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Distance ski fueling

By on 1 March, 2021 in BKL Race Blog, Junior Blog

This past week we had a couple chances for longer ski days, with school on break and some more free time during the daylight hours…oh, and good snow! On Wednesday during a 2-hour skate ski at Craftsbury I thought we would try something of a learning experience.

It was written down on the plan that everyone bring a snack to have during the ski, not just after. I picked up a box of granola bars ahead of time just to make sure we would all have some mid-ski fuel in case anyone forgot. Often on long skis I’ll bring along a box of fruit snacks to pass out, which serve to put in that little sugar-boost at the end of the workout…but really, we should be consciously consuming more calories than that if we’re out for over an hour.

I also started the workout with an announcement: I was going to use my heart rate monitor strap and watch to track my distance covered, average heart rate, and calories burned. A lot of us have heart rate monitors, but we seldom put them to use. Even in my case, it has become one of those things that I just put on because it “makes me feel like I’m a high-level athlete” and yet I rarely use the information it provides to the fullest.

Whether or not my device is accurate for calorie tracking, I don’t know. Mine is not the cheapest monitor out there, but it’s far from the most expensive. I’m guessing it tracks those calories through a combination of user-inputted stats like height, weight, age, and fitness level, along with workout data like average/max heart rate and distance covered.

“Counting calories” is a dangerous concept in and of itself. However I had a very basic hypothesis that I wanted to put out there: that we probably burn way more calories, even when skiing at low intensity, than we think we do.

At the one-hour mark in our ski, we took a short break to eat our snacks. I should note that Virginia made her own bars: she broke pieces off of to share and they were a huge hit. She sent me the recipe which you can find here. (Virginia noted that she used peanut butter instead of almond butter, FYI)

My own snack was just a common Nature Valley bar, the crunchy kind that comes with 2 bars per package. Both bars total up to 180 calories.

At the end of the ski, I concluded the workout on my watch and got the following data:

 

Again, the accuracy of the calorie count is not medically reliable. However, I have to assume it’s within a reasonable ballpark. And it’s worth noting that 800 calories is roughly the equivalent of 4 Nature Valley Bars burned over the course of that ski! Although this screenshot doesn’t show it, my average heart rate for the ski was 122 bpm, which is solidly in the “easy distance pace” category. I didn’t burn those 800 calories by busting my butt up the steepest hills or grinding out a grueling sweat-fest, although it was pleasantly warm and sunny out.

Calories are just a piece of the puzzle…there is a lot to be said about how fats, sugars, carbs, etc play into this whole discussion. As US Ski Team coach Matt Whitcomb likes to say, diving really deep into nutrition can be a point for the coaches to “defer to the experts” and so I will link this helpful article featuring Dr. Stephanie Howe Violett rather than try to educate on all of the ins-and-outs.

Right now, this is about keeping it very simple. Many of us only see calories as a negative and something to be avoided. In reality, they are fuel that helps us do the things we love! Ava recently brought back a candy bar from Finland where the nutritional info has “energy” rather than “calories” written on the label and I really like that as a way to think of it! Nothing makes that more apparent than their actual definition, which you may remember from 9th grade science class…a calorie is

“…the amount of heat required at a pressure of one atmosphere to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree Celsius…”

Calories are literally energy for your body to use. Heat and energy that can raise the temperature of water! That’s some POWER that we can use for our skiing and daily life alike!

So, in addition to all the calories our bodies burn by just being living, breathing humans (literally…breathing requires calories, as does driving a car or even typing this blog post), my ski burned through an additional 800+ calories. By consuming about 200 calories mid-ski, I definitely helped to keep myself feeling good for longer into the workout. It also meant I was jump-starting the road to replenishing those 800+ calories at the end of the ski, when my body needed to get fuel back in order to recover and build back from that effort…after all, I have to ski again tomorrow. Nutrition labels often say they are “based on a 2,000 calorie diet” and yet skiers often need to be refueling with more than that given our activity levels.

Hopefully, this post and this simple experiment in data collection help share a simple and well-intentioned concept: skiing takes a lot of energy, so we need to always be fueled-up before/during/after to make sure we can get the most out of it.

I do NOT think we all need to be wearing monitors and tracking every last detail of every last workout, especially the calories.

What can we all do? Please don’t hesitate to follow the links or resources here to learn from/speak with some of the experts in the field. Read information that has been researched and reviewed, and keep a positive mindset on fueling! I’m not a sports nutritionist or a resource for dietary health in any way. For a great local resource, please don’t hesitate to contact awesome athlete/nutrition director/personal trainer/friend-of-the-Pugs Jamie Sheahan (jsheahan@edgevt.com).

 

Wax Tip: Hard’Ack Challenge

By on 27 February, 2021 in Junior Blog, Masters Blog

It looks like spring skiing weather in St. Albans this weekend! A week of freeze-thaws, a race-time temp in the mid-30s, and a natural snow base will mean softer and dirtier snow. Here is a simple wax recommendation that should help repel dirt as long as possible and keep skis moving through the wet snow.

  1. Use a glide wax cleaner (note: this is NOT the same as a kick wax remover!) to remove as much dirt as possible: put some of the cleaner on a rag, wipe it down your ski base, let it dry for 20 minutes, and brush thoroughly with a metal brush.
  2. If you don’t have a glide wax cleaner, do a “hot-scrape” of your skis. To do this, apply a mid-to-warm wax like CH8 or Toko Red. After ironing, wait only a couple seconds before scraping to brushing to try and pull dirt particles out of the base.
  3. Actual race prep begins with a neutral NF layer of a semi-hard wax like Toko Blue or Swix CH7. Scrape and brush.
  4. Race layer is a yellow warm glide wax like Toko Yellow or CH10. Scrape and brush well after letting cool fully

Bonus: Look for the MNC wax bench (possibly tent) on site, where we will have a bench set up with a structure tool and some Toko NF Yellow spray to add to your skis if you like.

NEDA (National Eating Disorders Awareness) Week

By on 22 February, 2021 in BKL Race Blog, Junior Blog, Masters Blog
A note from MNC alum and current Bowdoin skier Meredith Stetter.
In case you didn’t know, this week is National Eating Disorder Awareness Week (NEDA Week, for short). AKA, this is the perfect time to learn more about the mental illness that infiltrates our wonderful sport all too often. Whether you have struggled with a disorder yourself or know a friend/teammate that is struggling or in recovery, there is plenty to learn. With education comes understanding, and with understanding comes our ability to combat the darker components of our culture. In other words, this is a problem that should matter to everyone, not just to those who struggle.
 
I encourage each of you to reach out this week, leave your comfort zone behind, and learn as much as you can. I’ve attached some resources that can be a good place to start.

Bolton Grooming

By on 18 February, 2021 in Uncategorized

Good morning MNC members,

We realize that many of our members made big commitments to ski and train at Bolton this winter. We’re psyched to have helped put in lights and do some work to maintain the trails there…we’re frankly not sure what we would be doing without this resource and facility behind us!

That said, there have been reports of some MNC folk being less-than-friendly regarding the grooming and/or staff responsible for maintaining the trails.

Please know that as a ski coach who spends nearly every day outside on trails, I am keenly aware of conditions and grooming impacts. Have I been frustrated at times with how the grooming at Bolton has been handled this year? Yes. It has been a very snowy January and February, so I’ve had days of grumbling myself upon arriving to fluffy ungroomed powder, narrow trails that only received one pass with the machine, or snow that was tilled deep enough to bring up chunks of dirt when such deep work with the machine was not needed.

However, I’ve also been putting in some work grooming the trails too (particularly earlier in the season when the large machine could not be used due to low base) and nothing makes you appreciate and understand good grooming like trying to do it yourself.

Bolton is not Craftsbury right now, nor are they Sleepy Hollow. But prior to this year the trails at Bolton seemed to be groomed very little, if more than a handful of times in a season. What has happened this year is a massive step up, and it is just that: a step, with more steps to come.

In coaching athletes, I’ve come to learn that it’s usually not worth letting anger or judgement be directed at any single skier…often, I have learned too late that what was frustrating to me regarding an athlete(s) was often something completely unrelated to the skiing situation at hand. As some say, “everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” and so kindness often goes a lot further toward solving situations of anger, as opposed to aggression.

As a grooming example related to this, on two separate occasions this winter when I was angry about the grooming (or lack thereof) that I saw at Bolton, I went inside or emailed ready to pound on a table (metaphorically). I started out with a polite inquiry about grooming and in both cases learned that the machine had broken down. Thankfully, we were in a position to use our sled to help out and create some more skiable terrain. In another instance, I again went inside ready to have “guns blazing” only to find that it had been a new groomer’s first day running the big machine on their own. Because our biggest group skis on Tuesday and Thursday, it wasn’t such a dealbreaker after all that this Wednesday was the day that this staff member was practicing on the machine.

I have a lot of suggestions for Bolton regarding how the grooming can be improved, and I am looking forward to putting these suggestions and thoughts down more concretely and sharing them with the folks at the mountain. These suggestions also still involve MNC contributing to the improvements, as a club, because we appreciate this partnership and want to see it continue and grow. This year we can be thankful to be skiing at all and although pandemic stress may have us a little more quick on the trigger, we all need to respect the work everyone is doing to make the sport something we can enjoy.

-Adam

 

Fluoro Free Wax Update 2021

By on 16 February, 2021 in Uncategorized

It has been a busy year of testing and racing on fluoro-free products.

Many days are testing days…regular training session? Put two different waxes on and try them! Race day? At VT Cup #3 in Woodstock I went back through the notes to calculate that we tested a total of 36 different NF topcoats and combinations.

Ski waxing is a game of narrowing choices. Think about how many kickwaxes skiers often own: usually enough tins to fit into a small shopping bag, and that’s not even putting klister into the mix. Over plenty of time we’ve gotten pretty darn good at narrowing down our choices on a given day.

For training, we can toss on something of a good guess and have skis suitable for our workout. On race days in stable conditions, we can pick a good starting point of 4 options out of the unfathomable possibilities.

As we go forward into 2021 and beyond, glide waxing is becoming more similar to kick waxing in terms of being a multi-step, multi-layer, multi-method process. Before fluoros were out, we were on a very simple system of applying a neutral, hard and wide-ranging LF layer. This was followed-up with the liquid HF layer in a representative temp and snowtype. Finally, fluoro topcoats were tested.

Now, each respective layer has much more impact. Below is a diagram I created to represent what we’re going for. Both pyramids reach the same height, but the NF pyramid requires a broader base and more steps to get to the same level of performance. Note that this pyramid is ONLY taking into account wax, and not ski selection, base material, grinds, or hand structure.

So…which waxes fit into these categories? Right now, opening the MNC wax box is akin to dumping out the tacklebox of a lifelong fisherman (thought slightly more organized, for sure). For paraffins and underlayers, things look similar to what we’ve seen in the past, although these are only NF options. You may recognize some familiar companies, as well as some “underground” manufacturers. We’ve been testing them all!

 

Iron-on paraffins that we like and have seen success with: Rode line in all conditions, as well as the Star and Briko lines in warmer conditions. The SkiGo Green has been great in cold, and we saw great success with the Swix Pro Marathon Clean Snow…so much so that we are currently out of it and you’ll only notice the “Dirty Snow” variant here.

When we refer to graphite as an “underlayer” this means it’s the first thing applied to all skis. We test this by making two skis…one ski has graphite, scraped and brushed, followed by a paraffin like Toko Red, scraped and brushed. The second ski has the paraffin like Toko Red, scraped and brushed, followed by another layer of Toko Red, scraped and brushed. This lets you know if the graphite is having an effect on the paraffin that follows it. There is an excellent write-up of graphite ski waxes at this link.

Now on to the part more people are probably curious about, and the biggest “unknown” right now that every team, international teams included, are trying to learn about…fluoro free “topcoats”.

We define topcoats as a race-day application, usually applied within an hour to the start of the race. While we try to test paraffin and underlayers the day before a race (if conditions are looking similar on consecutive days) we will test NF topcoats as much and as late into the game as possible. While some of these products, like CH10X Spray or Rex G41, are technically just paraffins in liquid form, their quickness of application means we treat them as a viable final layer.

Liquid Topcoats

The big difference in liquids from various brands are the drying times. You want a liquid that dries FAST because a dry liquid means it has evaporated all of the solvent and reached maximum effectiveness.

The liquids that dry fast are: Rode, Vauhti, Star, Rex, and Start

The liquids that dry slowly are: Toko, Swix, Holmenkol

Some liquids are best when dried and polished with nylon. Some prefer to be brushed with metal. Others can really see a speed boost when they’re “fluffed” (as we say) with the wool roto-fluffer…more on that below.

Successful liquids we really like: All Rode liquids. Swix CH10X in slushy snow. Rex G41 in manmade snow at all temps. Start RG Graphite in new-falling snow. Start RG Violet in general mid-range temps. Toko BP Blue in colder natural snow. Vauhti LDR in certain transforming natural snow. 

Life-hack: store your liquids in a toolbox arranged UPRIGHT to avoid any leakage

Powder Topcoats

Powders aren’t the fastest to apply, but they generally cool down in less time than an ironed paraffin and they can be viable race-day solutions. They sort of walk the line between a paraffin layer and a topcoat layer.

Successful powders we really like: Star Med powder which runs in a wide range from the 20s to the mid-30s. Vauhti LDR powder in transformed natural snow. Solda S-20 in dry, grainy snow. 

Wool Topcoats

Definitely the most intriguing and unique option of the topcoats. Wool topcoats are applied in a unique fashion with a fancy-and-funny-looking lambswool roto device which we colloquially refer to as a “fluffer”.

Wool products go on fast, you can layer them easily (our standard procedure is to do 2 layers as one “app”) and they seem to last a loooong time. We aren’t going to run out of any of our wool products anytime soon and they are extremely cost-effective per use.

All you do is run an almost imperceptible-thin layer onto the ski, or right onto the wool fur, and then buff the ski. Next, hit with a horsehair brush one time before a second application and a second quick brush. Done! These waxes are prime for layering and mixing given the way they behave.

Wool products we really like: Ulla Black for transforming cold snow. Ulla Grey and YES Green for new cold snow. Star Med and Warm for general mid-range conditions, with Warm handling new-falling snow very well. The secret of Ulla Red/Black got out last year, as it’s the real weapon in manmade and dirty snow. 

Want to see a video from Zach Caldwell all about wool waxes? Look no further:

 

 

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