wrote:
The technique used in Ski-O is only sort of skating. With the
emphasis so much on smaller trails and technical courses, there isn't
much time spent on wide groomed trails.

I know!

That was why I wrote about fancy new DP moves, I do remember the point
where a guy (from Finland?) first did a hilly Ski-O race on narrow
uphill tracks without kick wax.

For the uphills there is a ton of herringbone done, with skate skis.
You are also allowed to take your skis off and run straight through
the woods, as long as you carry your skis with you.

BTDT: _Many_ years ago, on a ski-o race in Sandefjord, Norway, we had a
long route choice leg on the way back to the event area: The control was
on top of an old ski jump hill, with a pretty good/wide track up on the
back side of it, but I decided on the direct route leading to the bottom
of the hill, then took my skis off and ran up. :-)

Even if the conditions were perfect and there were tracks everywhere,
a 10% difference in speed would be huge in terms of position.

Absolutely, even if the glide speed difference is pretty much never
quite that that big.

It is more a case of DP being significantly more energy efficient than
any other form of skiing technique, since only the pole tips have to
stand still and all the energy goes in the right direction.

There was a paper some years back where they compared Max-O2 for world
cup class skiers, and found that although they all had very high
numbers, there was little or no correlation between Max-O2 and world cup
points.

When they did the same test, but measured upper body Max-O2 only, i.e.
double poling, they did find a very strong correlation.

I.e. skiing the 50K in Oslo used to be on soft manmade tracks, just
10-12 guys skiing the route once before the race, and all the skiers
carried poles with huge woven baskets but didn't really use them very
much for propulsion, just a small additional push.

Today it is the opposite, i.e. most of the (classic style!) worldloppet
long distance races are won by people DP'ing on skate skis.

Terje
--
- Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"