Crosscountry skiing in Ithaca

There are two types of skiing - skiing at mountain resort and cross-country. The first one is expensive and more to spend time, not for real sporting hard work. The crossc-ountry skiing is not for lazy people, because the gravitational force of the Earth, that pulling you down from the mountain at mountain resort is not helping you now. Sometimes it works against you, when you climb a hill, sometimes allows some relaxation, when you race down the hill, but on average, like in running, you are working hard to complete the distance. In Russia this tipe of sport is extremely popular among all because of a three snow months. In Ithaca in normal year it is possible to catch 3-4 weekends, when the trail is good. Again, at mountain resort the people are making the artificial snow, but nobody is making artificial snow for cross-country and now the weather alone is responsible for strong enough snow layer to run the distance competing with the seconds on the chronometer. In 2007 I found an exellent place to run - Poddunk center near the Ithaca, on route 96 north. If the sun is shining brightly and the snow is good enough to cover all the remnants of the farmers crop in the fields, the trail will be in an exellent condition and in this case the distance is especially fun to run. The good trail means I am not thinking about where to put the ski on the next step and all the efforts are concentrated onto the wide step and stronger pushes with ski sticks. At those moments, when I running down the hill, I feel myself very excited about the velocity I can develop and how strong I am and how strong are my pushes. If the weather is not so good and windy, the trail is normally half covered by snow delivered by wind and more efforts are necessary to guess the trail with the ski and less fun remains. Still, the exersize is good and after couple of hours, what corresponds to 10-20 km depending on conditions of trail the feeling of an exellent outdoor relaxation persists.