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Keski Reports?
Wondering how other RSN's Keski went. I see that John Forrest
Tomlinson skied swiftly. I did the 52 km. classic. Conditions were super with the downhills in great shape. Seems to me that the forested trails have been widened over the last 10 years. I really enjoyed the race, though I didn't ski fast at all. When skiers I commonly ski faster than in later waves passed me at 15 km. I saw the writing on the wall. Glazed tracks created kick problems for me around at 20 km. that I couldn't correct the one time I tried to layer Toko over Vahti kick wax. I should have listened to my intuition to use a green klister binder under the hard wax. Would have saved me a lot of time. Missed kicks really took a lot out of me- so much so that I was not able to enjoy the better kick outside the tracks. Once snow flew and filled the tracks with a few mm. of cover I had great grip and glide but the damage was done. I was tuckered out and limped in at well over 5 hours. By far the slowest marathon time for me ever. I always felt for those skiers out on the course for a long time due to poor wax or just not being fit enough to be a bit more zippy. What would it be like to be out so long?- I used to wonder. Now I know. Finishing and adjusting the mindset in order to enjoy the great weather and tracks was the goal, and I achieved them. I was quite satisfied as the three prior weeks I suffered from flu/bronchitis and then some acute trauma to a tendon in my ankle that left me unable to walk just one week prior to the marathon. None of that seemed to impact me directly on marathon day, but I was quite aware of leg pain that emerged from walking city streets after beeing off my feet for the prior three weeks. The Keski is a nice event, and if you like to ice skate then making a winter city vacation out of it is the ticket. My wife who had a great time skiing the 25 km. classic event, and I really enjoy skating the carnival like Rideau Canal during Winterlude Festival. A very nice scene. My friend who skied the 25 km classic the first day and the 50 skate then next was an early arriver at the scene of the skied who suffered a heart attack and later passed away. He found two skiers attending to the stricken man and another skiiing furiously back down the hill they just came up. We discussed this situation and concluded based on our (limited) knowledge of CPR and incidents that lead to vascular incidents among those fit enough to ski a marathon, that CPR and first responder efforts have little chance to save the stricken. Usually among the fit, a heart attack we understand, is a result of a structural problem that went undetected, and not a situation that could be affected positively by CPR or even paddles. If our conclusions are incorrect, I'd like to gain a better understanding of the matter. This has been a topic in our newsgroup in the past. Indeed I started a thread within the year about deaths during marathons, as I have seen my share of them. We know that the risk of perishing in an event such as this is less than the risks of not exercising. I'd say that based on conversations I have had with a fit friend who lived through an aortic aneurism, the most important thing to do is to stop exercising and seek immediate attention the second you feels something wrong. Had my friend just continued on thinking he had a stomach upset he'd not be here today. Gary Jacobson Rosendale, NY |
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It's about time I stopped lurking, and got sociable
again. Glad to hear that Gary was able to do the 50 (or really 52) classic, despite all his recent problems. I was also pleased to hear the reports last week on the CSM, which has now got me salivating to go back to that. Maybe next year I'll try to do both, Parham! And the main thing to report on the 50 classic for me was again just how great those old Fischers of yours from about 1990 are still running. I've never had better skis in a long race. Parham sold me those when he needed a stiffer ski to account for the extra 10kg. or so that he'd be carrying as a Gold Courier de Bois. I was acually contemplating a divorce, or temporary separation, and tested a softer pair of Atomics on Friday night, but thank goodness I stuck with the old Fischers. That was also a topic of a recent thread. Looking at the splits, I think only one person slower overall than me was actually faster on the more downhill last 2/3 of the course, and quite a few who beat me were slower. My high speed glide seemed to be way better than everybody around me. The 60-64 men's category had a terrific turnout, 39 plus at least one other usual competitor who entered but couldn't ski. Lots of `foreigners' (I guess `international skiers' is more politically correct, if illogical). John Brodhead had a fantastic time. I also got soundly beaten by another USer, 2 Norwegians and a Czech in category, as well as by a Canuck, my friend Risto Santala in the 65-69's. But for me, on that day, 4h.02 made me perfectly happy. The old `flasks of gel hanging around the neck' trick seemed to work very well, and, if anything, after climbing Mont Bleu, I thought maybe I'd been too conservative, and had too much left at the finish. And despite the icy track, there was still lots of VF30 left on those skis for climbing it. (I think the negative comments about the old VF's we hear here are sometimes parrotting, and sometimes people who take the instructions on labels, like temp ranges, too seriously!) Hope to hear from others on the race. Was it pretty slow up on top on Sunday, JFT? The skate times weren't that fast, but skiing (and cheerleading) down below on Sunday, it didn't seem too bad, despite the -18 deg. Apparently several RSNers who often do the Keski didn't make it this year. hope you guys are all right. Best, Peter |
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Gary:
Sounds like my Keski was a lot like yours. I almost stopped half way to re-wax but opted not too. I should have. I'm feeling a bit too good today, which tells me I had more to leave out on the trail but didn't. My only story: I was coming down one of the long hills and was approaching the skier in front of me too quickly, so I stepped out of the tracks to go by. I hit soft snow. I went down on my butt, but went down so hard that I bounced back up again. (just don't start calling me 'lard ass'!) -Scott. "gary jacobson" wrote in message om... Wondering how other RSN's Keski went. I see that John Forrest Tomlinson skied swiftly. I did the 52 km. classic. Conditions were super with the downhills in great shape. Seems to me that the forested trails have been widened over the last 10 years. I really enjoyed the race, though I didn't ski fast at all. When skiers I commonly ski faster than in later waves passed me at 15 km. I saw the writing on the wall. Glazed tracks created kick problems for me around at 20 km. that I couldn't correct the one time I tried to layer Toko over Vahti kick wax. I should have listened to my intuition to use a green klister binder under the hard wax. Would have saved me a lot of time. Missed kicks really took a lot out of me- so much so that I was not able to enjoy the better kick outside the tracks. Once snow flew and filled the tracks with a few mm. of cover I had great grip and glide but the damage was done. I was tuckered out and limped in at well over 5 hours. By far the slowest marathon time for me ever. I always felt for those skiers out on the course for a long time due to poor wax or just not being fit enough to be a bit more zippy. What would it be like to be out so long?- I used to wonder. Now I know. Finishing and adjusting the mindset in order to enjoy the great weather and tracks was the goal, and I achieved them. I was quite satisfied as the three prior weeks I suffered from flu/bronchitis and then some acute trauma to a tendon in my ankle that left me unable to walk just one week prior to the marathon. None of that seemed to impact me directly on marathon day, but I was quite aware of leg pain that emerged from walking city streets after beeing off my feet for the prior three weeks. The Keski is a nice event, and if you like to ice skate then making a winter city vacation out of it is the ticket. My wife who had a great time skiing the 25 km. classic event, and I really enjoy skating the carnival like Rideau Canal during Winterlude Festival. A very nice scene. My friend who skied the 25 km classic the first day and the 50 skate then next was an early arriver at the scene of the skied who suffered a heart attack and later passed away. He found two skiers attending to the stricken man and another skiiing furiously back down the hill they just came up. We discussed this situation and concluded based on our (limited) knowledge of CPR and incidents that lead to vascular incidents among those fit enough to ski a marathon, that CPR and first responder efforts have little chance to save the stricken. Usually among the fit, a heart attack we understand, is a result of a structural problem that went undetected, and not a situation that could be affected positively by CPR or even paddles. If our conclusions are incorrect, I'd like to gain a better understanding of the matter. This has been a topic in our newsgroup in the past. Indeed I started a thread within the year about deaths during marathons, as I have seen my share of them. We know that the risk of perishing in an event such as this is less than the risks of not exercising. I'd say that based on conversations I have had with a fit friend who lived through an aortic aneurism, the most important thing to do is to stop exercising and seek immediate attention the second you feels something wrong. Had my friend just continued on thinking he had a stomach upset he'd not be here today. Gary Jacobson Rosendale, NY |
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Excellent, Peter!
Look forward to seeing you at the CSM. Here's an offer- if you attempt to do the both CSM and Keski next year, I'll be inspired by you and will attempt to do the 'double' too. Nice to hear the old RCS' are getting faster every year :-) Parham. |
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On Mon, 21 Feb 2005, gary jacobson wrote: Wondering how other RSN's Keski went. I see that John Forrest Tomlinson skied swiftly. Well I had something of an epic adventure. Thursday morning we packed up for the 5-hour drive home from Garnet Hill where we'd spent 3 days on a vacation with extended family. Spent an hour or so at home unloading the car and seeing to things there, then drove 4 hours more to Gatineau (alone). Got there at 8 PM to pick up packet and try to divine some clues about how to wax. The folks at the booth that was offering a waxing service as a club fundraiser insisted that it was all powder now that a few cm's of new snow had fallen. They admitted that the classic tracks had not actually been cut yet, but were unwilling to entertain the thought that once they were cut, old abrasive snow from the last freeze/thaw cycle would be exposed. They insisted all that was needed was VR40 plus maybe a layer of VR50 on top, or maybe I'm off by one and that was 30 and 40. Didn't matter, I don't have any VR waxes. I retired to the hotel, which insisted they had no reservation in my name, but fortunately still had rooms available at the Keski rate. After downing a mediocre pizza I headed for the underground garage where they were allowing waxing. I went with Start Green for glide, which was great for most of the race. It did seem to be slowing down once the temp rose significantly, but I couldn't think of anything else that a) I had, and b) would cover the expected temp range as well. I thought about mixing some Rex Blue into it but decided not to be too creative since that seems to backfire as often as help. :-) For kick I used Swix orange binder (the old one) and then a few layers of Extra Blue for starters. Somewhere along the way all the other waxers finished up and I was left alone until Duncan Douglas walked by and stopped to chat. He wished me luck and when I asked if he was racing tomorrow said "none of that classic racing for me". Well I guess he knows what he's doing, he took 4th place in the 50k skate on Sunday! Managed to catch 4 or 5 hours of sleep and then off to test skis and fiddle with wax. Got a nice parking spot just a few feet from a side loop with set tracks leading up the only small hill anywhere near the start. I tried several different waxes and was never quite happy with the results until I tried Rode Multigrade Violet. That seemed to give good kick and not drag on the glide so I *thought* I was happy and went off to the start. Having no recent results to draw on I entered with no seeding and was assigned to wave D. I thought this might be a problem but decided not to let it bother me and lined up on the front row. It turned out to not be a problem at all. We quickly strung out and by the time we started passing C wavers they were strung out well enough that passing was rarely a problem. Sometimes there were backups on herring-bone hills but nothing like the old mass-start all-in-one-wave days of the Gatineau 55. Things went quite well for the first 10 or 15 km I suppose before I realized I was gradually losing my kick. (Oh, no...) As time wore on the wax wore off and eventually I had pretty much no diagonal stride kick at all except on the shallowest of hills. On the flats I could still produce a KDP kick, but it was a long way to go with no diagonal stride. I thought several times about stopping to rewax but reasoned that if it came off once it would just do it again. I did catch a brief glimpse of Gary Jacobson at a point where the course doubled back on itself after the loop past the Huron shelter. I'd looked up your number on the start list and just as I hit the point where there were oncoming skiers I thought to pick my head up and look at bib numbers when there you were, and there you went before I even got my mouth open to holler. By the time I got back to the 2nd Huron feed station I knew I hadn't been eating enough and I knew what was coming next from having bonked on the Parkway decent years ago in the G55, so I stopped for a good 5-10 minutes and stuffed my face before starting the decent. That turned out to be both good and bad. Good because I didn't bonk this time but bad because I cooled off too much and once I started the decent I realized my mittens were soaking wet and my hands were starting to freeze. I have *never* gotten cold hands in these mittens (Sinisalo) before. I actually stopped to look in my pack to dig out my extra gloves (I remembered having thought about it) but they weren't there. Ok, going to have to figure out how to warm my hands while screaming down the parkway in wet mittens. Eventually I figured out to take thumbs and fingers out of their compartments, make fists, and stick them behind my legs on the decents. It actually worked. By the time I reached the next feed station at the bottom of the hills not only were my hands warm, my mittens were actually dry! The only remaining excitement of the day was the 5k race. As we passed by Mont Bleu on the way to the loop to the south of the start/finish, the teenagers leading the 5k race came blasting out of the woods onto the parkway, along with a half dozen or so coaches all screaming at them. That got the blood going and I tried to match pace with them but by now it was warmer and my Start Green couldn't quite match their glide. The flip side to the high-powered teenagers was the return from the southern loop, sliding down the hill in the last couple km's before the finish and merging with a trail FULL of slower folks bringing up the rear of the 5 km race! That was exciting bobbing and weaving through all the kids, parents, and grandparents skiing 3 and 4 abreast in full snowplow formation. Definitely a fun day despite the wax disaster which I figure cost me somewhere between 30 and 60 mins. Over lunch I chatted with a couple folks from Vermont, one of whom is a Toko rep. He told me that the skis he waxed for his companion did not lose their wax, and he used the Toko Green base binder. That I find interesting. I wonder if others have found it to be superior to the old Swix orange binder in abrasive snow conditions. The sad part is I actually have that in my wax box but have never actually tried it. I'm very curious to hear what worked for others who didn't lose their kick. I thought briefly about doing a klister binder but was concerned that would destroy the glide. I talked to a friend afterwards who had done that and she said that's exactly what happened to her. Great kick all day but really poor glide. -Mitch |
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#7
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On 21 Feb 2005 09:59:59 -0800, (gary
jacobson) wrote: Conditions were super with the downhills in great shape. Seems to me that the forested trails have been widened over the last 10 years. I think that's true about the trails in the woods being wider. And the grooming and snow were superb. I did the 50K skate race. My wife is recovering from ankle surgery so she didn't make the trip. Instead I travelled with two of my CW-X teammates who are quite elite -- getting 11th in the 50 skate and 2nd in the 28 skate -- and this was an interesting experience for me, seeing how hard they go in the races and seriously they take the race prep. I am serious too, but not as consistently. A brief report is at http://www.thinkracing.org/index.php?p=121. I had a good experience overall. I wanted to beat 3 hours, and just missed that. I may have been a little too conservative on the Penguin Hill and in the rolling hilly sections later, but overall I felt I skied firmly and with decent techinque (for me) throughout. I didn't fall, apart from an uphill stumble with one other guy on a narrow section of trail, so that was good for me too. And I've finally got feeding on the go under good control. I also didn't crack on the Mt. Bleu hill at the end, though in retrospect maybe I was too conservative there as I finished with a little energy left. Though I must admit my legs were dead the in the evening after the race, and my vision was somewhat blurry. I had Lasik surgery a few months ago and my vision gets worse when I am very tired. The weather was really nice. It was cold (I think about 5F to 9 or 10F) but sunny with little wind, so nothing like the ordeal two years ago. The snow didn't seen super slow or particularly fast. I used two layers of Fastwax White over some layers of Fastwax Teal/Green over Map Black and that was OK, not great. Or at least it seemed I had average skis compared to other people in my wave. The last few years with super cold weather it seemed I had much better than skis than most people around me, but that might be because I started in later waves where people aren't quite as serious with waxing. It's worth mentioning that the Torbjorn Sports website recommended HP05, a pure flouro for medium humidity and coldish temperatures, as the top coat and none of my group put it on. We thought it was too cold for a pure flouro. Which was probably a mistake -- my teammate who got 11th was in a long duel with an Italian skier who had some Swix pure flouro on over Swix LF4 and who had noticebly better skis than most people at the front of the race. My buddy was on old cold weather Germinas with the right Zach Caldwell grind that run well and were quite good, so we think it was the wax that kept them from being super. The race organization was good, as usual. It was nice having the race building closer to the start, though it seemed there were not quite an many bathrooms in the Mt Blue School as at the CEGEP. Or at least I haven't found them. Lot of nice people around, from all over the world, and kids doing the little races too. Very cool. We skied at Trapp Family Lodge on Monday. I'd never been there before and learned it was really nice. It was very sad to hear about Bob Soblieski passing away. I don't think I know him myself, but friends do, and I feel for his wife and friends. We discussed this situation and concluded based on our (limited) knowledge of CPR and incidents that lead to vascular incidents among those fit enough to ski a marathon, that CPR and first responder efforts have little chance to save the stricken. Usually among the fit, a heart attack we understand, is a result of a structural problem that went undetected, and not a situation that could be affected positively by CPR or even paddles. This event made me think I need to get more thorough medical checkups more regularly. JFT **************************** Remove "remove" to reply Visit http://www.jt10000.com **************************** |
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Skied the 52km Classic and marginally bettered my time over last year - just
over 4-1/2h's, but position in my age group (50-54) dropped a few spots. Guess the course was faster this year. Glide was LF7 mixed with LF4. Glide was NOT fast - as usual on my 10 year old Atomic ATC's (Should I excpect more after repeatedly chewing up the bases, repairing and re-sanding?). Grip was VR45 (long) and VR50 (short) over VG35 Base Binder and Polar. Base binder worked well. Re-waxed with VR50 once after Huron on the way up. Grip was good. Hobbled by a groin injury sustained completing CSM Gold the prior weekend. On Tuesday before Keski, could barely walk and figured only a 10% chance of starting Keski. Remarkably, injury healed faster than expected. Wore cycling shorts all week as a compressoin fitting. Wore two pairs of cycling shorts during the Keski which really helped. Experienced no sharp pain... unlike CSM. My limit during the race was general muscle soreness from CSM. With the injury, held back a bit for fear of tearing the muscle again. It wasn't the limiting factor I thought it would be. Finished fresh thinking I could ski another 20km... so obviously didn't push my aerobic capacity nearly enough. Too conservative! Mont Bleu was a struggle, but didn't feel like I was 'going under' as I reached the crest... as in some other years. Left too much out on the course... but alway though I was going pretty hard. The weather conditions couldn't have been better all weekend. Partly sunny on Saturday and sunny on Sunday. Temps -18C to start on both days rising to -6C roughly on both days. The event was very well organized again. Tracks/course was in very good condition. Slightly modified, wave starting arrangement worked well. Food/liquid stations were well spaced/placed, and volunteers were great. Preferred the tracks to the old finish line, but really shouldn't complain. Registration was quick. Using the timing chips (for 2nd year) is flawless. Using the Mont Bleu Ecole Secondaire worked better than the CEGEP. (Could never really figure out the hallways at the CEGEP anyways!) Spectator arrangements were lousy this year. Too many uneeded barriers so spectators couldn't get close to the skiers waiting to set off from the start. Couldn't get up close to the finishing tracks. Overeager and overly aggressive volunteers even impeded natural routes across an open and snow coverd athletic field to the starting area. Someone ought to review the layout with common sense in mind. If you've read my earlier post, you know I'm disappointed at Keski for replacing finishing commemorative pins (keepsakes) with stickers (disposables). I had quite a collection going. (Did buy a commemorative pin at the Keski product booth, but design was not the traditional Keski logo.) Please write to Keski ) if you feel as I do. See you in 2006! KenJ1952 |
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On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 05:32:06 -0500, "kenj1955"
wrote: Wore cycling shorts all week as a compressoin fitting. Wore two pairs of cycling shorts during the Keski which really helped. Experienced no sharp pain... unlike CSM. Congratulations on finishing after doing the CSM and having your injury. Take what I am about to say with a grain of salt, because I am sponsored by this company, but I have to mention CW-X tights and shorts. The provide compession support in a way that is quite tight around your joints but allows freedom of motion for propulsion. I can't explain it succintly but take a look at the website http://cw-x.com/ss/introduction These are the tights I race in -- they are great http://cw-x.com/ss/products/mens/m_pro_tights They also sell a short for support just around the hips which I don't use as much, but could really help people in situations like yours. JFT **************************** Remove "remove" to reply Visit http://www.jt10000.com **************************** |
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