Tomorrow I'm heading to Ramasau Dachstein for a cross country skiing week. It's a top destination for Nordic ski sports, with skating tracks where world championships took place. They're most exciting but (at my age) it's indispensable to find the optimal risk using them.
I need to select duration and speed to have fun and conserve/improve my fitness but avoid hazardous actions. Their profile look like a smoothed trajectory of a, say, stock price time series. Ups and downs follow quite frequently - arhythmic.
So I need to decide: how fast do I go down to get enough momentum saving energy when skating up the following uphill section without falling. And how fast do I skate uphill to reserve enough power to make the final step powerful enough to get the right speed for the following downhill part.
And from time to time, I'll take the option to run at the easy tracks to backtest, stabilize and automate my technique...
Running the same tracks more often you become more experienced and find the optimum easier.
I'll not be able to post during the next week, but I'll have time to think in depth about future challenges and opportunities related to innovation…