Advertisement

Forget everything you thought you knew about 'boring' cross-country skiing

 - Ferran Traite Soler
- Ferran Traite Soler

The explicit instruction of “do not sit on the ski lift,” had clearly failed to percolate through my nervous brain, because within a fraction of a second I’d gone from looking like just any other salopette-clad skier, to a spatchcocked, snow-eating novice, face down in the ice.

A button-like seat had whizzed between my trembling thighs, and upended my clumsy, 6 foot three inch frame. My head and shoulders faced down the slope as my waist and legs pointed up it, meanwhile my feet and skis jutted out at awkward, painful right angles.

Worse, and perhaps more embarrassingly, still, my backpack, containing about £2,000 worth of camera equipment had been ripped clean from my torso and was already 100 feet into its own perfectly timed ascent of the mountain. As an emergency stop button was hastily thumped, a shrieking claxon disguised my diatribe of pain-induced profanities from the giggling children within earshot. Things, I hoped, could only get better.

Beyond solely offering comic relief to Vålådalen’s ski schools, though, my decision to visit central Sweden had been five years in the making, and I was relieved to be back in the mountains. A serious knee injury had ended my fledgling relationship with snow sports after just a couple of trips to the French Alps – and ever since that excruciating ordeal, I’ve had to live without an anterior cruciate ligament in my right leg; one of the thickest and strongest tissues in the human body.

“You need to glide and kick,” said my guide, Erica, as she gracefully floated (and I timidly shimmied) around the snowy plateaux above Vålådalen’s Fjällstation – a tiny ski resort of just a café, 220 beds, three hot tubs and a sauna. “We want to achieve a sensation of floating over the snow, rather than just walking in skis. It’s about finding a rhythm, but also taking pleasure in movement.”

Simon Parker was a beginner at cross-country skiing - Credit: iStock
Simon Parker was a beginner at cross-country skiing Credit: iStock

The cruciate is a sinew that helps footballers weave daintily between oncoming defenders and gives basketball players their agile lateral movement. Frustratingly, though, it’s also the slightly elasticated connective fibre that allows skiers to achieve those elegant downhill twists and turns.

Living without one sounds more dramatic than it actually is, but it just means that I’m now restricted to straight-line sports like cycling, swimming and running. Cross country skiing, I figured, could be my chance to put a snowless half-a-decade behind me; even if it did have a reputation for being the more sedate distant cousin of the adrenaline-charged downhill variety.

“Anyone who thinks cross country is boring, hasn’t tried it,” said Erica, as we skied through a channel of two three-inch deep grooves that had been carved out in the snow. “Cross country is engrained in the Swedish culture – I love to move my body. In fact, I feel like I was born to ski.”

This region of central Sweden has experienced a mini boom since 2017, following a direct easyJet flight linking Gatwick to Are Ostersund. There are a handful of high quality, high occupancy hotels to be found nearby, like the 112 room Copper Hill in Åre, with its helipad, spa and private villas.

There are now direct flights from London to Are Ostersund - Credit: iStock
There are now direct flights from London to Are Ostersund Credit: iStock

The village feels as close to the developed party vibe of the French Alps as you can get in Sweden, yet still significantly quieter – and for a conurbation of just 1,500 fulltime residents, it packs an impressive punch, with 11 restaurants in the White Guide. The recent FIS Alpine World Ski Championships saw the population swell, momentarily, by tens of thousands and tourists are drawn to the 100 pistes and 48 lifts that stay open for both winter skiing and summer mountain biking. Sadly, though, I didn’t have the legs for either.

Flatter Vålådalen, meanwhile, has barely changed for a century and professional skiers have been using it as a warm and cosy refuge from which to launch training camps into the surrounding pine forests. Arctic foxes and lynx are known to roam here and the Swedish, Norwegian and United States cross country teams regularly use it as a base, while simultaneously filling up on hearty soups, reindeer steaks, waffles, cured bear meat and arctic char.

Even total beginners can embark upon solo or guided adventures, with only the occasional small section of daunting downhill. Cross country, I was quickly learning, can be as hardcore, or as mellow as you choose. It certainly felt a tad slow at times, but served as a welcome reminder that I’m, perhaps, not as young, fearless and unbreakable as I once was.

“This is the spiritual home of cross country,” said Vålådalen’s owner, Jonas, as we wandered around its museum of sporting artefacts – now occupying a disused shooting range. “This has long been a centre for winter athletes from all over the world, but also a place for Scandinavian royalty, artists and creative types. This place used to be so exclusive during the 1960s that people would book a stay here up to six years in advance.”

The museum’s relics date back to the 1930s, and antique leather ski boots share the same shelves as aerodynamic elastane skin suits and an ilk of futuristic footwear that wouldn’t look out of place in a sci-fi blockbuster. “Swedish Winter Olympic skiers like Thomas Wassberg and Nils Karlsson used to spend their winters in Vålådalen, chopping wood to get bigger muscles and skiing day after day,” said Jonas. “This is the sort of sport that turned them into strapping men of the forest.”

It was that, in a nutshell, that had attracted me to cross country in the first place – as a means of getting out into nature, and to feel the sadistic rasp of cold dry air running through my oesophagus and lungs. It’s an intense, full body workout that only ever left me feeling fitter. I buzzed from the exercise-induced endorphins, and the frozen, empty environment emitted a white noise that was as close to pure silence as I’ve experienced anywhere on the planet.

Granted, most of the time I resembled a freshly hatched duckling getting used to its clumsy new footwear, but I was hooked by the freedom of cross country. I was terrible, of course, and fell over a lot – but in contrast to the gravity-aided downhill version, I felt considerably less likely to kill myself, or rip a limb clean from its socket. Cross country boots are considerably more comfortable, too, feeling like snug bicycle cleats in contrast to the agony of downhill ankle-clampers. Every little helps.

Even without fully mastering Erica’s “kick and glide” it’s more than possible to move from place to place with relative ease, relying more upon instinct than any discernible skill. Better still, there was never a single person on any of the mountainous horizons – just a few sporadic thickets of hardy birch trees. The brilliant sky nearly always had a deep matte blue quality, brushed in a thin layer of white wispy haze. No eyesore bubble ski lifts or teenagers in garish Gore-Tex onesies wielding GoPros and selfie sticks like maces and fencing foils.

Simon Parker getting to grips with the cross-country skis
Simon Parker being shown the ropes by his instructor, Erica Johansson

I’m not ashamed to admit that the older I become, the fewer people I find myself wanting to be around, and I’ve never fully understood the attraction of paying a fortune to visit the mountains, only to share them with tens of thousands of other foreign tourists. Queuing for ski lifts, feeling ripped off for overpriced coffees and beers, music blaring beside the clink of Jägerbombs. It’s just not me.

Subdued, sleepy Vålådalen certainly appealed to my cantankerous free spirit – and despite my dodgy knee and regular mouthfuls of snow, I have every intention of making it part of my winter workout. Who cares if some people might think it’s boring? As I grow older and increasingly weaker at the knees, perhaps adopting a slower pace, on flatter ground, isn’t necessarily a bad thing after all.

More information

Vålådalen (0046 0647 35300; valadalen.se) is a 30-minute drive from the village of Åre and 90 minutes to Are Ostersund Airport, where easyJet flies two times weekly on Thursdays and Sundays (easyjet.com).