Holy Crap! I took my first lesson this past weekend at Devils Thumb Ranch in CO. I ended up with a one hour private lesson and I was wiped out. 8500 ft elevation didn’t help but I felt like a fish out of water. I’ve been a down hill skier for almost 30 years, have done a bunch of inline skating and am in decent shape but putting all the technique together was quite a challenge. After my lesson and a quick snack I went out for a flailing 4 mile loop and my whole body was destroyed.
I can see why all you skier-triathletes are ready to rip come spring. Very humbling experience. I wish it was more convenient for me because I could see myself really getting into it.
Yup, that sounds right. Nordic skiing and Rowing (with sliding seat) will use the most O2 of just about any sport out there due to the quantity of mussels used.
There is a reason why the best Nordic skiers in the world collapse when they cross the finish line. Unless you have tried a 10K X-ski race, you can’t quite appreciate the complete exhaustion.
Skate Skiing is like swimming. It does not matter how fit you are if you dont have good technique you will be slow and find it very difficult. It almost all technique related.
People think they dont need lessons for nordic skiing, keep taking them and learn as much as you can.
The three most important things are:
Forward hips and body position (flex at the ankles and try to not let the posterior edge of your butt ever go behind a 90 degree line up from the back heel of your boots)
Its a weight transfer activity. When you transition from ski to ski it is a complete weight transfer onto a flat ski, not an inside edge to inside edge motion. Practice gliding out completely without falling back to the other ski.
When poling keep your poles at a slight bend and never let your pole tips come more than 3-4 inches ahead of your bindings. Have someone show you good double pole technique.
I can see why all you skier-triathletes are ready to rip come spring.— But Nordic skiing and swimming are two different disciplines that have very little in common. Especially for those struggling adult on-set swimmers.
funny, kids pick it right up with no preconceived notions as long as you don’t try and mix poles into the equation. you have to focus on what legs are doing then, hence why I made comment about not starting with poles. beginners use them as a crutch and then don’t develop as quickly imo
sounds about right, focus on technique and you will get much better quickly and this will become your favorite activity (I barely even do tris any more, preferring xc skiing far more). I annually go to the Birkie and see / watch triathletes who are not good / experienced skiers act, and in some cases talk smack, about how their fitness will get them a good performance and time, many times wearing the latest costly fast looking gear. Somewhere around 20-30K, frequently earlier, they are usually in monster plod mode en route to a 6-7 hour day as 60+ year olds wearing 1980’s flannel shirts and carhardts easily pass them in cruise mode.
I can see why all you skier-triathletes are ready to rip come spring.— But Nordic skiing and swimming are two different disciplines that have very little in common. Especially for those struggling adult on-set swimmers.
I think skate skiing and swimming have something in common in than small body movements or body positions that are not always intuative add up to a lot. These are two sports where good technique can go a long way to make up for mediocre fitness. Just like learning to swim with a level position in the water skiing with a forward body position goes a huge way toward making you faster.
I am a MOP triathlete but when I ski with guys who smoke me on the bike or running I can out perform them on skiis no problem. I ski in NH at a resort frequented by cyclists in their winter bike kits who usually can only do crappy V1 technique on skis but are otherwise very fit. They only have one gear / mode on skis. It is great sport if you can take some lessons and get a lot of practice.
We didn’t touch the poles for the first 45 minutes of the lesson.
I was thinking during the lesson how the technique aspect of skate skiing is very much like swimming for adult onset swimmers. Fitness without technique doesn’t get you very far.
"if you dont have good technique you will be slow "
There was a guy in my AG who could beat me by almost five minutes just at the local 5 kms charity running races. I was a better swimmer and our bike times were always about the same. But there was a 10 kms x-country race we’d do every year and I could beat him handily every time out. I don’t do anything else in the winter except x-country ski, even when I was still racing.
Holy Crap! I took my first lesson this past weekend at Devils Thumb Ranch in CO. I ended up with a one hour private lesson and I was wiped out. 8500 ft elevation didn’t help but I felt like a fish out of water. I’ve been a down hill skier for almost 30 years, have done a bunch of inline skating and am in decent shape but putting all the technique together was quite a challenge. After my lesson and a quick snack I went out for a flailing 4 mile loop and my whole body was destroyed.
I can see why all you skier-triathletes are ready to rip come spring. Very humbling experience. I wish it was more convenient for me because I could see myself really getting into it.
Just a quick note…it is not as hard as what your lesson at Devil’s Thumb Ranch would suggest. I raced there once over 15K and my time at 15K was the same pace as my 100K skate ski race at sea level. I’d guess that a lot of it was the 8500 ft elevation assuming you went out there from sea level… I actually got mildly alitude sick driving over Berthoud pass and spent the day at Devil’s Thumb with mild nausea and never really got better until I dropped down to Denver later in that day (this was back around 2001).
I can see why all you skier-triathletes are ready to rip come spring.— But Nordic skiing and swimming are two different disciplines that have very little in common. Especially for those struggling adult on-set swimmers.
Truth. I put in big mileage on my skis last winter, almost no swimming, and came into triathlon season with terrible fitness in the water. Specificity.
But Nordic skiing and swimming are two different disciplines that have very little in common. Especially for those struggling adult on-set swimmers.
Try mixing some double poling into your workouts - it’s almost exactly the same as the pull in swimming wrt muscle recruitment and strength requirements. Of course, you need to be able to catch the water to take advantage of this strength & fitness, but if you can’t catch then no amount of strength & fitness is going to be of much help.
Thanks Dev. I wish I could use that excuse but I live at 6000ft. I am coming off 5 weeks of no training due to walking pneumonia.
OK, if you live at 6000 then it was the 5 weeks with no training. I have found in general my tolerance for altitude sickness is low when I shoot up to 11,000 feet or so quickly. The times I have gone that high on my bike slowly, I have been OK. In general , I don’t deal with altitude well. In Denver, my 400m track splits are 6-8 seconds slower than sea level which is bad (I did a 12x400m workout just to quantify)…and that is at mile high, not 1.5 miles high!
To Nordic skier, I am surprised you suck in the water coming off XC ski season. It takes me 1 week and I swim my fastest times all year in late March/Early April. It actually has nothing to do with the specifics of nordic or swimming and everything to do with conditioning. In the winter, I get 7-12 hours per week of upper body conditioning while XC skiing…in the summer, I swim 3 hours on a good week. So basically over tri season, I just lose upper body aerobic conditioning. It’s just a function of hours. If I swam 7-12 hours per week, I am sure I’d swim faster, but cannot be bothered to swim that much. I need to be outside for the majority of my training.
I can classic ski decently. My dad had some old school 75mm/3-pin skis and shoes (back when they made ski SHOES, in addition to boots) that I’d tool around with in the back yard when I was young.
I took some skate ski lessons a few years ago in Truckee, CA. 6000’. I was living at ~50’ at the time. And I can’t skate either. I was flailing around out there, going nowhere fast! I didn’t try any long loops, as I was averaging maybe 3 KPH, so I didn’t get too wiped out lol.
I still want to learn to skate successfully, but I can ski though most of the MA state parks near me, and they aren’t groomed for anything, let alone skating
Kris Freeman who is a US olympic skier enters a triathlon in NH every year. It is a uphill mtn bike (+1100’), then .55 mile swim, then run up 2200’ at Cannon mountain. He does not do a lot of swim training at all.
Clearly some of the muscles transition to swimming…
I still think I big part of it was how inefficient my technique was. My right leg had a lot of trouble setting the edge and getting a good push off.
The next day I did a pretty intense 2 hour snowshoe hike up to tree line (approx 11,500) and I was fine.
