Skate Skiing anyone?

Yeah it is definitely nice that it's way less expensive than downhill. I have never been down hill skiing though.

As for the "easy" part - haha, not for me.  I took a set of 3 lessons and we learned 4-5 different styles of poling.  I found I could do the offset poling on the right quite well, but got totally messed up when trying some of the other styles.  I'm not the most coordinated person I guess.

Kelly - thanks for the blog comments.   We've only been skiing at Telemark in the west side so far but I want to try out Nordic at McCullough Lake as soon as the temperatures moderate a bit. (It was -25C up there yesterday!).  I know there's great skiing at Sovereign near Vernon.

Right now I'm trying to figure out how to fit skate skiing into my training once a week during the next few months.  It means dropping one other work out during the week - can't decide if I should cut out a bike or a run....

I doubled the amount of times I've been skate skiing over this past weekend. 2 or 3 years ago I went skate skiing at Cypress twice. I didn't take any lessons, but went with a couple of friends and didn't find it too difficult maybe because I'm an okay downhill skiier and I used to ice skate a lot. I remember it being a hard workout though.

Over this long weekend, we rented some skate skiis and went to Stake Lake in Kamloops on Saturday and Sunday. There were 7 of us in our group and 3 of us were instructors, and 1 other girl was intermediate skate skiier, so the other 3 of us got some good lessons. It seemed a lot easier this time, I guess because I got lessons. State Lake is a lot less hilly than Cypress too, or at least the trails we stuck to were. Cypress really only had one skate skiing trail and it's hilly.

That said, I probably won't go skate skiing too often. I didn't like it as much as cycling and since we can cycle in Vancouver pretty much year round, I don't need to ski and also it was just too much effort (get up the mountain, get dressed, get going) and too cold for an activity I didn't love.