Ski Machines

Two or three people within a week or two have mentioned on the sales floor that they are unfamiliar with skiing, but have used the Nordic Track indoor exercise machine. More than 30 years ago, American Olympic skier Bill Koch endorsed it as a great trainer for the preseason. The company itself no longer makes them at all. They make treadmills, ellipticals, exercise bikes, and rowers, but no cross-country ski simulator.

I still have one, folded up in the crawl space. Dutifully, I put in many hours on it to prepare each year for the coming of real ski conditions outdoors. Mind you, I never put in even an entire hour in one session, because the Nordic Track is without question the most tedious exercise simulator ever devised. I used to say that it was all of the work and none of the reward, which is true. Worse than that, though, the way it uses the muscles and shifts the effort from one side to the other is so different from actual skiing that the muscle memory will probably actually inhibit a beginning skier's progress if they really want to learn to stride on a medium to high performance ski.

One customer sounded like he was trying to teach himself, sliding around on his new skis, trying to make it feel like the Nordic Track. Note: if your skiing feels like the Nordic Track, you're doing it wrong. The machine is confined and constrained. Real skis in the real world are free, and sometimes unruly.

Cross-country skiing didn't start out as exercise, it started out as a way to get from place to place. Exercise was incidental. Skiers would put forth as much effort as necessary. If you're chasing game, or being chased by someone you pissed off, maybe you'd get the ol' heart rate up there in the red zone, but as a practical matter, skiers use terrain to their advantage as much as possible. What goes up gets to come down. On snowshoes, you'd be plodding either way. On skis you get to glide.

On the Nordic Track you do not get to glide. That crucial difference is the subtle impediment to actual skiing based on what your body memorized in your dutiful plod on the machine. You can set the resistance so that the flywheel spins, but then you aren't working as hard, burning calories and breaking down muscle so that it will rebuild itself stronger. If you design a program or even make the minor effort to mix things up, you might vary the resistance from one session to the next, or within the course of a single session. Even so, the glide phase of a low resistance session isn't anything like a real glide phase when you have to balance on a sliding ski.

A fully developed classical stride has distinct segments that occur in seamless succession. Dig around in the archives for more detail on getting the most out of your classical technique. 

Well this is some crap

 After a brief cameo by the legendary polar power of old, winter has reverted to its mediocre slouch. No one was happy to see the frigid blast arrive, since it chased all but the most foolhardy intrepid indoors for the two days of its reign. Before the frigid interlude, we'd gotten a couple of storms that put enough cover on the Wolfeboro trail system to open virtually all of it. But even that was a mixed blessing.

Three storms arrived between January 19 and January 25. The first two brought mostly snow: five or six inches in the first one, and about 14 in the second one. Those covered the trails, but the ground was not frozen. Streams were still fat with rainwater, and all normal wet areas were at their wettest. The groomer had to maneuver around the mud traps. And then the third storm brought a few inches of snow, ending as rain and freezing rain.

Often, a little bit of freezing rain can put a protective shell over the snow beneath, so that plain rain at the end of a storm runs off without soaking in. This time, however, the freezing rain and plain rain overlapped enough to create a thick crust that set up during the series of sub-freezing nights that followed that third storm. The big groomer could till the trail surface, but that compresses and wears away the snow. Snow loss continues from skier traffic and days above freezing. The sun isn't very strong yet, but it is getting stronger. When the average temperature is trending above freezing already, the sun doesn't need to be blazing to make bare spots get bigger as the dark ground absorbs heat.

Off of the groomed trails, the crust hinders all travel. Snowshoes snag on the surface as they break through to varying depths with every stride. In many areas, the snow beneath the crust is powdery or loose granular, but just a stride away it might but frozen solidly a couple of inches deeper. On skis, the crust breaks, but the snow beneath provides no grip. I haven't been able to try it on a skin ski yet, because we have no demos of those, but you couldn't find a grip wax that could deal with the range of textures, and a scale base gets nowhere on the surface of the crust or in the unconsolidated snow beneath it.

Well-traveled trails may be packed down to a firm -- or at least consolidated -- surface for hiking. I haven't had a chance to examine any of them. The trade routes are usually as firm as concrete by this time in an average season.

The weather for the coming week offers us a half-inch tonight and a half-inch on Thursday night, well mixed with rain. Every daytime high goes well above freezing. Our trail system is still holding up, but the little caution areas become less little and more numerous.

We have to hope that we retain enough continuous skiing to entice a few Massachusetts vacationers to spend some time on our trails during the notorious school vacation week that begins with Presidents Day Weekend. After that, no matter how good the conditions might be, interest drops right off as a winter weary general population looks toward spring. Winter doesn't have to have been particularly harsh or long for most people to be tired of it by the beginning of March. This includes casual recreational skiers.

As spring warmth arrives, the off-trail snow might transform briefly into something usable before it shrivels away to nothing. And as usual, the higher terrain of the White Mountains will have more snow and present more opportunities to anyone who can manage to get there while it lasts.