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NORDIC TECH PAGE by Patrick Moore

Fast Trax Pro Team - World Cup Update - Days 3 & 4:

Yesterday was our first race day here at the world cup. In a lot of ways, the process and experience was very similar to that of a "normal" race. The biggest difference was we tested both grip and glide right up to the last possible second before race time. Yesterday was very stressful but not too difficult. The conditions stayed consistent with relatively few surprises. We settled on a good setup for both grip and glide early in the process and made minor adjustments throughout the morning. I should point out that Team Fast Trax owes a special thanks to Mike Mappin and Solda for all the help and information he has provided!

In terms of Madeleine's race results, the 15km pursuit was good, but not fantastic. Madeleine finished in 37th position, which was good for 180 FIS points. Based on her prior results from this season, we know that she is capable of producing results that would have easily been good enough for a top 25 in the pursuit. Although she didn't feel great, the pursuit race provided a lot of positive indications for Madeleine's level of fitness and her readiness to race at the world cup level. We're looking forward to Friday's 10km skate race with great anticipation.

I was recruited by the national team to help with feeds during the men's pursuit. This was a really cool experience, especially during the skate portion of the race. As part of the new FIS rules, coaches are allowed to provide feeds only within a certain zone and are not allowed to run with the athletes. Hilariously, the skate feed zone was WAY too small which resulted in a lot of pushing and shoving to get to the athletes. You really had to be aggressive in order to make sure your person got their feed!

Today Lorris and I helped Solda test grip solutions for the classic sprint. Again, conditions were not changing and were similar to the day before. It was really different to be testing wax with no idea what was on the skis! I also got recuited by CNEPH to help test glide and then wax Graham Nishikawa's and Brent McMurtry's skis. Apparently the word is getting around about the skis produced by Team Fast Trax = our services are in demand by other teams :)

The rest of today was spent watching the classic sprint. Most of the men ran on skate skis and double polled the whole course. The Norwegians qualified eight people through to the heats and had five (out of six) of the men's sprint final. Apparently they are doing something right!

Tomorrow will consist of testing Madeleine's and Emily Nishikawa's skis to select the race pairs for Friday.
Fast Trax Pro Team - World Cup Update - Day 2:

Today was the last day before the first race and a busy day for the service staff from all the countries. We arrived at the race site at around 9:30 and began our day by sorting out coaching bibs and accreditation. The world cup is a seriously high-security affair and you can't really get anywhere without the proper security pass. Thankfully, this was a relatively painless exercise and we were able to get down to work.

Our day started by zeroing Madeleine's classic skis and applying some grip wax so she could do her testing. Within an hour Madeleine had selected her two best pairs of skate and classic (the ones I predicted were in the number 1 pair!) and we sent her home.

The temperature in Canmore has been quite interesting over the past few days and has been making for unusual testing conditions. Normally, we would do all of the testing right around race time, however given the frigid temperatures this morning we waited until much later in the afternoon. Today, Lorris focused on grip and I focused on glide. We waxed two pairs of my test skis with four different options, of which I selected the best two. From there we tried various additives and covers, carefully noting whether the change improved or worsened the speed. This process was very similar for the grip wax. We had a two base waxes that we liked for grip and then tried a variety of toes and covers. By the end of the day we had settled on both a grip and glide scenario that I am very happy with. Given the unstable weather predicted overnight, we will have a lot of flexibility to make changes as required. It should be awesome.

The entourage that comes with a world cup is enormous... I mean, really huge! For those of you who have been in Canmore, the entire bottom floor of the new biathlon wax room building is occupied by professional staff from companies like Fischer, Swix, etc. This afternoon there were literally hundreds of service staff out testing, easily identifiable by their purple "Team Service" bibs. Included in this was a huge contingent from the retail companies. Toward the end of today, representatives from the companies came around with a print out that detailed the various waxes they tested, the results, and their final recommendations. Very cool to compare to our findings.

Tomorrow will be an early morning as we'll get to the race site several hours before the start. All signs point to an awesome day!!!
Fast Trax Pro Team - World Cup Update - Day 1:

After a 5:30am departure from Edmonton, Lorris and I arrived in Canmore to begin an intense week of world cup racing with Madeleine. Today consisted mainly of administrative tasks; figuring out which wax room we are operating out of, obtaining team parking passes, and just getting a general understanding of operating at a world cup. Madeleine tested five pairs of skate skis today and narrowed the selection down to three pairs. Tomorrow we'll be at the race site early to work them up with an approximation of our race wax to do the final testing. Madeleine will also test classic skis tomorrow, focusing on which pairs provide the most secure grip while maintaining glide. As Lorris discussed in his post from this week, we have a pretty good understanding of Madeleine's skis and I would be willing to place a significant bet on which pair she'll choose :) By the end of tomorrow we'll have selected two pairs of classic skis and two pairs of skate skis that we'll work up for the pursuit race on Tuesday.

The weather for the week is looking like overnight lows of -20 and highs upwards of -8 or -9. With such a big swing it's going to make testing around race time super important!

Last week I commented to Lorris on how crazy it was that we were travelling to the world cup. We decided that although it seemed crazy last week, it was probably going to seem more crazy once we arrived. Lorris and I skied for only 30 minutes today, but during that time we saw athletes, coaches, and service staff from Sweden, Finland, Germany, Norway, and France. In short, we were right; it's already crazy this week. The atmosphere in Canmore is fantastic and working side by side and racing against the best teams in the world is surreal.

That's it for now. Hope your final week of preparation before the Vermilion loppet goes well!!  I'll keep you posted!

Canmore World Cups

While Patrick is in Canmore with Lorris helping Madeleine with her fleet of skis he will be posting daily updates on the goings on of life on the World Cup or at least one very small portion of life on the world cup when it is a four hour drive from your "real job" as Patrick likes to say. Stay tuned, I for one am looking forward to Patricks updates.

Plus skis au maximum:

Every year 1,000 of the world’s best cross country masters skiers descend upon a specially selected ski community to vie against each other for age-group world championship titles. The host site for 2008 is McCall, Idaho.

The 2008 Masters World Cup Championships races take place in early March at the Ponderosa State Park cross country ski trails. These trails are at a high elevation (1,528m vs. 1,350 at Canmore!) and run the length of the 1,000 acre peninsula that splits Payette Lake. Being so close to the water you can expect the humidity to be high and HF wax to be in the mix!

More important than wax, however, will be your ski selection for the race. The normal temperatures for McCall in March range from an average high of +6 degrees Celsius to an average low of -6 degrees Celsius. These temperatures, combined with the high humidity, will likely result in some hard, wet snow; the perfect conditions for “plus” skis!

As discussed in a prior post, plus skis (both skate and classic) tend to have a shorter, hotter pressure distribution that reduces suction and allows them run significantly faster in wet conditions. Additionally, the bases have a lower graphite content making them softer and especially fast in wet, humid conditions above -5 degrees Celsius. Finally, the plus classic skis have a specially tuned pocket for use with warm hardwax and klister. This pocket tends to be taller and positioned further under the foot than that of a traditional cold ski.

The best servicemen in the world know that the majority of a ski’s speed comes from proper ski selection and not the wax. A great pair of plus skis will certainly help in your quest for Canadian medals at the 2008 Masters World Cup Championships. Fast Trax has an awesome selection of plus skis from Trab, Salomon, and Atomic. Fast Trax also has an awesome selection of the most coveted plus ski of all, the Fisher Carbonlite (see additional discussion on the Carbonlite below)! Stop by the shop and ask the team about plus skis!

Good luck in March – show the world what Canadians are made of!!!

Salomon skis…

So far so good in terms of performance. It seems like most of the crew are about 50/50 as far as using their new boards.  Most of the crew had great white skis so it’s taking a bit of time to get the new ones to the same level.  Chris Jeffries has been the one that is full on the new boards as he didn’t have much of a choice – but does not appear to have affected his performance!  He actually had better boards than Ivan on a few cases.

In terms of comparing the old VS new – the bases are the same (Zeolite) and exclusive to Salomon still.  The new skis feel much more lively than the white skis.  If you swap back and forth, you’ll definitely notice that the old skis have a ‘clunky’ feel  to them – but the control is still in a class of its own!  The only link between Atomic and Salomon are the core (Nomex) and the cap construction.  However, the cap is slightly thinner on the Salomon, hence the lightness of the ski.  Otherwise, both ski very differently – if you get a chance to compare, you can easily tell the difference, especially in the tip swing weight.

In terms of feel on the new skis, most love the feeling of the new skis on the climbs.  The ski offers good control on the flats, descents, but you have to make sure that the ski is definitely stiff enough.  For example, if you ski in Canmore (man-made hard track), a ski that is too soft will tend to feel a bit more lively than the old white ski.  Chris had much difficulty with this until I put him on a 3.0+ MH value skis (in mm).  Once he had a ski that was stiff enough, he was good to go.  So in essence, I’m saying that if you are sizing a skier for hard track, go a little bit stiffer than you normally would – this will help with control.  That said, I ski on medium flex skis all the time in Canmore and love the feeling…so again, it’s based on preference.

The new flex/camber on the classic skis is great!  I can ski on a much higher MH than before b/c of the new ‘heel-toe’ camber.  In other words, despite the higher values on the ski tag, the ski’s easy flexing camber allows much more forgiveness in the ability to flatten the ski.  The lightness of the ski is really felt when you drive the ski forward down the track – a huge, huge difference over last year’s ski. 

Let me know if you have anything more specific you wanted to know…

Happy Holidays!

Phil V. Team XC.com

The Hotbox

So, you just bought some new skis... congratulations. Like most people you are probably expecting them to be scary fast from the moment you take them home. Hold on there, Sport! if you want to have the fastest skis when you roll up to the start line of the big race there are a few steps you need to take before putting your new gear on the snow!

The more wax you can get into the bases of your skis, the faster they will get. Period. Solda recommends a minimum of ten layers of an extremely soft wax as a starting point. In speaking with the Norwegian national team coach at the 2005 World Cups in Canmore, Fast Trax learned that skis do not enter a Norwegian athlete's race fleet until those skis have been waxed and scapred at least 30 times. While this process undoubtedly results in ridiculously fast skis, it's also completely impractical for most normal people due to the sheer amount of time required.

This is where Fast Trax comes in! Early in the fall Fast Trax received a SWIX Hot Box... the secret weapon of the most successful national teams. Consider this: most World Cup athletes have a race fleet of between 15-30 pairs of skis. Assuming that a layer of wax takes 15 minutes to apply and scrape (if you're fast!), that's a minimum of 2.5 hours per pair, or nearly 40 hours per athlete for a 15 pair fleet! As a wax tech for the Fast Trax Pro Team, I can assure you that not even the national team wax crews have that kind of time.

Instead, the initial saturation of the skis is completed using a hotbox. A very soft, specially designed saturation wax is ironed into the skis, which are then placed in a controlled environment for 2 – 6 hours. During this time the hot box is maintained at 52 degrees C, allowing the wax to penetrate deep into the base of the skis and creating the effect of up to 30 layers of wax. This accomplishes the extremely important initial base saturation with none of the effort of applying and scraping 30 layers Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? This initial saturation is followed by a conditioning treatment with a much harder wax to ready the bases for the appropriate Western Canadian conditions. As a result, when you take your new skis home from our shop they are already super fast.

In Alberta, the hotbox is a service unique to Fast Trax... this is good news if you live in Edmonton (if you're not from Edmonton and are interested in the hotbox, give us a call)! Even better news is that the hotbox service is included with the purchase of new skis at our shop. This service is also available for your current skis and with daily hotbox batches we'll have your skis back to you and out on the snow in no time!
Atomic Ski Outline

Atomic skis are new to Fast Trax for the 07/08 season. This year’s offering represents the culmination of a three year design process that resulted in some significant changes to the skis. We haven’t had the Atomic skis on the snow yet but have some valuable information to pass along based on our in-store testing.

Classic:

Familiar to those who have skied on Atomic in the past, the classic skis come in both K (cold) and W (warm) models. The K model has a lower camber and longer pressure distribution, making it appropriate for hardwax in colder snow, and will likely be the preferred model for most Fast Trax customers.

The most interesting characteristic of the Atomic classic skis is the action of the wax pocket. By applying different loads to a specific ski, representing different skier weights, we’ve noticed that the front end of the pocket is virtually constant. In other words, adjusting the weight appears to have no impact on the front of the pocket and simply opens/closes the back of the pocket. This is very different than a Fischer ski which would normally change uniformly.

Finally, these skis are light… really light! In fact, the Atomics are the lightest classic skis on the market for 07/08. Can’t argue with that!

Given a fixed pocket length the skier will be able to adjust layering and thickness of wax to change the characteristics of the ski. We think this will be a great ski that will be useful in a wide variety of conditions.


Skate:

As with the classic skis, Atomic’s skate offering is crazy light… only ten grams more than Fischer Carbonlites at the equivalent length. The warm skis have a much higher and more active camber relative to the cold skis and are great for bigger/more aggressive racers on hard snow. The cold skis should be fantastic in cold, soft snow.

It should be noted that the Atomic Worldcup skate is a stiff ski and you will likely be on skis shorter than you are accustomed to. However, unlike a Fischer RCS, which is soft at the top of the flex and finishes feeling very stiff, the Atomics start stiff and finish soft. Expect them to feel lively on the snow!


It is interesting to note that Salomon is now being manufactured in the Atomic factory in Austria. As a result, we expect that they will feel and behave very similarly to the Atomics. The Salomon skate skis have an additional carbon fibre layer on the top-sheet in order to harden the finish of the ski. This results in a stiff, low camber.

CLASSIC SKI SELECTION

At Fast Trax, we custom test every single pair of skis that we sell. For most uses, our standard flex evaluation is sufficient.  The wax pocket is fully analyzed and marked for both hardwax and klister applications. However, if you're in the hunt for gold on the race circuit, or simply want to maximize performance there are specific characteristics we can look for when selecting your new skis:

Cold hardwax: Long, extremely low pocket (0.25 – 0.3mm), with a flat closing profile. The reason for the extremely low pocket is that all skis act a little stiffer in very cold temperatures. Long pressure distribution will ensure maximum glide over cold, dry snow.

Universal/warm hardwax: Long, medium height pocket (0.4 – 0.6mm, some residual camber at full weight is acceptable (especially if the skis are to be used in softer snow conditions). Additional tip pressure and shorter pressure distribution than dedicated cold ski.

Klister: For hard tracks short and very high pocket (1mm +), with the pocket positioned further under the foot than that of the hardwax skis described above. Short pressure distribution will reduce suction in wet snow and maximize speed. These characteristics are most commonly found in dedicated "plus" skis and especially the Fisher 902 (wet construction), Salomon Plus, and most Rossignol models. For soft tracks long, medium height pocket (~0.6mm) with significant residual camber at full weight.

The most important thing is that if you have a specific use in mind for your new skis, let us know. Your input will help us custom pick a winning pair!

 

FISCHER CARBONLITES

Fischer introduced the Carbonlite for the 2006/2007 season amidst much fanfare and debate in the cross country skiing community. Fast Trax is proud to announce that the shop will be carrying the Fischer Carbonlite for the 2007/2008 season and has an excellent selection in stock!

 “Carbonlite” is really a misnomer for Fischer’s newest model. The skis are light... but not that light. The skis have some carbon in them; but not that much carbon. They also retail for ~$100 more than other high-end racing skis. It is my goal to provide some insight into this enigmatic model.

When people ask us about the Carbonlites, the question that most often comes up is the weight. In absolute terms, the Carbonlites are about 9% lighter than the RCS. While this may not sound like a significant amount, as with poles, it is important to remember that it is really the swing weight that counts.  Fischer has removed the weight in places that matter – substantially at the tips and tails. The result is that these skis feel significantly lighter when you are out on the trails.

It is also important to note that while Fischer was a leader in the superlight category for the 2006/2007 season, the other manufacturers noticed and have definitely caught up for 2007/2008. In general terms, skis are lighter than ever before and there are several models on the market (and available at Fast Trax) that rival, or even beat, the Carbonlite in terms of weight. I’ve provided a comparison below:

Classic Skis

  • Atomic: Worldcup Classic (196cm) – 980g
  • Fischer: RCS Carbonlite Classic (197cm) – 990g
  • Rossignol: X-IUM Classic (198cm) – 1,000g
  • Salomon: Equipe 10 Classic (196cm) – 1,040g
  • Trab: Race Aero Classic (205cm) – 1,040g
  • Fischer: RCS Classic (197cm) – 1,090g

Skate Skis

  • Fischer: RCS Carbonlite Skate (187cm) – 990g
  • Salomon: Equipe 10 Skate (186cm) – 1,000g
  • Atomic: Worldcup Skate (186cm) – 1,000g
  • Trab: Race Aero Skate (186cm) – 1,010g
  • Rossignol: X-IUM Skate (187cm) – 1,060g
  • Fischer: RCS Skate (187cm) – 1,090g

The most interesting feature of the Carbonlite is with respect to the methods employed by Fischer to reduce the weight of this model. In simple terms Fischer modified the venerable Air Core to allow it to handle most of the flex of the ski. (As a side note, while other manufactures have matched or beat the Carbonlite in terms of weight, I don’t think anyone else is using this construction method). The result is a much stronger core and a more torsionally rigid ski. This translates into improved stability and great edging, even compared to the RCS.
So what does all of this mean to you? The best insight that I can provide is a cycling analogy. While there may be relatively little weight difference between the $10,000 custom built dream bike and the $3,000 production line Trek, the true difference lies in the feel of the bikes. This comparison is also applicable to the Carbonlite. While the weight savings are terrific these skis feel really great.
Still confused? Stop by the shop and we’ll be more than happy to help you pick out the perfect pair of skis J Stay tuned for detailed descriptions of more of the race skis available at Fast Trax!

 

 

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