Learning to cross-country ski, skating style
At the end of August I joined the Wanaka XC Merino Muster trip, run by friends Tim and Nicole David. It was a brilliant week of skiing, meeting great people, enjoying the fabulous Wanaka landscape and outstanding hospitality.
I had XC skied once before, in the classic style, in Italy about 15 years ago and loved it. The classic style is where you ski in two narrow tracks in the snow with a grippy part to the bottom of your ski to stop you going backwards, It’s basically like running on snow.
Ever since then I had been keen to try the skating style as well, which is a bit like inline skating with poles. I’d done a fair amount of inline skating when I lived in Wellington. I brushed up a bit as practice over winter before I went, using the new suburbs in Papamoa, which have quiet roads and wide cycle paths.
We skied all week and took part in the Merino Muster World Loppet at the weekend, which is part of a world series. I signed up for the 21km, but there were also 7km and 42km options.
Day one on the snow was hilarious. Despite having pretty good balance and coordination and being pretty fit and strong, I felt like a very uncoordinated Bambi. There was a lot to get your head around, the action of skating, how to use the poles and every small downhill looked terrifying initially.
The skating style is very much a whole-body, 3D experience. It involves explosive power to get yourself up slopes, a bit like interval training or mountain biking where you need to put in a lot of power quickly to get over an obstacle.
It took a few days for the ski motion to click, and what helped at first was skiing without poles to get the feel of how to push off one leg and glide.
In the middle of the week I had a few doubts about being able to ski 21km, but by the end of the week I was confident I could, and I did! It was a very satisfying to have persevered with it and got to a good enough level to ski the whole course and even finish in the middle of my age group. The scenery on the course was also beautiful and the elite racers were giving encouragement to people as they passed which was amazing too.
Team Wanaka XC Ski 2019
It definitely left me hungry for more in the future, even if my body was actually pretty tired for at least of couple of weeks afterwards. I ran a half marathon two weeks later and could still feel the XC skiing in my legs!
It was fantastic to meet people from around the world on the trip, including France, Germany, Australia, Canada and the UK. Several of the group had completed Loppet events all over world. Jim and Marcia from Canada were particularly inspiring as they are in their 70s and still XC skiing marathons.