"You make it too hard to buy"

 When our shop was first approached to be the seasonal retail provider at Jackson Ski Touring, the executive director made a big point to tell us that we needed to bring the expertise to serve their distinguished clientele. He'd already built up our morale by telling us that we were no better than the foundation's third choice anyway, but the outfits they really wanted didn't want to play.

Coincidentally, our ski reps were advising us that we needed to boost cross-country skiing's image as more technical than people think. Get more detailed in ski fitting. Demonstrate that cross-country skis weren't something that you could get from a vending machine. This was driven partly by the fact that ski construction, especially for performance, fitness, and racing models was getting more technical, and partly just because the cross-country side of the industry was tired of getting sneered at by the much younger but massively more popular downhill segment.

Reps held in-store training clinics. Peltonen held a clinic at Great Glen Trails to go over the nuances of their line and compare it to the other industry leaders at the time. Their tech guy, Jussi, was delightfully blunt about some of the weird sidecuts being marketed to American rubes. Remember Fischer Skate Cut? Ha ha ha. Not even Fischer wants to remember Skate Cut. Skate Cut begat the Cruiser sidecut that they foisted onto tourists for a shamefully long time. It was utter bullshit, but marked part of that period's emphasis on making cross-country seem enticingly technical instead of just like walking with a shuffle.

Into this environment we stepped, with not only our own years of experience in touring, racing, and Telemark skiing, but newly trained in the meticulous process of fitting racing skis.

Racing skis are any skis intended for high intensity use on groomed surfaces. Most of them do not go to racers, because Nordic ski racing is an exhausting neurosis. I mean, you can do a race or two just to see how you do, but you aren't a real racer until you have a "quiver" and a wax kit the size of a suitcase. And you have to train obsessively.

Normal, balanced individuals who don't want to finish a grueling 50K plastered with frozen snot and vomit while sweating through a single layer of Lycra at -5 degrees F can enjoy hours of vigorous fun on their "racing" skis. They still benefit from relatively precise fitting, because the mechanisms of the motion are the same. The equipment has to work with them the same way as for the gaunt sufferer who double-poles an entire 30K classic race because it's the fastest way to both the finish line and early cardiac problems in your 40s.

So...squeezed between the contempt of the Jackson hierarchy and the exhortation of the reps to tech up our presentations, we started encouraging and answering customer questions, extending the sales process, but sending out skiers not only with gear that would serve them well, but with a little more understanding about what the skis, boots, bindings, and poles were doing for them that might not have been obvious.

There was a lot of sloppy misinformation going around, especially about the relatively new area of skating. Skating had been up and coming since the later 1980s, but advanced rapidly in the late 1990s, leading to a surge in retailers similar to -- but much smaller than -- the mountain bike boom that had just preceded it. Lots of profiteers were making things up as they went along, thinking they'd figured it out just by looking from a distance.

The Jackson brass, for all of their talk about wanting to see expertise from us, didn't mean care and concern in fitting skis to customers. They wanted to see high-volume efficiency at separating customers from cash, because they got a percentage of our gross on top of our base rent. Not only that, some of their luminaries got their feelings hurt when the Podunk idiots they'd hired to be their retail flunkies took them to technical school about the equipment. I was told that I made it too hard for people to buy. My answer was that I tried to make it impossible for people to buy stuff that wasn't going to meet their needs and desires. I wasn't just going to foster a misconception to pry money out of someone who would then perpetuate misinformation about the equipment and the sport.

Jackson managed to convey an image of being both welcoming and elitist at the same time. The two exist side by side in Big Nordic because the elites are very elitist, but they do welcome the dubs, because the dubs are more numerous. The dubs actually pay the bills. My sin was in trying to turn as many dubs as possible into more knowledgeable participants. I wasn't hired to help them. I was hired to process them. Take the money and move 'em along. I had come to realize that ski shops serve an important educational function, representing the sport in general, not just their own competitive interests. A shop might be the first point of contact between an interested beginner and anyone they perceive as knowing what they're talking about. I was not going to sell them something wrong, just for a quick sale.

"Wrong" is debatable, of course. Any customer's profile might be met by a range of options. I felt that telling the customer this and pulling them into the selection process would help them later, even if they had chosen an option that I had considered less optimal.

"They won't know the difference" is a common defense by the quick-sale crowd who feels no long-term responsibility to the activity in general. I always answer that they will notice the difference, even if they can't identify it. By trying to instill a little knowledge along with the sale, I hope to plant the germ of some analytical thought, so that the customer doesn't just say "skating sucks," or "cross-country skiing sucks," and drop it completely. Instead they might say, "hey, now I get what that nerd in the ski shop was trying to tell me," and they come back for the better option. At the very least they don't just quit.

Skis are sold in a gray area

 I was taught some careful fitting criteria for performance skis. Around the turn of the century, skate lengths had stabilized after the wild experiments of the late 1980s into the mid 1990s. Classic lengths had shrunk a bit along the way, but for performance skis still needed to be at or above 110 percent of height.

The relationship to height in performance classic is more to stride length and weight shift than just height per se. In a casual shuffle or a back-country plod, stride length isn't a factor. But if you want to move along smartly on a groomed or at least well-packed trail, you'll want a ski that tracks smoothly as you swing your legs through a longer arc. You want enough ski up front to support your weight shift down the axis of the track as you accelerate.

Skate skis use length in their own way. You might wish from one day to the next that your skating skis were shorter or longer, depending on the firmness of the snow and the steepness of the terrain. As the ill-fated Fischer Revolution taught us in the early 1990s, there's definitely such a thing as too short. However, not long before that, early skate-specific models had demonstrated that they can be too long, as well.

If you're six feet, four inches tall or taller, you'll do fine on a skate ski that's 200 centimeters. In the early years of skate-specific gear, you could get skis that long or longer.

Average trail width was a big factor in trimming ski lengths. Since skate skiing was only done on firmly groomed trails, a skier didn't need the flotation provided by the traditional skis of old. That fact, plus the narrow trails at most touring centers, led to the 147cm, "one size fits all" skating ski. It was never intended as a racing ski, only a convenient way to allow many skiers to fit the new technique into trails that had not yet been widened to facilitate it.

Racing skate ski lengths dropped down for a few seasons as manufacturers and skiers alike felt around for the right balance of length and stiffness. By early in the 21st Century, skate ski lengths had settled pretty close to where they are today. For adults, lengths range from 172-ish up to 190-ish.

According to guidance around the turn of the century from the Peltonen ski company, a venerable Finnish manufacturer, skating skis should fit between 106 and 110 percent of height to provide the optimum balance of maneuverability, propelling edge, and glide length. Taller skiers would end up getting stuck with skis that didn't hit that window, but they were already accustomed to fitting into our world of low doorframes and short beds.

Along with length came flex. The mid section of a skating ski pops in a similar way to a classical ski, but for a different purpose. A properly fitted skating ski never flattens out completely. That center section does not need to touch the snow and stop for a moment, the way a classical kick zone does. Instead, the skate camber absorbs energy as you put your weight on it and returns energy as you unweight it to shift to the other ski. The gap also interrupts the glide zone, which helps to expel free water in warm, moist conditions.

When a ski is properly fitted to weight, the skier can get a comfortable amount of glide zone onto the snow, with the pressure well distributed along it. Too stiff a ski means the glide zones are effectively farther from the foot, farther from where the weight is applied to the ski, and the rebound when you unweight will punch up. The action on and off of the ski might feel unstable and erratic. Too soft a ski can mean that the whole base contacts the snow. The pressure points in the glide zone will sit close to the foot, while tip and tail have too little pressure on them because the ski is being mooshed down in the middle.

The weight relationship is nowhere near as exacting as in performance classical, but there are limits. The same goes for height. You might do fine with skis that fall a centimeter or two outside of optimal, but go just one more and you feel like you're a mile out. Also, on softer snow you might really like the longer end of the fit range, while on hard, fast conditions you would prefer the shorter end. Too short in those conditions can be grippingly squirrelly.

The ski shop is a gray area. The person selling you skis wants to sell you skis. The better ones will start out with the goal of selling you skis that are perfectly dialed in, but once they look at the rack they will try to make a case for whatever they have on hand.

Twice now I have listened to the other salesman here fudge the numbers to sell a ski set to women looking for skate setups. In the first case, I had opened the sale and went to check on whether we could order her a dialed-in fit. The other salesman stepped in and did a fudge fit that will be usable, but could be a little bouncy and a hair short. He's also 6'2", so maybe misery loves company when it comes to never getting a 106- to 110-percent fit.

In the second case, the ski strikes me as way above range flexwise, although the height might be pretty good. There was a ski of identical length with a softer midflex number, that he didn't choose. I don't know whether price was the factor there or if the woman is a lot heavier than she looks. Weirdly, the weight range on the softer ski was listed as higher than on the stiffer ski, but the midflex (tested at the Fischer factory) was softer than the low end of the general range for the ski.

Scanning the almighty internet for guidance on what the real racers and race oriented shops are doing, I found a lot of conflicting information. Caldwell Sports seemed like a good honest broker. Their fitting criteria breezed over height and focused on weight. But racers tend to be conveniently height-weight proportionate. A certain weight more or less corresponds to a general height, so that height doesn't need separate and detailed scrutiny. Caldwell addressed it by referring to average builds among male and female skiers in different general weight ranges. So height is hidden in there, but they have that gray area in which to fudge a fit.

In an era when ski companies are telling us that we should be able to move our bindings up to three centimeters either way to get the perfect ride, they can't turn around and tell us that ski length overall doesn't matter. They still do, but don't just nod along. Try to part the fog a little to see where you are in their gray area.

Support Ukraine: buy some skis

 Assuming that Russian intelligence does not read my obscure drivel, I feel safe in making this observation: purchasing Fischer skis supports Ukraine in its ongoing war repelling the Russian invasion.

War since 1945 has been carefully compartmentalized, to the point where its artificial brutality becomes grossly obvious. The war in Ukraine is a great example of this. Drones and missiles rain down on population centers. Thousands die. In the meantime, somewhere in a less war-torn part of the embattled nation, an enormous factory churns out skis, hockey sticks, and other toys for the rest of the world to buy. 

Fischer has had a factory in Ukraine for years. Decades. Back in 2020, they had a devastating fire there, which drove their production out to other European nations, and to China. They had already been hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. Then came the Russian invasion. Somehow, nearly all of the Fischer skis we got this year have "made in Ukraine" labeling.

I don't know that Fischer particularly supports Ukrainian independence. As a big, multi-national corporation, they'll make a deal with whoever is in charge to keep the flow of consumer goods going. The snow doesn't know what flag flies over it. Business can be completely cynical, and it usually is. But for now, anything that brings money into Ukraine helps its economy as it funds its life-or-death defense against imperialist Russia.