The fifth leg, kayaking 60 km from Sweden to Åland, was cancelled after a few hours of paddling due to hard wind and big waves (approximately 2 m). All teams were transported to Åland by ferry and re-started yesterday evening at 7pm.

Due to this re-start, teams will have time-credit according to the following:
1. Swedish Armed Forces Adventure Team +0
2. Estonian ACE Adventure +1:20:57
3. Sweco Adventure +1:29:47
4. Haglöfs Silva +1:48:18
5. Greener Adventure Team +1:53:16

The leaderboard show the correct time with this time-credit added, but the dots won’t show if they are leading or not. When the time-credit should be taken out is still not announced.

Follow the race on the following links:
http://live.arworldseries.com/niar18
https://www.facebook.com/TeamHaglofsSilva
https://www.instagram.com/teamhaglofssilva

And the organisations pages:
https://www.facebook.com/nordicislandsadventurerace
https://www.instagram.com/nordicislandsar/

The sections of the race. Currently they are on leg 7.

This is the first Expedition race for Team Haglöfs Silva for 2018, but we have not been laying too much on the couch until now… Apart from our daily life puzzles with family, work and training, we have attended a few shorter events.

Björn and Robert raced the Åre Extreme Challenge a month ago. It is the European Championships in Multisport with 20 km of kayaking, 15 km of mountain running (over Åreskutan) and a final 35 km of tough and technical mountain biking. Robert did another strong performance and finished 1st (!) for the third time, with Björn 4th.

Recently we have taken advantage of the crazy hot summer in Sweden to try to improve our skills in and on the water, with the upcoming race in mind!

The race course for the Nordic Islands Race covers a total of 637 km divided into a total of 11 sections, with kayaking, mountain biking, trekking, swimrun and packrafting.

This gruelling course will take teams from central Stockholm, across the Åland Sea, swimming and running between several islands of Åland, then over to Finland to finally reach the finish line in Åbo. All different sections will offer their challenges, but we expect some to be tougher than other, including the 230 km of mountainbiking, the 60 km of sea kayaking over to Åland, the 84 km of swimrunning on Åland and the 78 km of packrafting in Finland, the land of the thousand lakes. We think that there will be a good balance between physical, technical and navigation skills and the winning team will need to perform well in many different areas.

Team Haglöfs Silva will consist of Björn, Robert, Corrinne O’Donnell and Rob Preston. This team has raced together once before, on the AR World Series Xtrail Expedition Race in China last June. We will for sure give all we have to do even better this time.

Thanks for all cheering and support! /Team Haglöfs Silva

Teams from around the globe race through ancient landscapes and cultures on foot, bike and kayak. Many of the areas visited by the race are inaccessible to the outside world.

Team Haglöfs Silva finished 3rd in the 3-day long race. The episode contains an extended interview with Aaron Prince. Link to full clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vp6t-Ahrdc

Team Haglöfs Silva crossed the finish line as second team after 58 h 40 min! Seagate controlled the lead from the first day and won the race. A longer report will be posted as soon as the team has collected some sleep (they have only slept 1 hour in three Days!).

photo: James Pitman

The race started with a short run down to the kayaks. The kayaking went back and forth on Kanas lake. Haglöfs Silva and Seagate were close together, but on the white water rafting, team Seagate got a small gap. They have kept that gap on the 49 km trek and have extended it to approximately 50 minutes at the next TA where they went out on the fifth section, MTB 201 km, which is expected to take 18 hours! This bike leg contains a lot of climbing and downhills and will be a mix between sealed-, gravel roads and trails.

The current tracking. Team Haglöfs Silva (#2) are currently second and chasing leading Team Seagate (#9).

Follow the race by dot-watching on: http://live.arworldseries.com/xtrail17/

Coverage by Craig Cook on AR Live Coverage on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arlivecoverage/

We also post short notices on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/TeamHaglofsSilva/

Sleepmonsters also covers the race: http://www.sleepmonsters.com/v2_races.php?event_id=12661

On our way to the second checkpoint located 900 m a.s.l. Photo: Mattias Nyström

The weather was clear and sunny which made the navigation rather easy. At this time of the year in Hemavan, the sun goes down only for three hours. During these three hours there is still light, so the head lamp is only needed to read the map.

Sunset with Norwegian mountains in the backgorund. Photo: Mattias Nyström.

After the taking the checkpoint on the northern Syter mountain, we decided to revise our planned route. We reached the night camp 6:30 am and here they served hot blue berry soup and Bullens hot dogs. Yummy! It was great to eat something hot after 16 hours of cold drinks and food.

On our way to the tent camp. Photo: Hemavan 24

The planned route back from the night camp contained several checkpoints on lower altitude (~900 m). The lower altitude also means more bush (Salix)… Therefore we had to skip a few checkpoints from our planned route.

We reached the finish line 12:48 pm happy and tired. We knew that we had taken many points (50 out of 62), but we could not be sure that we had won before everyone had reached the finish line (14:o0 pm). After all teams had reached the finish line, we were still in the top!

We’re always eating… Photo: Mattias Nyström

If you haven’t seen it, here is it again, the film about Robert Lindberg – Family father, PE teacher and world class Adventure Racer.

The first big race of the season was the Raid Gallaecia in Spain, part of Adventure Racing Word Series, in mid may. As Björn got diagnosed with Diabetes type 1 less than two weeks before the race he was not able to go. He was replaced by Jari Palonen, who together with Josefina, Mattias and Robert took a nice and strong victory ahead of Team Seagate (NZ).

5 weeks after the victory in Spain, the team was gathered in Åre for Haglöfs Åre Extreme Challenge. Josefina finished 3^rd amongst the girls, Robert was the fastest guy, with Mattias 2^nd. Björn was 6^th, after a tough day where he got some new experiences regarding blood sugar values…

August is normally the big mountain marathon month in Sweden. Björn and Josefina ran the Björkliden Arctic Mountain Marathon and won the mixed category. The next weekend, they both ran the Kiruna Extreme, but in different teams. Björn won together with Olof Häggström and Josefina finished 3^rd in the mixed category with Jonas Westling.

In September, many Swedish teams had gathered in Branäs for the Le Grand Tour, 24 hours of nonstop racing in the southern mountain region. Team Haglöfs Silva (Aaron, Josefina, Mattias and Robert) won the race, three hours ahead of Thule Adventure Team.

Adventure Racing World Championship in Pantanal, Brazil, was the main goal for team Haglöfs Silva, as for probably almost all other adventure racing teams out there. Having been forced to withdraw both Costa Rica (2013) and Ecuador (2014) due to wrist/elbow fractures for Josefina, we really wanted to finish the Worlds in Brazil, and we wanted to finish strong! The race turned out to be one of the warmest and toughest races ever and our team finished 2^nd!

Photo: Erik Putsep

Thanks to everyone who have supported and cheered us during this 2015 (and earlier) season(s). Without you, it would not have been this good!

We are now looking forward to the Adventure Racing season 2016. Race schedule is still to be decided, as there are many interesting and challenging races out there and unfortunately we cannot race them all.

We wish you all a Happy New Year!

Haglöfs Silva’s route marked in red. After not finding the cattle route South of the abandoned farm Sao Jose do Mato Grande we changed plans and headed west to intersect another cattle route. Seagate didn’t find the route either but decided to plough straght through the swamp at 500m/hour for 8 km to farm Modelo.

The challenge here was 40km through a flat swampland, known as the Shubiswamp after race director Shubi Guimares. The cattle tracks all looked the same on the map but are classed by us as Fat Cow Track (the cattle have ploughed a 5m path through the waterweed that can be paddled in a pack raft), Skinny Cow Track (too narrow to paddle effectively and hard to follow, even harder to see if trying to intersect from the side) and quite a lot of Mystery Cow Track (a track that still can’t be found in spite of us knowing exactly where we are and hunting around for an hour). There were small pockets of forest marked on the map however these were extremely unreliable as there were mapped in the 1960’s when farming was more viable in the area, and have changed in size and shape considerably. In the 1970’s a large flood drowned 200 000 cattle and most of the ranches have been abandoned. The trees quickly became named nice trees (good to look at) and lookout trees (trees that could be climbed to try to see any navigable waterways close by). There were also small waterways, Corixos, however these proved to be navigable for a short distance, often about 500m, before being filled with various varieties of water weed. The four main varieties of water weed in the area are fastwaterweed (500m/hour), slowwaterweed (<500m/h) and shitwaterweed (=can’t move) and our favorite but unfortunately vary rare type called nowaterweed. If we managed to stay on an existing cattle track or corixo we could reach a top speed of 2km/h, and where we lost them or they ceased to exist we maxed out at 500m per hour if we managed to keep to the pockets of fastwaterweed and push very hard. The swamp was generally waist to chest deep. The rest of the map was white apart from the odd fence, and small collections of farm buildings spaced consistently at 10-12 km intervals.

The longest section of the race, the second pack rafting section.

A broken trolley… This was the only clue we found that this had been a herdsman trail…

Narrow water way.

The only way to get an overview in a totally flat area – climb a tree!

The pack rafting include a lot of treking with the kayaks too.

We found the Shubiswamp section very challenging but at the same time it was a cool experience where we pushed our skills and fitness to the limit. It was the deciding section of the race and after that the field was so spread out that none of the positions changed at the top of the leader board. Six teams went into the Shubiswamp, first Seagate, second Haglöfs Silva and third Swedish Armed Forces came out unassisted. Fourth and fifth Colombia Onoco and Estonia Adventure Team received navigational help by sending text messages on their emergency locator beacons (there was a lot of discussion after the race but the race jury decided to impose a time penalty instead of disqualifying these two teams for the assistance they received). The sixth team turned back after spending 8 hours coming nowhere and managed to convince the race organisers to cancel the section for all of the remaining teams. This was probably a wise decision from a safety perspective, even if several of the teams that weren’t allowed to start the section would have been well capable of completing it there would likely have been many teams that would need to be rescued.

The crocodile incident occurred of the seventh day. On the last 200km MTB section Rob stood on a rather large crocodile as we were carrying our bikes across a swamp. The croc got a big fright and jumped clear out of the water. This amused the rest of the team greatly and kept our spirits high, which was welcome as we were attempting to push through the last night of the race without sleep.

A thunder storm on its way…

Help from a local to find the way to the port. These boys walked bare foot in a high pace and it was almost hard to follow…

Hundreds of crocodiles… This was on the MTB section.

Small croc on the road. We walked around it and it seemed paralyzed (or dead)…

…but after we had passed, it walked away.

It was not only on the treking it was wet…

We caught the ferry with only a few minuts marginal. The other teams on this photo are on the short-course.

The team continued biking and made it all the way to last transition. Finalizing this brutal race course was a short paddle in a local boat which took team Haglöfs Silva to the finish line as the 2^nd best team in the world! First place to Seagate (NZ) and 3^rd to Swedish Armed Forces. Congratulations to both! This race goes down as one of the longest and most challenging, but also one of the most interesting and beautiful races the team has done. The Pantanal area is amazing and well worth a visit (as a tourist).