The transition from Winter to Spring appears to take as long as you want it to around here. I’ve been on a few great mountain bike rides already this Spring -the trails in Squamish are dry and in great shape, and the temps have been comfortable. But there is plenty of skiing still to be had as well. The Callaghan Valley still has 154cm of snow on the ground and the crew up there is keeping things in great shape. This week the US Biathlon Team and the Norwegian XC Team are in town skiing at the venue. Coming up we’ve got USST and Canadian XC teams. The report is that they’ll continue to groom through May 25th.

The photo here is from yesterday, April 23rd, testing skis with Vesa Suomalainen. In this case we’re trying to identify the best skis for the conditions, keeping grind and wax preparation as controlled variables. We started skiing at about 1PM in order to get into some soft conditions, and Vesa picked out a 1.3K loop to ski at controlled output. We ski the loop on each pair of skis, taking time and heart rate data, along with some intermediate splits, and whatever else my Garmin 305 will spit out (like peak velocity, etc). This is hardly a perfect test - anytime you’re trying to hold physical effort constant over time you’ve got a very hard-to-control variable. However, it’s a valuable test because unlike a speed trap, glide-out, or even feel-test, this is measuring the speed of the skis around a course. That’s where it counts!

With two test pilots gathering information you start to get an interesting indication of what level of information can be gathered. Both Vesa and I easily identified the best skis by feel - in other words, the skis that feel fast have the best times around the course. And we’re identifying the same skis, for sure. However, at a more subtle level, individual preferences emerge. In two testing sessions I have identified the same pair of skis as being really fast under foot, but questionable climbing, while Vesa has found it good all-around. On the course our times and efforts bear-out our subjective assessment of the skis. On a climb lasting a little over a minute, that pair gave away 10 seconds to the best pair on my feet (a big surprise that the number was so large) while it was equal with the best for Vesa.

The biggest surprise from this type of testing, over the course of the season, has been the size of the margins. Anybody who is testing skate skis seriously understands that half-weight glide characteristics (what gets measured in a glide-out or speed trap) are not as important as the skiing speed of the skis. People describe this in different ways, but the bottom line is universal acceptance that you’ve got to ski the skis for feel. What is surprising is how large a difference we might be feeling in climbing speed. Left to my own devices I might pick that pair that feels really free under foot, figuring that climbing depends more on effort than skis. Every test I’ve run suggests that such an approach is a bad idea.

So, what good is a speed trap? Well, when you’re isolating other variables - like wax or grinds - on a well matched test fleet, then the speed trap can tell you a great deal. However, there remains the concern of testing climbing performance in addition to half-weight speed. It’s just that, in the case of base treatments as opposed to ski construction, there is tighter correlation between downhill performance and uphill performance. Also, the speed trap is a great tool for initial evaluations of a lot of skis. The best pair I’ve got in soft wet conditions is one that “flunked out” of my test fleet by consistently testing faster than the rest of the fleet by a significant margin. That alone wasn’t enough to make it a race ski rather than a test ski, but it subsequently tested well in certain conditions (softer snow and higher moisture) against proven race skis in climbing and skiing tests.

All of this has clear implications regarding ski testing and selection. It would be nice to believe that it’s possible to unerringly select great skis using a flex testing procedure, or even your hands. I’ve seen plenty of athletes with a lot of faith in their skis simply because some great ski service guy has had their hands on them. I hope that the selection process I’ve used has given customers confidence in the skis I’ve picked as well. Certainly, I’ll stand behind the process I use, and I know that it identifies a broad range of “good” skis and generally rules out “bad” skis. But it’s important for everybody to realize that nobody can unerringly pick great skis. Sometimes you get lucky, but at the highest levels it’s mostly a question of doing the work and putting skis on snow.

“Fleet evaluation” is one service that I’ve offered for quite a long time. This can mean different things for different people. Often it’s simply a question of doing flex evaluations on skis and confirming that some of them are just plain wrong or bad. The most powerful version of fleet evaluation is when you run flex evaluations on all the skis, and then zero-grind them - put the same structure on all the pairs and start skiing them on the snow. I’ve done this with a number of athletes in the past couple of years, and it’s always been very fruitful. This year’s most notable success came with Graham Nishikawa’s fleet. He came to town about a week prior to Canadian Nationals, and we went through the whole process with both skate and classic skis. Graham had been frustrated for much of the season - his standby skis weren’t getting the job done the way they used to, and he didn’t have enough of a handle on his newer stuff to have confidence. The big surprise came from his skate fleet, as his newest pair of skis won testing over several successive days, against all expectation. He used that pair (reground for the conditions) in the 15K skate where good skis contributed to a really strong second place finish behind Ivan Babikov. Without going through the fleet testing process it’s likely that those skis would have stayed in the bag for the whole week.