Archive | Junior Blog

We have some early snow, which is awesome! But regardless when the snow hits, it’s always easy to fall one step behind on the little things that make it easier to get on snow…here’s a checklist to review, covering some common “situations” that we’d love to avoid:

Bindings on skis

Do all your skis that you plan to use have bindings? Or, if you use plate bindings and are swapping between pairs, are you comfortable doing so? There’s nothing worse than realizing 5 minutes before you head out the door that you can’t attach your boots to your skis.

Poles with snow tips

As the snow gets deeper, rollerski tips don’t work so well. Make sure that the poles that you’re skiing on have the right tips for the job! Yes, this can be a pain if you rollerski/snow ski on the same poles, but it is worth the extra 5-10 minutes of hassle up-front.

Waxed skis…yes, even rock skis!

Maybe even moreso rock skis. Early season skiing is often a battle against icing/clumping, because the ground underneath the snow is not fully frozen. This applies to skate skis, too! You won’t believe how much more of an impact waxed vs unwaxed skis can make in the early season…putting training wax on your rock skis this time of year equals a better increase in glide than putting race wax on your top skis in the mid-winter.

I highly recommend putting a true, ironed layer of glidewax into your skis every once in a while. This will do the best job at making spray waxes be more effective and last longer with each application.

The right clothes and layers (during)

On ski trails we often aren’t as concerned about hi-viz clothing. But our focus shifts to the right layers for warmth and performance. Wool is best, with a shell over top! Keep in mind it can be tricky when we are warming up, then shedding layers to go fast, then putting clothes back on when we’re done pushing hard.

This applies to gloves and hats as well. One good rule to live by is “no headbands under 20F”…time for hats at that point. With gloves and mittens it’s always better to be too warm than too cold.

The right clothes (after)

Do not, under any circumstances, underestimate the value of the “after-shirt” for training days. Even if it’s just the shirt you wore to school that day, taking off your wet/sweaty ski clothes and putting at least a dry shirt on can be CRITICAL to staying healthy, if not just outright comfortable.

Snacks, hydration, refueling

Mid-afternoon is a hard time for the body to train, being distant from lunch and distant until dinner. Please try to have a pre-training snack! After our workouts, having carbs and protein is equally important for recovery and health.

Hydration is also harder when skiing, because even though we work just as hard, you often are not hot and dripping with sweat like the other seasons…so hydration isn’t on the forefront. You’ve always gotta hydrate, though!

We were atop Mt Greylcok, the tallest peak in Massachusetts, the other weekend when we started receiving images and videos of folks back in Vermont skiing our tallest peak, Mt Mansfield.

The Toll Road which winds up Stowe at mellow grades is ideal for early season sliding, since it gets you to higher elevation but retains smooth terrain and switchbacks. It’s often the site of the first ski of the season if nature is kind enough to drop some snow before the ski areas can make the artificial stuff from guns and compressors.

While the weather brought some big fluctuations throughout the past week, there was still plenty of snow up high if you were willing to hike for it yesterday. As is customary, a dedicated handful of Juniors and I strapped skis to our packs and began the march up the Toll Road.

The snow on the roadside began to pile up, until the road itself was covered in white. A little higher still and we determined that the time had come to switch from shoes to skis. We strode our way on some old fishscales up to the top of the Toll Road, skied some laps around the flatter terrain there, and continued on to the Octagon area and the top of Nosedive.

Conditions were super variable: snow guns were spewing sticky wet snow, while dry powder sat atop icy crust in other spots. Cat tracks from machines and snowmobiles presented chunky surfaces with bumps and clumps.

In short, it was the perfect conditions for the first day on snow.

Skiing tricky stuff makes for more competent skiers! And if you can climb up a mountain and rip back down on the same pair of narrow skis with your Nordic boots and little else, you won’t be phased in the slightest by a fast downhill on a groomed racecourse.

When we paused to “look down” at the snowless green Stowe golf course and villas far below, it provided some good perspective on what we’d accomplished. It also made me think back to classic old ski films where racers and explorers were conquering the bigggest of mountains on the simplest pieces of gear:

Some of my favorite quotes come from old ski literature like Luke Bodensteiner’s Endless Winter (ok, 1994 is not that old) where he remarks that “nobody can call themselves a skier until they can ski it all.” Or an old quote from some book or movie of years past, with the stipulation that “back in the day, there was no downhill skiing or cross country skiing…there was just skiing.”

So, here is a look at just skiing on Stowe yesterday!