Red Yeti's Blog

Back to an outdoor related topic. But this one might be new to most people reading…

We had a shorter than planned stay in Sweden over the Xmas holiday but whilst we were there I had my second try at Tour Skating (Långfärdsskridskoåkning).

It’s ice skating using big skates on natural lakes and covering quite long distances. If you can skate even reasonably well then 30 or 40 kilometre trips are easily doable, but double or even treble that distance is mentioned. Unfortunately I can’t skate very well at all and the ice thickness was marginal so we stuck very close to the Sommarstuga (Summer Cottage).

What made me think it was particularly worth a mention was that, rather like winter mountaineering and walking, there are changes afoot in the gear.

Up until recently you’ve needed a pair of specialist boots that clip or slot in to the bindings on a pair of touring skates. But now with a simple addition to the front binding along with a back binding just like that on a snowboard, they can be fitted to standard walking boot. You can see the additional part in the picture. It is the top section with the grey EVA padding to hold the toe in place. Standard skate boots clip under the two black prongs that you see low down against the toe, stopping side to side movement.

I used them with just a pair of Montrail Stratos XCR (pictured). Although as a novice I could probably have benefited from stiffer boots I could still get about on them and they had no problem staying in place in the skates. Even when I fell over and put a dustbin-lid sized set of cracks in the ice with one elbow.Which certainly added some extra excitement to the day. Might have to get some elbow pads for next year.

It’s tempted me into buying a pair since it made more sense than buying specialist boots and borrowing a spare set of skates (borrowing footwear is tricky with my size eleven and a half feet). The simplicity of them appealed very much.

The other essentials are things called Isdubbar (which I notice the Wikipedia article has as “Ice Claws”) and throw line.

These are for emergency use, should you manage to elbow your way right through the ice.

Imagine floating in a hole in the ice, and trying to claw your way out back on to it. Pretty tricky eh? But using the Isdubbar that you cunningly hung around your neck, you take one in each hand and jam one spike into the ice and pull yourself up a bit. Stick the next one in a little higher and slowly hand-over-hand your way to safety. The throw line is a little more self explanatory and is simply thrown to you by a friend who pulls on the other end – just the same as in kayaking.

Things much like ski or walking poles are usually taken but these are more like James Bond’s ski poles. Instead of a hard, blunt tip these things have a shiny metal spear that’s enough to despatch any henchman with ease. They’re used partly for balance and propulsion and partly to check the quality and thickness of the ice ahead of you.

Finally you make sure you have a change of warm dry clothing in a properly waterproof bag inside a rucksack. This is partly to act as a float if you fall through (hopefully a rare event). So the specialist skating sacks have groin straps to prevent them floating up from your back. And partly it’s to give you something warm to change into pretty sharpish!

We’ve spent Xmas and New Year with LB’s folks in Sweden and have been very lucky with the weather. It hasn’t quite managed to get above freezing for the whole two weeks. It’s generally not been above -3 or -4 C and even touched -13 C overnight (and looks set to beat that tonight in fact!). And with little snow, we’ve therefore had some excellent tour skating conditions. So we’ve picked up from where we left off last year.

Ice is not always skatable apparently. If there’s a layer of snow or if the ice was roughened by being formed during heavy snow fall you can hardly move. Gliding strides simply grind to a halt.

But for us the ice was nearly perfect. With occasional sections of glass-like smoothness allowing us to glide and glide.

I’ve even managed to go out four times and only fall over once and that was only a sort of sliding, resigned laying down.

And I’ve now bought my very own tour skates. Unlike the ones I used last year, these have only got snow-board style bindings at the toes meaning that they fitted my Montrail Cirrus GTX even more easily (I miss my inov8 terrocs very much already this winter but they’d be little use for this).

The huge advantage with having my own skates is that I can set them up so that they are balanced specifically for me. The skate must be right in the centre of the heel and right in between the first and second toes.

Each day I’ve come back and spent some time in the garage tweaking the adjustment and it’s helped massively. I imagine that for a better skater it would be less critical but for me it’s made all the difference.

Until today when I spent twenty minutes wondering what I could have adjusted so badly… at which point I noticed I’d put them on the wrong feet! Well it is New Year’s Day. I’ve had a late night.

The other thing that has made a huge difference is wearing protective pads on knees and elbows along with wrist-protectors. Add in an old riding helmet (a childhood skating rink accident when I landed on my head still haunts me!) and my confidence, and therefore posture, improved enormously. Though I’m not sure it would have avoided over-stretching my shoulder somewhat last year when I tried to punch a hole in the ice with one elbow!

I also learnt a few more tidbits of tour skating lore. Like it’s best for the skate to be adjusted to protrude behind your heel for half an inch (1.5cm) or so, or else the skates want to shoot out forwards if you lean too far backwards. And that the skate blade itself is not straight but is in fact a section from a notional circle of around forty metres in diameter.

A smaller diameter circle obviously gives a more pronounced curve (if you can call it pronounced when you need a steel-rule before you can see it’s not straight). A more pronounced curve is apparently better for turning quickly whereas a straighter edge is more stable in a straight line.

A tiny extra bit of kit is the clips that can be used to hold the skates together to make them easier to carry and prevent the blades being blunted accidentally (my simple blue ones are visible in the picture along with the more elaborate red ones with velcro straps to ensure the skates stay together).

Skating clubs (who may do several tens of kilometres in a day) will have a leader who typically skates twenty metres ahead of a second leader with the rest of the group another twenty meters behind them. So if the leader misjudges the ice and “plurrar” (“takes a bath”) then the group has plenty of time to stop.

The specialist rucksacks that tour skaters use have a crotch strap so that the bag doesn’t rise up if you have a bath and thereby acts as a float with all your spare clothes in a waterproof bag. They also have a throw-line to be thrown to the swimmer (rather like in kayaking).

As you skate, you must be wary of weaker patches seen as odd patterns. They become safer as the ice thickens. But at the marginal end, when the ice is only just skatable at around six centimeters, then they must be avoided.

Finally, once off the ice, a nip of something very alcoholic from a hip flask that’s been chilling in the day-pack along with some Prinskorv heated over a fire is hard to beat.

Though some mince pies warmed over the embers made a thoroughly British addition to a very non-British pastime.