We still didn’t make it down the Ski Centre before 10 AM. This week we made good time to Huntly, but somehow the time got eaten up between parking at the pool and arriving at the Ski Centre, mainly due the atrociously icy conditions on the road. Thanks to Rick for running Alice down, although I don’t think she was too keen on Tilly!
This week I was worried about everything being frozen rock hard as there had been a frost overnight and the snow was pretty beaten up. Skiing on Thursday hadn’t been too much fun (after rescuing Paul Gray’s car from the icy track by the Golf practice area) for the same reasons.
Despite my worries the day turned out fine. The temperature crept above zero which allowed the snow to soften up just a little. This was helped by a bright sun for most of the morning. I was skiing in just a coat and a base layer. Most of the teaching was moved over to the football pitches where the snow was firm with a well developed icy crust. It was just soft enough to get some traction while classicing but had excellent glide.
Deciding to play to the day’s strengths Andy Miller started the group I was working with on some skating after the warm up. Although they are all fairly small, the kids mostly took to it immediately. I noticed one doing skate 2 totally naturally. It took me several years and a lot of effort to do that.
We then worked on double poling for a while and double-pole stride, which seemed to fox most of the children. A lot of the children kept their legs straight when poling which was a difficult habit to discourage. Then back to the ski centre for a warm up and snack.
After break it was back out onto the football field for some more skating. Andy found a perfect piece of snow that was flattened out and had very few footprints on it. We worked on Skate 1 and Skate 2. Skate 2 seemed to come more easily to the children than Skate 1, which I guess is the opposite to working with adults. Unfortunately, given the limited number of skate skis available in the centre the children had to stick with their classic skis, despite that they all made a good effort. Maybe that’s something the club should try to address in the longer term.
Finally to the week’s Olympic event – the relay. Your standard relay has 4 people per team, but to include everybody each team in the Huntly version had about 12. The smallest children had a short classic course, a slightly longer course for the older children and the top level had a skate race. It all went really well despite the complex logistics with lots of support, a huge amount of effort and a few spills – none serious.