A road warrior.
I began Nordic Cross Skating 13 years ago at age 60. I skate about 1300 KMs per year between April 1 and December 1 mostly on back country roads nearby. A great time for podcast listening!
A photo from November 18, 2024.
My Nordic Cross Skating season for 2024 is coming to an end, sadly.
Winter cross country skiing and Nordic Walking will replace it but not with the 3x per week frequency as Nordic Cross Skating which is the most convenient and accessible form of outdoor ‘level 2’ aerobic exercise that I have done since my marathon running days in the late 1970s.
For a senior citizen, Nordic Cross Skating is easy on my aging joints, particularly knees and hips.
As an aerobic activity, it engages 90% of all muscle groups to provide overall body conditioning as well as superior cardio-respiratory fitness.
My wife rides her bike to keep me company which is a wonderful activity to share between us. We are well known in our area as regular fixtures travelling at 15 kpm along blissful country roads.
Skate & learn
1300 km per year at an average 15 kph pace yields about 90 hours per year on my Nordic Cross Skates and simultaneously 90 hours of podcast listening. The combo is perfect. Many of the ideas I write about in MY LIFE LENS originate from a skate and podcast. I can’t think of a more enjoyable way to stay fit and to continue learning.
A solo endeavour
Over the years, many people have asked me about Nordic Cross Skating showing possible interest in taking it up. Fewer than five have done so and nobody within my local community.
It would have been nice to have a small group of local enthusiasts to join me on skates as I did as an endurance runner between 1974 and 1980. I no longer have any hopes of this happening.
I have covered over 20,000 KMs as a Nordic Cross Skater since 2011, including one full 42 km Marathon in Duluth Minnesota in 2016. If I haven’t attracted even one other skater over those years, it unlikely that anyone will appear.
Nordic skiing is truly one of the healthiest, most enjoyable pastimes to engage in as well as the most demanding of sports to pursue if you so desire. I was not blessed with any particularly special physical attribute but I love a good challenge and I knew how to train. I did several sports including bicycle racing. I was introduced to XC skiing in my early 20s by a wonderful friend who was Ontario time trial cycling champion at the time. Nordic Ski racing was a great way to do winter training for cycling so I joined the university ski team. I made special friends in the team and we did well. We skied what’s now called Classic Style and only started skating in my final year of competition. Classic style is more interesting in some ways as I feel classic technique is slightly more nuanced than skating and we also had to really understand waxes and snow, as well as ski design in order to perform because classic skis are much less forgiving than skating skis if incorrectly matched to difficult conditions. As for off-snow training, my Jofa roller skis mimicked classic skis and were not really designed to accommodate skating. They also didn’t have brakes so I had to do semi-snow plows to stop. Working in big cities was not conducive to skiing so I switched to other physical exercise once I left school and then I had to care for several aging family members as well as my parents so competitive sports weren’t possible. However I did other things to challenge myself. I even once thought about trying biathlon as I had also shot 3 position rifle in high school but it was a real struggle to train for such a complex and unsupported sport in a big Canadian city and then a spinal injury worsened so that was that. Nowadays I spend many hours each week working to save Canada from our criminal WEF globalist government so it’s all I can do to just stay physically fit to keep that going, at least until we “make Canada great again”.