Cross Country Skiing

2023-06-03 00:00:00 / episode: 138

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"Cross country skiing.

If you come from a country where there isn't a lot of snow, you might not know much about this sport.

And once again, I come from Canada.

So when I was growing up, we did cross country skiing.

I'll never forget the very first Christmas when we woke up and ran to the Christmas tree to find our presents.

And then we found there were not many presents there, very few in fact, but there were strings and all of us had a name on our strings.

We followed the strings, we picked up the end of the string and followed it through the house and the strings led downstairs to where our Christmas presents were.

And the Christmas present was a set of cross country skis for the entire family.

So then after that, we were skiing as a family.

We had the old cross country skis that were made of wood.

My father had to heat the skis with a very hot torch and then rub pine oil into the wood and bake it in with the torch.

And then on top of that, you had to put wax.

And every time you went skiing, you used a different wax.

You didn't need hills.

It was cross country skiing, not hill skiing and you had to be in good shape.

You had to kick the foot back to push forward.

And if you use the wrong wax, you were sliding and slipping.

If you use the right wax, you could kick forward and glide a little bit.

Nowadays, there's another technique for cross country skiing called ski skating, which is as, as it sounds, it's more of a skating type of uh movement.

If you want, you can put cross country ski skating on youtube and you'll be able to see lots of examples of it.

Anyway, cross country skiing was boring for me as a kid.

I really preferred downhill.

But after I became a teenager, I discovered the joy of cross country skiing.

And now I think cross country skiing is way better than downhill skiing because I can go just about anywhere I want.

Have you ever crossed country skied?"