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