This website has four purposes, around three cross country skiing topics.

Topics 

• Techniques of cross country skiing. 
   
• Places to ski, and styles of exploring and traveling. 
   
• Ways to have fun and play games and appreciate the beauty of cross country skiing. 

Purposes 

• identify helpful or interesting questions about those topics 

And sometimes identify useful categories of perspectives and goals of skiers asking or bumping into those questions.  

• identify resources publicly available in English on the web that address those questions. 

And to describe those resources in ways that skiers can quickly jump to the kind of information that is more helpful to them and their current perspective and goals. 

Where there are multiple perspectives or conflicting views to a question, provide access to sources that express and debate those different opinions. 

• to fill in gaps in the information publicly available for those topics and questions on the web. 
   
• to provide analysis and raise questions about skiing techniques from a perspective of basic physics.  

where "basic physics" here means old-time Newtonian mechanics of force and velocity, not quarks and quantum levels. 

Future 

My perspective is that someday all the information and interesting viewpoints will be richly available on the web. 

Right now we're a long way from that on some topics, so this website has a role in describing and assessing the limited current resources, and in trying to fill in some of the gaps.  Search engines provide long lists of matches, but they do not assess the quality of those matches, or which ones are more helpful to a skiing-specific perspective or goal. 

In the future the other existing resources will be expanded and new resources will appear on the web.  In response to that, some of the detailed content on this website will be replaced by links to other websites, together with brief comments describing, interpreting and appreciating those other resources. 

Example:  This website's page on Dryland Learning and Training for Classic techniques provides a framework and perspective for "uphill ski walking".  But it offers little detail about how to do it.  Instead it gives a link to the NENSA Classic Dryland drills page, and  describes briefly why it is such a helpful resource for this detail. 

I hope that in some cases, the creators of the new content will have been stimulated by my gap-filling attempts -- with the confidence that even though their work would have flaws, at least it will fix the deficiencies and errors in my attempts, while carrying forward the (few?) good ideas. 

Then for some topics, even the framework of interesting and helpful questions on this website might be replaced by a link to another resource that offered a superior framework.  For others, my framework might outlive that, and continue alongside as helpful for a minority of persons in a minority of situations. 

Present 

Right now the useful information out there on the Web is pretty "thin" on:

• cross country skiing techniques 
• identifying questions about fun and beauty 
• "games" other than racing 

But the Web is already fairly "rich" on: 

• normal places for normal kinds of cross-country skiing "games" at normal seasons of the year. 
• the racing game. 

Techniques:  This website currently has a lot of detailed content about Classic techniques, because I think they are tricky and interesting and not much in depth is available about them in English -- not even in print books, let alone the web.  And because I was very interested in classic-technique racing last year.  And because my background in research with multi-joint robots and robotic perception gave me a special fascination with applying a "robotic" approach to analyze that tricky technique.  

Skating technique is more straightforward, and the key questions have been clearly raised and addressed in English, so my focus there is more on definitions and links. 

Places:  Here it is easy to provide links to general websites that already do a good job of providing a framework and links to place-specific resources.  I've only filled in "gaps" with an odd topic that connects with me (out-of-season snow), and with a website about a region (the Hudson river valley) that I love but which is not well known for skiing. 

Fun, Games, Beauty:  I've only started getting into questions of fun and beauty and games -- by way of concern about how to learn techniques -- which in turn led me to what the motivations of learning and practicing new techniques might be.  But it's a topic I'm interested to explore further.