It sure is beautiful back East this time of year. I’m at “home” in VT after a couple of days in Lake Placid at the USST camp. I need to see to winterizing my house (anybody want to buy a really nice small place in Windham, VT?), and then I’m headed over to Manchester NH to pick skis at Fischer before flying out to Denver to meet with Nathan for a couple of days at BNS Global Headquarters.

Yesterday’s Whiteface rollerski race in Lake Placid presented me with an opportunity to address a couple of comments from my previous post regarding home-made rollerskis. Ollie asked why a rollerski made from an Atomic classic ski shaft might be more prone to failure than, say, a Marwe which he understood to be basically a Peltonen ski. Well, one athlete was stupid enough to show up at the rollerski race with his Marwe skate skis in a state of sufficiently abused distress so that they experience catastrophic failure prior to the start. I don’t want to mention any names, but his initials are S. Tarling. Whoops. I must have slipped on that second initial. Sorry Sam. You idiot. Anyway, this gave me an opportinity to illustrate two points: 1 - a Marwe shaft is not a peltonen ski. 2 - the shaft ends are reinforced in exactly the way that the Atomic ski shaft ends that we “built” are not reinforced. This reinforcement is necessary to support both the compressive and shear forces associated with the attachment of the fork to the shaft. I would be completely shocked if the Atomic shaft itself were to fail.

For the record, Sam found replacement skis and went on to finish impressively in 10th place. His replacement skis were also Marwes, putting him on the same “standard” skis that most of the top guys were using. His performance was both impressive and legitimate as a measurement of his fitness against the top guys in the country. He’s still an idiot for showing up with broken equipment.