BASIC SKI COURSE
| Syrtveit, Evje |
08.02.21 – 12.02.21
Mainly, as the name of this 5-days-course says, we have been spending a total of five days learning cross-country ski in Syrtveit. Since I have never skied before, I came to the trip with 0 knowledge about it but with high expectations since skiing for 5 days and 5 hours a day is a great opportunity to learn and practice. Right now I could identify part of my progression; if I compare myself from Monday to Friday I can observe a huge improvement in terms of self-confidence, ski technique, skills and balance. The fact that we started working on technique helped me to gain confidence and to test myself, for instance small downhill or uphill using different ways of going through them. Then, we started combining technique with short trips around the area of Høgås, with or without our rucksack, depending on the length and the aim of the activity.
The few lectures we had were also very productive since they talked about things related to the whole week: the appropriate packaging of the daily rucksack, maps and orientation skills, useful advices about the wax of the ski, first-aid stuff and avalanche rescue. I am practically new in this field so everything was a big learning. The length of the lectures was the time needed for acquiring the specific contents of that day, they could vary from 30 minutes to one hour.
The fact of learning how to ski in the wilderness has a lot of benefits, not only to learn skiing itself. The natural environment that surrounds us while skiing, the vegetation or the animals living in this place are other things you can learn while skiing in the wilderness. For instance, in the case of our group, whenever we were able to see some footprint we stopped and talked about it, made some hypothesis and guess which animal was. Regarding the relief and vegetation, the trees and hills were a good clue to orientate ourselves and to find the good path; it didn’t consist in skiing for skiing, we were learning how to locate ourselves, how to find the north, how to find the right direction. Thus the environment was even more important to achieve all that stuff.
It has been proved that the smaller the group, the bigger the achievements. That is one of the reasons why the whole group (24 people) was divided into 2 sub-groups, also because there were two guides. Probably if there would have been three or four guides, it would have been even better. Almost all of the people in our group (not me) had done some type of ski before, but few of us knew cross-country ski. So the level was quite balanced since this type of ski was quite different from downhill ski or alpine ski. Luckily, I could say that I’m good at sports in general so it wasn’t that hard for me to “catch” the technique itself, as it could be seen at the end of the week. The relation among the group members was good, everybody was aware of everybody. For instance; if someone had some problems and was one of the last ones of the group, the other two or three in the back waited for him/her and therefore the rest of the whole group did not have to wait. Also, we were always moving in two rows of 6, better than moving in one row of 12, then everybody was aware of the advices or comments coming from the guide. Regarding the breaks, we decided them all together, considering the place, the activity, the hunger or the fatigue.
Considering that I did not have any experience before neither in cross-country ski nor in this environment (an average of -10ºC, never being out for five hours per day before), right now I feel that I’m filling my baggage with all these experiences completely new for me. Back home we are not used to spend time outside if the temperatures are low (in Catalonia, with low I mean 0ºC haha) basically because we are used to good weather conditions. So that, spending time outside here in Norway is changing a bit my habits, getting used to cold temperatures and staying outdoors. In addition, those experiences will be useful for me when teaching kids in a future, working on a wider field of physical activity.
Through this link, you can watch and enjoy the aftermovie of the trip, made by Will, one of our classmates 🙂