wrote:
Hi... This one's for Terje.

OK, I'm here of course...

I just looked into Ski-O. It seems they only skate. The online
handbook says that skating off-trail in narrow conditions in loose
snow up hills is hard and to herringbone and get purchase with the
tips in the snow to the sides. It sounds miserable. Herringbone also
doesn't work at all with un-kickwaxed skate-skis. Ugh! But it must be
faster overall. On the flipside, such conditions sound perfect for
classic. I suppose most SkiO courses only have a small amount of
offtrail and one makes up the time on the groomers?

Ski-O skaters actually invented all the "modern" double pole moves,
those that made it possible for Jørgen Auckland to do the (original)
classic Birken on skating skis last weekend (he ended up nr 4, his
brother Anders won),

Classic vs Skating has long been interesting to me. Word is that WC
skiers are 10% faster when skating. I suppose normal trails and
normal skiers -- even at the top level of SkiO -- are faster yet when
skating.

Anyway, just wondering your thoughts on this.

Ski-O used to be kick wax always, due to all the single-track parts, but
they used shorter skis, so they could skate as well on relatively narrow
trails. At one point in time some of them developed a double poling
technique which made it possible to push straight up really steep (but
not too long) hills, and from then on pure glide on skating skis have
dominated at the top level.

My only recent Ski-O race was two years ago
http://tmsw.no/qr/show_map.php?user=terjem&map=300, when I did a
public race alongside the World Masters champs in Lillehammer. I skied
it in mostly pre classic style, with regular classic skis, and still had
to herringbone the steepest hills in very soft snow.

Terje

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