For those of us who cannot imagine going cycling without recording every ride on a GPS device, there is no reason not to do the same when we go skiing. Although there are specific skiing apps that you can download onto your phone, they increase the drain on the battery and use up your roaming data allowance. A simple alternative is simply to put your Garmin in your pocket for the day.
It is worthwhile creating a specific activity profile for skiing. On my Garmin 520, this is an option on the setting menu. The interesting data fields are elevation, total ascent, total descent, distance and max speed. When you upload the file onto Strava, you have a nice map of the day’s mountainous activites. Make sure you set the sport as “Alpine Ski”, otherwise your rides up the chairlifts end up smashing loads of KOMs set by summer mountain bikers.
When I went heliskiing in Canada, I was charged according to the vertical distance covered. One might hope to do at least 100k feet or 30 vertical kilometres in a week. It turns out that, with the multiple, fast-moving lifts and prepared pistes of a modern ski resort, you can expect to cover far higher total ascents/descents or “dénivelé” as they say in French.
If you keep moving, you can also cover remarkably long distances in a day of alpine skiing. The large interconnected European resorts like, Val d’Isere/Tignes, Les Trois Vallées, Portes du Soleil and Zermatt/Cervinia provide exentensive ski areas, where it can be hard to reach both edges of the piste map in a day.
Skiing speed is an interesting statistic. Having a background in slalom racing and freestyle skiing, I don’t hang around. It turns out that my descending speeds tend to be remarkably similar to cycling, averaging 35-40kph on a typical long run, but top speeds are definitely higher on skis.
A decent day’s skiing
A few years ago, I came up with three criteria for a decent day’s skiing, based on total vertical metres, distance covered and maximum speed. A reasonable total descent is 10,000m. You also need to cover a total distance of 100km. But the most challenging and dangerous part is to include a maximum speed of 100kph, which should only be attempted by expert skiers, at their own risk and without endangering other people.
The image at the top of this page shows a day when I comfortably achieved all three targets. It was surprising to note that, over an 8 1/2 hour day, I was only moving for 4 3/4 hours and that included riding up the lifts.
Of course, when there is a fresh fall of snow like we had at Christmas in the Alps, you can forget all that and just head off piste.
Science4Performance 