Over the weekend the team won the Le Grand Tour 24 hour adventure race in spectacular scenery from the Sölen Mountains in Norway, over Trysil skiresort and down to the finish in Branäs skiarea.

A map and replay of the GPS tracking of the race can be viewed here http://www.arseries.se/live/lgt-2015/ Extra special in this race was the full blood moon, which we got to enjoy all night due to the nice clear weather.

This race was a perfect build up for the team of Josefina, Robert, Mattias and Aaron who we are sending to Brazil to compete in the Adventure Race World Championship in November.
We started with a 40 minute prologue in Branäs skiarea on Friday night that included inline skating, orienteering and abseiling.

There was a large crowd of seasonal blueberry pickers from Thailand staying at Branäs who watched our antics with amusement and should be able to go home with a good story about the Swedish weirdos that rollerskated off down the road and then jumped over the side of the bridge on the end of a rope.
 

The race proper started on Saturday morning with a 28km run over the south and middle Sölen peaks. The team started hard and we were able to put a gap on the chasing teams Thule, Outnorth and Reijlers Kolmården.

We continued with an inline skating section. Three of the team members skated like it was the most natural thing to do in the world, while the fourth team member struggled along behind like Bambi on ice and was very happy to survive.
After this came a really fun section where we swam down some small rapids on air bed mattresses.
Next up was a 150km MTB through the forests of Norway, which took us from dusk to dawn. The full moon was particularly spectacular and Robert, who is a school teacher, informed us that it was the closest the moon has been to earth for 33 years. The long bikeride was broken in the middle with a foot orienteering section on the tops of the Trysil ski resort.

We crossed the border back into Sweden by hiking our bikes straight through the forest to get from a road end on Norway that was 2km from another road end on the Swedish side. Lastly we had a 33km kayak down Klarälven in class two rapids to the finish in Branäs.

We raced well and held up our speed and motivation all through the night and were able to finish with a convincing win over three hours ahead of team Thule Adventure.
Results http://www.arseries.se/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Results_LGT_2015.pdf

Mattias had time to take some photos of the offivcial results between eating breakfast and leaving on the bus for the start of day 2.

Yesterday the team were 4th Place 15 min behind the leaders. That puts them in 4th place overall 18min behind the leaders.

Overall:

1st Adventure NZ (New Zealand) 5:04:56

2nd Red Bull (New Zealand) 5:14:23

3rd Toread (France) 5:18:42

4th Haglöfs Silva (Sweden) 5:22:42

Today the team had a problem with a deraillier and were too tired to write a post so it’s uncertain how they went. The evenings at Wulong involve recovering and organising gear for the next days’ stage.

As the terrain is very tough on the bikes this means that considerable time is often spent in the gear room at the hotel each evening carrying out repairs, which I assume this evening meant replacing a broken derailllier.

Then it’s usually up early, 4-5am, to take a long bussride to the start of the next days’ stage. Anyway we’ve tracked down a few photos and have heard that first today was New Zealand Adventure, 9 minutes ahead of another Kiwi team Red Bull.

The limestone gorges and caves in this part of China are pretty spectacular!

Results can be found here www.centrumok.se

Maps, videos and more can be found at www.bamm.nu

Next up the team leaves for South Africa on Wednesday for the next Adventure Race World Series event, Expedition Africa.

The aim is to pack everything under 4kg!

Björn and Aaron are off to the highlander mountain marathon which takes place on Saturday and Sunday next weekend. It’s in the same area near Fort Willaim where we competed in the adventure racing world championship in 2008, only this time we’re on the same team.

Aaron also convinced two of his neighbors, Per Fagring and Anders Ådahl, to come along and compete. It’s the first time they have done an event of this type, so it will be exciting to follow their progress. They have been frantically buying lightweight gear for the last 3 months in preparation, trying to get their packs down to 4kg each, which is the weight we aim for including gas stove, tent, clothes, food and sleeping bags.

Rounding off the Swedish contingent are Fredrik Hedin and Magnus Andersson, two regular competitors who are also experts in mountain marathon trivia and whisky tasting, and somehow always manage to have fun, no matter how crap the weather is in the British isles.

Mountain Marathon= 2-day long distance orienteering event, raced in pairs. Winners take about 5-6 hours each day, and there is an overnight camp where everyone camps using gear they have carried in their backpack (tent, food, sleeping bags, stove etc). Highlander has, different from other mountain marathons, a marquee tent at the mid camp, with hot food, pub and Scottish dance. These events are popular in the UK, the largest event, OMM, has 1500 teams!

Coasteering with the young multisporters

Over the weekend my multisport club had a training camp. We were about 60 multisporters, orienteers and triathletes. The camp started on Friday night in Höganäs/ Kullaberget. On Saturday we had both morning and afternoon training which even included some coasteering and small caves.

In the evening I held a presentation about adventure racing. On Sunday we had a camp champs, a sort of team relay. To prove that people had been at the controls they had to take a selfie in front on the church or lighthouse or whatever it was they had to go to. Check out the selfies on Mölndal Outdoor’s facebook site.

Selfie in front of a church

Camp champs transition

A picture from today when my club, Mölndal Outdoor, had a MTB-Run-Kayak training. I sat it out beacuse I’ve been sick for the last couple of weeks, although tomorrow it’s all on!

It time for a ranking race, 10km, to get into a better start group for Göteborgs Varvet. Göteborgs Varvet is the worlds biggest half marathon and I’m entered to run it for the first time in May. Trouble is that if you don’t get seeded you end up in start group 20-something, behind about 50,000 other runners. The time to beat to get into start group 1 is 37minutes for 10km. I’ve got no idea how it will go as I’m still pretty run down with a cold, but I’ll give it a bash…