Wax of the Day: Skate Skis
· Jan 12, 09:50 PM
And no, I don’t mean skate skis in the sense that I meant last week. In Alaska LF6/ZR1 on my best skate skis gave excellent kick out of the track. Here, well, skate skis are the wax of the day because trying to classic ski is practically a waste of time. No one ever said waxing was going to be easy at Whistler Olympic Park was going to be easy, but the last couple of days have been downright ridiculous.
We (Ev and I are flying the XC O flag this week) have been up to ski three times. The only temperatures I’ve seen at the venue are 32 and 33 degrees. Very nice. There was snow falling the first day, the clouds were a bit above us yesterday and today it was lightly misting. If I was coming from anywhere other than Alaska (ungodly cold) or Bend (this is actually preferable to heavy wet snow at 35 degrees) I’d be complaining about the weather. Instead I’m just complaining about the waxing and the snow speed. If someone could figure out how to make a glide wax and structure that is consistently awesome in fresh wet powder (Zach?) there could be a lot of happy customers out there. In the mean time we’ll just continue to slog along.
The good news with regards to conditions is that the clouds are supposed to clear out and we’re going to get into a legit freeze-thaw cycle starting tomorrow. Well, I think that might be the case. Good forecasts in Canada seem are apparently classified, either that or I’m looking in all the wrong places. The best I’ve found is the snow-forecast.com 6-day outlook for Whistler, but Environment Canada leaves a whole lot to be desired. (Click for point forecast with the NWS is pretty sweet). Anyways, if the predictions come true, the snow should transform, speed up and be considerably easier to wax for come this weekend.
Getting here took a while, and I spent the weekend a little tired. I’m tired now too, but that’s more from training. I chased Bird around the Pursuit course for a 15k TT today which was probably the hardest workout I’ve done all year. He did a 15k TT, my workout was more like this. Hang on, get dropped, take a shortcut (there are lots of them out there, but I bet they’ll be fenced off on Saturday), repeat. I ended up with two shortcuts on the classic course (for probably 6-700m) and none on the skate course. I finished about 30 seconds back and absolutely fried. It was good to beat myself up, but I’ll probably have to execute a bit of a better race plan if I want Saturday to be a result instead of just a suffer-fest.
Commenting is closed for this article.