view from (the back of) the elite wave

(sorry if this gets posted twice)

it was a new experience for me this year, skiing with the masses and
just hoping to maintain top 200. i'm used to being a little further up
in the field but i guess that's what a job and a couple of knee
surgeries will do to a guy. with the exception of the 10km after OO, i
spent most of the race getting passed, so i occupied myself with
watching the other skiers and taking some mental notes. here's what i
saw.

technique. even on the world cup, you don't have to look very far to
find examples of bad technique. and sure, it's easy to look at the
elite wave birkie skiers and find a lot of technique issues to pick
apart. but for the most part i didn't see much that couldn't be
improved by spending time skiing without poles to improve balance and
stability. there are much better uses of your time (and by "your" i
mean you folks getting 50-300th in the birkie) than debating which
vector produces which force in your pushing leg.

by far the biggest mistake that i saw was in terms of what i call
racing technique, that is how a racer skis in a given terrain,
especially in transitions. this is kind of a big deal in the birkie
because that course is entirely transition (the lake and a couple
consistent climbs being obvious exceptions). the people i skied with
are in shape - they were hammering up the hills. but i didn't see
_anyone_ push hard into the bottom of a hill, push hard over the top of
a hill, push hard into a downhill to gain momentum, push hard after a
downhill to keep momentum etc. etc. what i saw was a litany of people
hammering a V1 up a hill, getting tired and coasting over the top,
coasting down the other side until their momentum stopped on the next
uphill and then they'd have to start their hammering V1 from scratch.
people! so many of you were losing so much time in the transistions.
not such an issue at the mora vasaloppet, but on the birkie course...
there is so much benefit from the little extra work of two or three
hard V2 pushes in the transitions.

all you have to do is get into the habit. you know why you coast over
the tops of the hills? because on training days you stop at the top of
hills to chat or drink. stop doing that. make sure that you always
put more emphasis on the bottom and the tops of hills in training, and
it'll pay off at the birkie. i think there are a lot of people out
there who could improve dramatically at the birkie - without any
improvement in fitness or technique - just by learning to race the
transitions.

fun race this year. -phil

Thanks for the report and the tips!

In relation to what you say, I find a neat thing about racing is when I
was on top of my game (years ago) how I had a big picture of what's
happening. I was not stuck in a certain mode but was instead looking
ahead and stringing together whatever techniques keep the Big Mo
rolling. Not even really paying attn to any particular series of moves,
mostly trying to mesh nicely with everyone around. Still, one should
always remember your tips of pushing over the top and into the bottom,
etc.

I do wonder, tho, with the Birkie you often have these TRAINS. I bet
there's a whole separate art to skiing in these things---and bridging
up thru them. (Re bridging: Ideally one gets in the right one at the
start then conserves from there! The perfect race: you start where you
finish. Boring...but only in one sense! Great in every other, eh?)
Anyway, I'd be happy to read more about life in the trains. Seems maybe
fun. But mostly you'd just be drafting, right? In certain hill
conditions you'd have to not run into people, have to deal with
accordian effect. I suppose it could suck if you do the train wrong.
I'd hate to run up on people then have to ease way up before a climb.
UGH!

--JP

PBo wrote:
(sorry if this gets posted twice)
[snip]

by far the biggest mistake that i saw was in terms of what i call
racing technique, that is how a racer skis in a given terrain,
especially in transitions. this is kind of a big deal in the birkie
because that course is entirely transition (the lake and a couple
consistent climbs being obvious exceptions). the people i skied with
are in shape - they were hammering up the hills. but i didn't see
_anyone_ push hard into the bottom of a hill, push hard over the top of
a hill, push hard into a downhill to gain momentum, push hard after a
downhill to keep momentum etc. etc. what i saw was a litany of people
hammering a V1 up a hill, getting tired and coasting over the top,
coasting down the other side until their momentum stopped on the next
uphill and then they'd have to start their hammering V1 from scratch.
people! so many of you were losing so much time in the transistions.
not such an issue at the mora vasaloppet, but on the birkie course...
there is so much benefit from the little extra work of two or three
hard V2 pushes in the transitions.
I really noticed that on wave 3/4 skiers. Conga up the hill, and then
ease off and let momentum and gravity take you to the next conga line.
Watching the few skiers who were moving up, they were consistently
taking a couple of good strokes over the top, passing a few people and
then skiing into the back of the next bunch. Pretty soon, they'd gone
thru 50-100 people and not done a bit of extra work.

fun race this year. -phil
It was a fun race this year. Great snow, sunshine, no wind - what more
could you ask for?

Marsh

I do wonder, tho, with the Birkie you often have these TRAINS. I bet
there's a whole separate art to skiing in these things---and bridging
up thru them. (Re bridging: Ideally one gets in the right one at the
start then conserves from there! The perfect race: you start where
you
finish. Boring...but only in one sense! Great in every other, eh?)

trains - you start seeing them after 5-10K. You pick the one which
you think is right for you. If you get passed by another train and you
found yourself hitting breaks here and there with your current one, you
hop on the faster one. When your fast train is passing a slower one,
and you feel tired, you get off and hop on the slow one to take a rest.