I just now got to look at this thread, and have a little trouble
following:

"These posts are from 1996 yet still seem to hold up well for the most
part. Peter H might want to take a look at the second article in light
of the recent discussion about the physiology of skating and striding."

I'm not sure which posts Gene refers to here. Seiler's web site
I've known about for a long time, but can't see anything there
to educate me further about the two questions on which Gene and
I apparently still don't entirely agree :

(1) what it means to say that classic elicits a lower HR than skating
(not to be, as it sometimes is,
confused with saying that training more hours at classical is better
than more hours at skating, possibly because you can keep the HR
lower while climbing, during LSD training) ; and

(2) whether there could be any useful sense made out of saying
that offset uses more upper body than 1-skate (though the exact
negation of that is true IMHO, and a useful factoid, when faced with
not-too-steep climbs and fresher legs than arms, say).


"There have been a few changes in technique since then that might
modify his comments here or there. I also suspect that stride cadence -

and not just stride length - has become a differentiating variable at
at least the top levels. For example, watch Becky Scott and Julia
Tchepalova relative to others on the climbs at Canmore. This may be a

function of the trend in recent years toward steeper climbs on
repeating shorter loops (done for cutting costs and easier TV access
and spectator viewing)."

That's a good and interesting observation, new to me!
I think the WC have also jacked up the accumulated elevation gain
per unit distance over the past 10 years as well.
There was an interesting exchange with John Estle
here about this quite some time ago.

The cadence of a few of those 500 meter long track skaters
seems almost super-human to me!

Best, Peter