjørgens way of celebrating a clear win - a flag in her hand and a huge smile.

[mudmucker]

Yesterday I went to Wachusett for some lift-service telemark skiing again. This time I went with a friend who is a more experienced tele skier than me. We knew it was going to warm up and rain so we wanted to get out there before the weather got here. The season is getting short. It was a beautiful sunny day with very good conditions. Got there nice and early and basically had the slopes to ourselves till about 11am or so. It was really nice to have someone watch my form and be able to critique it and give good pointers. It really is awful hard to see yourself. We came across another tele skier, an older fellow, who was just art in motion and beautiful to watch. We three ended up hanging out together for quite a spell and I was able to get excellent tips and advice from the other guy too ( I've never come across other women doing this). Tele Man gave my friend a helpful hint also, where he felt a great improvement after making one adjustment.

Both these guys had the hard core tele equipment. I was using my more flexy type boots so in order to speed up my learning curve I decided to go over to the ski shop and demo some beefier boots. I tried out some Garmont Veloce's (only $15 for the day). Went back out to the slopes and met up with the guys again. Sure enough the boots helped and by end of day my form was getting a lot prettier. Always room for improvement but even Tele Man said I was was "pretty much there". Just need to keep practicing.

I'm not going to want to do lift-service telemarking often but maybe once in a while. So the day was loads of fun but boy are my legs feeling it today. This weekend I'll probably get out to do a little more gentle backcountry - I still have over 2 feet of snow.

[roadie gal]

It was doing the rain/snow thing yesterday so the snow was really sticky. We took the dogs out for a ski out our back door in the morning. Poor Toby, our rough collie, he had HUGE snowballs in his ruff and between his legs. We had to keep stopping to pull them off of him. I had sprayed his paws with Pam so they were OK, but his poor belly and chest...

In the afternoon I got a little housebound, so I went over to the cross country center for a short ski. The lodge was right at the transition zone. It was raining at the bottom, but snowing after just a short climb. The conditions were weird, but at least I got out of the house.

[7rider]

Finished up a week in Colorado today - downhill at Breckenridge. Texas is on Spring Break this week, and I think the entire state decided to ski Breck today. Good grief, what lift lines!!!

But on Saturday, we broke up our week of downhill with some xc skiing at the Keystone Nordic Center. My friends from Boulder drove up for the day to join us. It was pleasantly warm....loads of sunshine, but not too mushy. It was my first time on xc skis in several years - the first time on (paid) groomed trails in an eon! It was DH's first time ever on xc skis. As predictable...he did great. We stuck to the green "easy" trail, as it was only the second time on skis for our friend's 8-y.o. daughter.

Nice way to spend a day.

[Crankin]

Jealous.
Ski season is over here, unless I want to go up north.