Don't forget Nordic Ice Skating!

[JeffOYB]

It seems that every winter we get a 2 week meltdown. Ours is finally coming to an end. But the melt is usually followed the next stinking day by renewed freezing, but no snow for awhile. The upshot is that we have the wonderful situation of a couple weeks of great BLACK ICE many winters. How best to exploit this? Well, ice skating, that's for sure. Any skating is great, but I recently started doing Nordic Skating. I bought some $29 blades and slapped bindings on em and now my ski boots clip right in. No more freezing fingers out on the ice! These skates also have free heels. So I get the speed of my long speed skates but no more tripping. You need good heel-down technique to avoid tripping, I find, which I rarely have. It's also easier to use ski poles with these skates, again because there's no need to keep the heel down. I'm pleased as punch, in short.

...But yesterday when we went out my daughter and her friend needed THEIR skates laced up so my fingers STILL froze off! Oh well, ice is great! I still like a good session of hockey-type skating: curves and turns are great. But going FAR and FAST is also great.

Check out the blades at Ricardo Fultz's shop in Grayling or go to http://nordicskater.com and tell Jamie that I sent ya.

[c0nsumer]

Huh. That's pretty neat. I've wanted ice skates for a while, so now I'm tempted to give these a look.

[barrybs]

I just got some Nordic Skates this winter from nordicskater.com. My are made in Sweden.I didn't notice any at the Cross Country Ski shop when I stopped on the way up to iceman. Wish I had known.

I've been having a blast with them. The Ice was pretty rough before the thaw but is a lot smoother now, you can really go fast. I skated around Eagle Lake over at Fort Custer Saturday and even though there was almost 4" of powder it didn't slow you down all that much. I wear my wrist and knee guards from rollerblading because you tend to go flying if you hit something under the snow.

If anyone finds some really smooth ice post up. I've been on Eagle,Whitmore, Silver, Pickeral, and Crooked Lakes so far this winter.

Oh, I also bought the the icepick set-up that you wear around your neck. My buddy crashed into a water filled icebreak on Portage Lk. earlier this year while iceboating and the ice picks may very well have saved him.

Barry

[jajones]

One of my favorite "active outdoors" events that I had the privilege of seeing live the last time it was ran (1997)...

http://www.elfstedentocht.nl

There are some good YouTube videos of the event as well...

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_q ... +1997&aq=1