Finland Border to Border: Day 1-2
Thursday, March 5, 2015
"Yoko mennään?"* This is what my dad (Ahvo) asked me Thursday morning when I woke up in his hometown in Central Finland.
Sure, why not?
Two weeks ago during a Skype conversation he had suggested (he may have been joking) that I join him, 6 other Minnesotans, 2 Alaskans, and roughly 40 others to ski the Border-to-Border event (from the Russian border to the Swedish border) here in Finland. Ahvo and the others have had this idea a bit longer than I have, and when I first heard about it around the holidays I thought I might be in the midst of controlled research chaos and was a bit jealous that there would be no way for me to join the fun. As luck would have it though, I have some time off from research (time to write!) so I decided that if there was still a chance to sign up (the deadline is December 31), I would go for it. That’s right, I signed up to ski 440km of classic two weeks before actually doing it. I probably haven't covered 440km on classic skis in the past 5 years combined (l will skip the list of excuses) but for some reason this did not deter me from paying the registration fee and packing my bags. It's on.
For more info on the event: Border-to-Border
Before we start skiing, we need to drive north. We headed to Oulu where we parked our car before hopping a bus over to Kuusamo (home of the Ruka Nordic Opening). In the evening, we met the other skiers for a quick info session and then it was off to prep our skis and go to bed.
* This is a play on words. "Joko mennään?", in Finnish, means "Ready to go?", but "Yoko mennään?" is specific to the skis, poles, boot, and clothing we are using/wearing on this journey. Thank you Yoko and Optiwax for letting us test your products during this journey!
Friday, March 6, 2015
We woke up at roughly 6am to get packed, eat and load our gear into two busses. One bus brought our gear to the hotel, while the other followed us on our journey (so we could put on a dry shirt or switch skis). We skier folk also boarded the bus and headed to the start on the Russian border.
Today’s journey was 62km. Ahvo and I both opted for waxless skis (Optigrip 2.0), because the trail is relatively hilly, and the skis had bomber kick. Glide was slightly affected when the bases of the skis got wet when we skied over a lake, but for this part of the journey, kick is way more important than glide. For the record, we were both able to stride all but the very steepest of hills on this leg of our journey. Everyone else that we saw from our group (not everyone from our group) had to herringbone almost all of the hills.
While our pace was not exactly blistering today (speaking for myself and Ahvo), I can assure you that skiing 62km is pretty tiring (exhausting) even with stops for juice, raisins, pickles and hot soup in roughly the middle. My heart rate monitor told me that I burned 4741 kilocalories of energy (and that is just from skiing!). The duration was 8:03:00 (I did not bother to stop the clock for lunch). I kept my heart rate in the aerobic zone aside from the biiiig hill at the beginning… and the best part? I have completed over 1092% of my recommended daily physical activity!
Here is a map of Finland with markers for today’s journey (left) as well as a picture of today’s GPS data (right), as well as speed/altitude data (below).
You might be thinking we’re nuts for taking on this event, and I will not correct you, but I will let you in on a little info: You are not required to ski every kilometer. The bus follows the skiers from feed/service station to service station, so you can jump on at any feed/service station. A snowmobile also follows the last skier. No one is left behind and everyone can ski as much or as little as they want to with one catch: hit the final feed/service station by 5pm. My personal goals are to ski as much as possible, to listen to my body, and to enjoy the Finnnish forests. It’s not a race.
Attached are a few pictures from our trip up North and the first day of skiing, which already saw one broken pole, one broken binding (that got a temporary fix from Ahvo), seeing and skiing along the Russian border, and making it to Kuusamo totally tired and ready for a sauna and food.