It's great to see on this newsgroup some goals other than racing -- like
feeling good (Grissy) and looking good (Jay W).

Jay Wenner asked:
Is the goal here to ski with technique that looks
good, or to ski fast regardless of how it looks?

Slow: one of my current goals is to learn to skate slow.

On gentle terrain and fast snow, I'm interested in playing with what looks
good sometimes. When skating up a steep hill, the only thing I care about
is making it to the top without suffering lactate pain for the next hour.
My problem is that I'm one of those guys for whom skating up a hill fast
_feels_ good -- powerful and strong -- in that moment. I just don't like
paying the price later.

Therefore, I've been trying to learn how _slow_ I can skate up hills
(regardless of how it looks).

So I spent a lot of time yesterday afternoon at Mountain Dell looking for
skaters plainly slower than me, and then following them up all kinds of
hills -- because they were the proof that it was really possible to go that
much slower and still be skating. And it worked. In my third hour I was
finally able to climb hill after hill without stopping to rest.

Seems to me there's several kinds of "looking good" and "feeling good" --
but that merits a whole other thread of its own.

Ken