Dysfunctional

Loving winter has really become an abusive relationship. Who would stay in a relationship with someone who runs hot and cold, shows up late, leaves early, slaps you around, is constantly failing to deliver what's promised or live up to expectations? And yet we keep hoping it will change, that the magic will come back. Maybe things will be like they used to be.

You're so lukewarm...it's like you're not even trying anymore.

You hang around with that hussy Colorado. I hate you! I hate you! Please come back!

I can't leave. Where would I go? What would I do?

Irrational, isn't it? But it's all we know.

Supported Touring

At this moment I can overhear a couple of people discussing operations in Maine by an organization I won't name, offering supported camp-to-camp ski tours.

Logistical problems pile up like foam in a shaken soda. Snowmobile users demand their shot at any trail. The customers require a certain level of indulgence to get them to come out at all. As with so many guided outdoor adventures, self reliance is the first casualty. It just becomes another energy-consuming, pollution spreading, peace-and-quiet-destroying human carnival. The organization in question has always expressed the hope that a significant percentage of the people who insist at first on being coddled will mature into self-reliant explorers and environmental advocates.

This is why I bushwhack. Choose terrain no one can cross with a machine, with a sketchy trail or none at all, and you have half a chance at some privacy and fresh tracks. This applies whether we have snow or not, because ATVs need a clear space and a manageable slope, too.

Of course the machine heads keep pushing the envelope, forcing the fanciers of quiet self-propulsion onto dicier and dicier terrain. Eventually you end up clinging to a cliff, bombarded by the echoing sounds of engines you can't escape.

We have some time before that happens. It's a race between humanity's self-indulgent deficit spending and the absolute limit imposed by finite resources. In the grand scheme, sag-wagon ski tours of the backwoods of Maine probably do a tiny bit more good than harm.

Klister Control

Klister can be more of a blessing than a curse, but only if you control this feisty servant.

Wax in a tube, like glue that never dries, klister has developed its own legend, full of demonic behavior and the horror of ruined clothing and equipment. But it's not evil, just misunderstood.

Many people fear klister's reputation so much they add to it by dousing the kick zone of their klistered ski with a flood of solvent, waiting a few minutes and attacking the gooey mass with a plastic spatula. This will move a lot of klister out of the kick zone and give the illusion of some success, but when the solvent dries the ski will be as sticky as a plastic placemat in a pancake house. The klister hasn't gone away completely. Thinned by the solvent, it has just moved to new neighborhoods and settled down. It's all over the sidewalls and top sheet of the ski. It's under the edge of the binding plate.

To succeed with klister, you must be patient. You can't kill it with chemicals. You can't scrape it away with a plastic or metal scraper. But two items from your own bathroom can turn klister cleanup into a trivial problem.

You will need some toilet paper and an old toothbrush. You will need wax remover, but not a lot of it.

Carefully place one ski on the waxing profile. Unroll a strip of toilet paper the length of the klistered area. Pat this onto the klister. Some technicians suggest you heat the paper at this point, using a hot air gun or hair dryer, but be careful. Softened klister could escape if heat is applied too quickly. You want the klister to soak into the paper.

You can also use Swix Fiberlene or similar cleaning tissue, which is more rugged than toilet paper, but also more expensive.

Using a thin plastic scraper, start at one end of the kick zone and scrape firmly, at a shallow angle, to the other end of the waxed area in one smooth motion. This should pick up the paper and klister in one nice HAZMAT wad you can then flick into the trash can. Only a little residue will remain on the ski.

Dip your old toothbrush into the wax remover and scrub the leftover klister in the kick zone. This is also the time to scrub away the little boogers of klister that always hide along the lower part of the ski sidewalls, especially with cap skis. The protruding edge of cap skis makes a little ledge under which the klister hides all summer if you don't root it out with your last base cleaning before applying storage wax.

Repeat the toothbrush cleaning as necessary to get all the little klister insurgents out of their hideouts.

Your other choice is to do a hack job on the cleaning, or no cleaning at all, and pay me to clean it up at the beginning of ski season. But let me warn you: I'm not cheap.

December Says It's Getting Its Act Together, Honest

Snow squalls sift into the emerald fairways of the golf course, barely touched by frost even at this late date. Could the ground please freeze before the snow this year? And could it stay frozen, so we keep what falls and don't lose it to a bog at the first gleam of rising sun as winter passes its midpoint?

The temperature has dropped to 26F. That's promising.

We tell ourselves it's early yet, and it is. But early clicks over to late by the end of the month.

The Ski Shapes the Skier

Because cross-country skis come in such a variety of shapes and sizes, the ski itself (combined with an appropriate boot and binding) does a lot to shape the technique of the person using it.

If you chose your ski to match a particular style of skiing, such as skating, high-performance classical, low-intensity groomed-trail touring or back-country trail-breaking on ungroomed snow, you may not notice the fact that it shapes your style. The qualities of the ski will reinforce the strong points needed for that type of skiing. Only when you push the boundaries of a ski's strong area will you start to feel it compelling you back to a stride length and rhythm more suited to its shape. It doesn't care what you want. A wide, shaped, heavily-built ski will bring you back to slower, easier strides that conserve energy over the long haul, no matter how hard you try to muscle your way down the trail in a vigorous V-skate on it.

Generally, you'll find people trying to push heavy gear into faster forms of skiing more than they will take racing gear into the puckerbrush. An experienced skier knows there are times you can have a wildly good time on racing skis on ungroomed snow, but only when the natural surface mimics or improves on the commercially prepared product. Far more common is the sight of some dogged tourist trudging along in a laborious V1 skate, wondering why anyone would spend time or money to ski like that all the time.

Because skis have such different shapes for different uses, skiers tend to collect several pairs, perhaps with boots and bindings to match. They're fairly easy to store. When conditions favor a certain type of skiing, the fully-eqipped skier grabs the appropriate tool and heads out.

No More Whining about the Weather

Think you have a tough time training when winter won't deliver the white stuff? How about if it never did? Check out this guy.

Of course he does enjoy consistently warm weather. He can focus on dry land training without considering nuisance snowfalls that wreck the roller skiing while failing to provide real skiing. He doesn't have to go out into subzero wind chills for his road workouts. Then he travels to the snow for his final finish training and his races.

Pretty shrewd.

A Taste of Winter

Winter is acting like I did in high school. It's been screwing off all term, only to come running in with a late effort to drag its grade from an F to a C minus.

The storm that brought eight inches of powder in parts of southeastern New Hampshire sprinkled about three on Jackson, but, combined with what had fallen earlier and the rock-hard ice that underlay it in places that had not just gone over to mud it actually made a smooth, fast surface on the Ellis River Trail. Skiers could set out from the base lodge, rather than have to ride the shuttle bus to higher elevation trail networks.

The temperature has been like January, with overnight lows slightly above or below zero and daytime highs in the teens or low twenties. We haven't lost any of our meager accumulation to melting this time. Not yet.

The bad season has taken its toll on skiers who count on having the trails to use for their regular exercise and fun. People I will see many times in a normal winter are finally coming in, looking tired and overweight. Will they get enough ski time to bridge to bike season? The seasons frequently overlap in the spring, but only if we have enough snow to survive thawing and refreezing.

Cross-country skiing provides such complete exercise I may finally break down and get roller skis, so I don't have to do as much weight training in the off season. Nordic skiing uses the core muscles, strengthening the abdominal and back muscles dynamically through a comfortable range of motion. The fact that you get to move down the trail keeps it interesting with changing scenery and the need for varied techniques.

Roller skiing isn't quite the same as skiing on snow. You don't slide as easily if you crash on pavement. You don't have cars and trucks blowing by you on the ski trails. But you do get to use poles and enjoy the scenery and real movement. We'll see. Hey, I could roller ski to work some days. Then again, maybe not. Route 28 doesn't have much of a shoulder. I hate not being able to put my efforts to practical use.