The Two Titans

If you would compare Usain Bolt to Björn Sunesson, chances are that you would come up with many more painfully obvious differences than striking similarities. The showy superstar from Jamaica is not only the fastest man who has ever run down a 100 m-track, but also one of the most sought-after and popular athletes on the planet. He is adored by fans and media alike and can have his pick among any sponsor he chooses to support. If Usain Bolt is larger than life, Björn Sunesson must be his polar opposite. The diminutive Swede was humble, unassuming and soft-spoken when I had the pleasure to chat with him during a coffee-break at an ultrarunning seminar at Bislett Stadion a few weeks ago. Bislett International Endurance Festival (BIIEF) – the organisation behind the popular race Bislett 24-hours, an indoor-ultra race at Bislett Stadion – had invited to a seminar with two Swedish titans, or nestors if you will, of the ultra community: Björn Sunesson and Rune Larsson.

For once, I had slipped away early from work in order to squeeze in 11 km of running before the seminar that was scheduled for 17.00 in the afternoon. After a quick shower at the gym, I jogged the few hundred metres to the beautiful Olympic Stadium, where I arrived to find one of the conference rooms bustling with people of a certain, shall we say, ultrarunning quality. Ultrarunners are a breed unto themselves, but more regarding attitude and charisma than a certain body type. To be sure, ultrarunners come in many shapes and sizes; from the thinnest beanstalks you have ever met to more heavy-set fellows with tattoos decorating their forearms. I grabbed a cup of coffee and managed to snatch a seat in the front row just in time to hear Björn being introduced by a bearded veteran from BIIEF.

Björn Sunesson is a 67-year-old runner who has run coast-to-coast across the US no less than FOUR times, a distinction he shares with an American who, by comparison, had a follow-car trailing him on all four occasions. Björn has run solo across the continent every single time. Not only has he run the distance four times, but his first time was in 2007, i.e. at an age of 59 years. If that’s not impressive, I don’t know what is. (You can find his blog right here, by the way.) You can see for yourselves on the map below the routes he has taken every time. The USA is about 5000 km from west to east (which happens to be the direction in which you always run, because of the wind, apparently), and the classic route is from Los Angeles to New York, a distance of 4860 km and which Björn completed last summer in 100 days. He told us that when he runs across the US, he always aims for 50 km a day without any rest days, and that he has always used a babyjogger for his gear. His first ultrarun on American soil was between Chicago and New Orleans, a ”test-run” of around 1600 km to see if he was ready to run the entire distance across the continent. That time he chose a backpack to run with, a decision he bitterly got to regret thanks to the many chafings he got in the hot Southern states during the final legs of his run. Which is why he has always preferred a babyjogger (specifically the 25 Jubilee edition) since then. In contrast to Darren Wendell, a 33 year-old American who completed his own coast-to-coast race in April 2015 and who apparently wore out 30 pairs of running shoes, Björn has always been content to change between two pairs every day (one pair for the morning leg, and another for the afternoon leg) and wore out only five pairs during his last run. One of the keys to running across the US is apparently also to avoid the big cities as they tend to be difficult to run through due to heavy traffic. Björn has always preferred to run on highways with traffic not bothering him too much since there is so little of it outside the huge metropolises of the country. During the coffee break after his own seminar, I went up to him for a little chat and asked him to fill in a few blanks for me, mainly about the practicalities of arranging such an adventure. I’ll spare you the majority of the tidbits I learned – call them trade secrets if you will – but I can tell you that his babyjogger was loaded with around 10 kg of gear, and that to arrange a trip like this comes down to around 70-80 USD a day, the lion sum paying for the motels. He smiled and told me that it could probably have been done a bit cheaper, but he likes to stay at the better kind of motels during his runs, the better to reward himself after a long day of running, and also because he loves the contrasts of these transamerican adventures: a tiny old man running along dusty highways all day long and come afternoon to check-in to a motel and finally get to rest his legs on a soft bed in the evening.

Björn told us that he doesn’t consider himself an ultrarunner since he has never actually run an official ultrarace with a numbertag on his chest. Rune Larsson, on the other hand, has competed in several ultras, most notably Spartathlon which he has won three times. The thing that makes Spartathlon one of the toughest ultraraces in the world is not only it’s distance (245 km between Athens and Sparta), but also it’s severe cutoff-times and weather conditions. Two-thirds of runners never make it to the finish line. In this race, every finisher is literally a winner. When people ask him at what time he adjusted his diet in order to become a better runner, Rune normally replies: ”When I stopped breast-feeding.” In other words, he has been running since he started to walk. He ran his first marathon as a 16-year old (3:04) and has every single run he has ever made since 1973 written down in notebooks that are indexed and kept safe. How many kilometers? As New Year’s Eve 2014 he’s run 237 880 km and counting. That’s more than 60% of the distance to the moon, ladies and gentlemen. Where Björn had had us paying attention through his soft voice and stories about exciting encounters on the highways of the US, Rune was playing his audience like a master violinist. He changed his voice from a hush to loud cries, when illustrating conversations, and he told frequent and funny jokes, mainly on his own expense. He invited us to see and understand running from his point of view, which I would say is a pure joy of all forms of running. Or happy running, if you will. His philosophy to become a better runner is cemented by the fact that you have to love running, both the training and the competitions. In the course of his seminar, he mentioned several other important basic components, such as the will to fight, running economy, to build yourself a body that can withstand severe battering and to train your gut to absorb any kind of food stuff while on the run. Not regarding purely running-related trouble with muscles, ligaments and tendons, the most common problem for any runner (including myself, unfortunately) is the stomach. The man or woman who could invent a solution to runner’s belly, or whatever it’s called, would become so rich he or she would never have to work for a living again. Rune told us that he used to train this particular characteristic by eating an enormous portion of pasta and then without delay head straight out for a run. And when he needs to build muscle for strength, he never hits the gym as the rest of us do. Instead he loads a backpack with around 20% of his body-weight (I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I guess he weighs around 80 kg, meaning he packs it with 16 kg of weight) and then goes out for a terrain run. No better way to train your abs, back and upper torso, apparently. Another little jewel of information he regaled us with was that every kind of runner has trouble with deficiencies. The sprinters and middle-distance runners have to battle oxygen deficiency, as it is their main barrier towards a good result in a race. The long-distance runners, i.e. the marathoners, mainly have to worry about their glycogen stores, not only having to fill up their stores prior to a race, but also maintaining an intake of calories during the race. Ultrarunner, in comparison, have it easy. They are deficient in EVERYTHING. Oxygen, glycogen, salts, common sense; you name it and they don’t have it. As illustrated by the fact that out of ten starts at Spartahlon, Rune has ended up in hospital a total of eight times. But not before finishing every single race within the time limit. Which brings us back to the body’s ability to withstand pain and a proper battering.

I could write on and on about Björn’s and Rune’s anecdotes and races, but I’ll leave you with a simple, but very illustrative, picture of how you compare sprinters to ultrarunners. I hope Rune will forgive me for so cheekily relaying the story, but it is Rune’s own, after all. You know the gesture Usain Bolt does after winning his races? Where he strikes a pose and aims for the sky? Do you know what he wants to tell us?

”Look up there! That’s Rune Larsson, running to the moon!”

Oh, and here’s my training during the last two weeks, for those of you that are interested.

Monday         13 km, calm tempo

Tuesday         12 km, progressive increase

Wednesday   9,5 km, restitution

Thursday       11 km, marathon tempo

Friday             20 km, proper trails with a backpack, water and chocolate together with a friend

Sunday           8 km, restitution

Total               73,5 km

Monday         17 km, interval training coaching Urban Tribes, including back and forth from home

Tuesday         11 km, progressive increase

Wednesday   10 km, calm tempo

Thursday       12 km, progressive increase

Friday             30 km, wonderful trails and gravel roads with a backpack in Nordmarka

Sunday           8 km, restitution

Total               88 km

Super-pathogens

Finally back in shape! Or, rather, finally back to training according to my program. Easter brought with it a full-blown viral infection that knocked me sideways and off my well-prepared training path. Courtesy of my daughter. She gets the sniffles and coughs for a few days while her virus silently mutates into a super-pathogen on par with smallpox or ebola. To tell you the truth, I was lucky to survive the incident without succumbing to hospital intensive care. My wife tells me that a few days off from training would be good for me and even went as far as to imply that my symptoms weren’t potentially lethal. After all, she hadn’t been incapacitated in any meaningful way. Could it be that her Norwegian genes had provided her with a superior immune system? Can you believe it? Here a poor innocent athlete is virally ambushed by his runny-nosed little daughter and is left to fend for himself, coughing his lungs out and wiping out entire acres of rain forest’s worth of Kleenex on his near-death bed all the while only asking for a little bit of sympathy, and what does he receive? Scepticism and a raised eye-brow. What, I ask you, is the world coming to?

But, dear readers, not to worry. Despite my immediate family’s attempts at the contrary, I have once again survived a close encounter with the afterlife and have hit the ground running. Well, maybe more of a jog, initially, but still. The week after Easter was spent running calmly with control, avoiding interval training and the more severe of the long runs. Last week, coach Sondre threw me to the wolves to see if I had recovered, and I believe that that’s the case. I even managed an extra-curricular run yesterday, since I wanted to go for a run in the beautiful part of Germany that is Saarland. I have two godchildren that live close to Saarbrücken and that I try to visit whenever I can, even though the visits have been fewer and far between the last couple of years. My godson (nine years old in a few weeks) was to receive his first communion and his mom – my cousin (I’ve mentioned that I have sixteen cousins, haven’t I?) – had invited us for the festivities. A child’s first communion is a pretty big deal in Germany, and his older sister’s party three years ago had been a wonderful celebration. My mom and dad, my brother and his wife and several aunts and cousins had arrived for the weekend and as is customary, enormous amounts of food were served with relatively short intervals. I myself arrived just in time for lunch on Saturday and it seemed to me that I haven’t even washed down the last of the German sausages with a glass of Bitburger before it was announced that dinner was just around the corner. Adding to all that were the half-dozen or so boxes of homemade Slovak sweets and cookies that my aunts had brought in the trunk of their car. I’m telling you, one gets heavier by the minute during these family gatherings.

I had set my alarm for 06.00 on Sunday morning in order to get a head start before breakfast and the departure to church, and as I sat on the stone steps tying my shoes outside the front door, I shivered a bit in the cold morning air. The hills around the house are pretty undulating and steep, so even though the sky was already pale in the east, the morning sun hadn’t yet climbed above the ridge in front of the house. Since my hill training has been sorely lacking during these long winter months running indoors, I chose not to start with the steep hill leading straight up a side street from the house, but instead chose a more conservative route down the main road of the small village that led down the small valley towards Heusweiler a few kilometres further down the road. It was painfully slow going after all the food and beer the previous evening, but I had made it to bed at a reasonable hour and really only had my own tired eyes and legs to battle, rather than a headache and hangover.

My cousin and her family live in the little village of Kutzhof, and even though it’s separated by around a kilometre of empty road from the next village down the road, when one starts running around in the immediate neighbourhood, one realizes that it’s all just the same big village. The next cluster of houses is never far from the next bend in the sinuous country road. In no time at all I found myself on the outskirts of Heusweiler and took a quick peek on my Suunto only to realize that I had accidentally paused it after only 400 metres of running. Bummer. I spent a few minutes trying to locate my position on my phone GPS, activated my backup app Runkeeper, and ran off down the road towards the centre of town, where I turned at Lidl to go in the opposite direction. During my run from the house, the sun had slowly begun to warm my back, but running back eastward again I was blinded by the sun in my eyes. Luckily, there were always sidewalks to run on so I wasn’t in any immediate danger of being run over by someone. I had run flat and downhill most of my run and now started the slow and painful climb back up again. I could have spared myself a bit of nausea if I had turned back the exact same road I had come, since the hills weren’t as cruel there, but instead of turning right at the intersection at the start of town, I continued up the hill towards Numborn on the other side of A8, one of the highway-arteries criss-crossing the region. I passed over a bridge that spanned the Autobahn and saw that the morning traffic was getting started, even though it was early Sunday morning. They love their cars, the Germans. At this point, I started to regret my lack of hill-training for the last six months. That’s the downside of running so much indoors. My calves have withered to a pair of small, chicken-like muscles, bitterly reminiscing their long lost glory days when they would have easily mastered these puny Saarlandisch hills. As it was, I only grumbled and sweated my way up and up the road.

At any rate, the view was magnificent. The hill I was running up fell away softly to the southeast, revealing the valley I had just run down in the opposite direction, and the sun had by now risen high up into the sky, illuminating the landscape with those pale rays of light you only see at dawn. The dewy grass by the road watered my ankles and right here I stopped to enjoy the view, accompanied by the many birds chirping in the trees behind me. Also, my lungs and legs needed the break. I’ve run here several times before, so I didn’t need to check my GPS to know that I had to turn right down on Barbarastraße to get back home to Kutzhof. I had imagined the downhill as a triumphant run back to the house again, but it was every bit as painful as the uphill run had been. Curse those wretched legs! I arrived just in time for breakfast, with everybody already gathered round one of the large tables in the kitchen. I sat down next to my cousin Maros, grabbed a bowl of corn flakes and smiled a happy smile. I love breakfast after my morning runs, even though the morning runs themselves are a bit of a nuisance. Maybe you remember that I told you that Andrej, the husband of one of my cousins, completed his first ever marathon a few weeks ago? Well, Maros finished his first marathon last weekend: the beautiful Paris Marathon, and in an impressive sub-4 hour time as well! Huge congrats! So now we’re four marathoners in the family, not counting Jakob. And there’s more to come.

 

I thought I’d round off this week’s entry by showing you last week’s training schedule. As long as I remember, I’d like to update you with more specific progress like this all the way to the race in August. So here it is, on popular demand. My training schedule. Enjoy, and speak to you soon!

 

Monday         13 km, calm tempo

Tuesday         12 km (3k warm-up, 6k marathon tempo, 3k wind-down)

Wednesday   10 km, restitution

Thursday       10 km, restitution

Friday             27 km, calm and steady tempo

Sunday           12,4 km (400 vertical metres), first hill-training in ages

Total               84,4 km

 

Running For Charity: Hand In Hand International.

In the last few years, Jakob & Jakob – together with my dad, Jozef – have raised more than 70 000 SEK for charity. Reece’s Rainbow, UNICEF, the Children’s Ward at St Francis’ Hospital and Hope For Children are the organisations that we have supported through our running. This year, we have chosen to raise money for another kind of organisation. Hand in Hand International was founded in 2003 by Dr Kalpana Sankar and Percy Barnevik, and their initial goal was to get local children out of factories and into schools. With time however, it became clear that in order to deal effectively with child labor they needed to get to the root of the problem: combating poverty. And what better way to deal with this problem than creating jobs? Which is why Hand in Hand started to focus on fighting poverty through creating jobs with grassroots entrepreneurship. In November 2012, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon released a statement calling on African leaders to “work together to foster job creation and entrepreneurship throughout the continent as critical ways to build a more prosperous and sustainable future for all.” Hand in Hand has supported the creation of some 1.38 million businesses and 1.96 million jobs worldwide to date, and their long term is to create 10 million jobs for some of the world’s poorest residents.

Jakob & Jakob and Jozef have decided to support Hand in Hand International and will raise money for the charity in connection with their big adventure this year; the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc. We hope that you, our readers, supporters, friends, families and co-workers will once again take up the challenge and donate money to this honourable cause. We are still in the process of establishing an online donating webpage – just as we have done in the past – and as soon as we have it ready we will let you know. Please help us break our records and reach 100 000 SEK of total donations for our combined charities!

Randonnée in Wyller and Snowy Trails in Bäckefors

I have friends who run more than 5000 km a year. That’s a hundred km a week, more or less. Every week. I have nothing but respect for runners in their category. They’re awesome. Which is why I seldom brag about my own meagre accumulated sums in this blog. Well, OK. Sometimes I do. Like now. Last week I ran 85 km, and the week before that 87 km. Wohooo! 172 km in two weeks is not bad for being me. And I’m still 21 weeks (and four days, seven hours – but who’s counting?) away from starting UTMB. God only knows what my coach Sondre has in store for me further down the line. Nothing painless, that’s for sure.

Last time, I complained about the lack of outdoor running. It’s part injury paranoia and part practicality on my part. The truth is that the weather can’t be trusted in this city. A week ago, I was warming my face in the sunshine of close to two-digit plus temperatures. One day later Oslo was hit by a snowy weather front so hard that they had to close the airport for several hours while they packed away the lawnmowers and ran around looking for the keys to their snow-clearing trucks. But I have been training outdoors a few times in the last month, though. A few weeks ago, Hedda sent me an sms to ask if I would like to walk up Wyllerløypa with her, the slalom slope, you remember, where Oslos Bratteste is run every fall. Only now, we would walk up it with randonnée skis, something I have never tried before. Since I’ve been up the hill many, many times, I knew exactly how far and high I would have to lift my heavy ski boots and skis in order to get to the top. It was 400 metres of vertical hell, as always. And I loved every second. Especially the downhill part where we got to ski down again. I think I could get used to this. And I’ve always dreamt of walking the Haute Route, the most famous ski touring route in the world, starting in Chamonix and finishing in Zermatt. So that’s another adventure I need to train for. See there, my Love? You are hereby forewarned.  

 

 

 My second outdoor training this month was with Jakob, close to his parent’s new house. I helped Jakob out with some renovating at the house around six months ago, right after our Morenic Trail-adventure in fact, and I was curious as to how far he had come in his solo-effort of fixing and polishing since I hade been there last. Jakob picked me up at the train station in Halden, and after having crossed the border into Sweden and an hour of driving through the forests of Dalsland, we parked outside his parent’s new house in Bäckefors. We quickly pulled on our running tights, shrugged into our jackets and stepped into our shoes before we headed out the door. We kept a leisurely pace when we left the house and headed up the road towards the old ironworks before we turned left onto a side road that headed over a hill and along one of the few fields that dot the countryside, swallowed up by the vast forests that make up much of the province of Dalsland. The dirt road was covered in 20 cm of wet snow, save for a fresh set of wheel tracks that made for an easier run as we chose a track each and ran side by side down the lane. Fairly quickly we reached an asphalt road that led up one of the higher hills in the area, and there we aimed for Bäckeforsmasten; a 327 metre high TV-mast that supplies the region with both digital TV-transmissions and analog radio. The top of the tower was lost in the heavy clouds that surrounded the hill, but we could clearly hear voices shouting to one another from up on high, probably belonging to maintenance workers. Or vandals. We never did find out, since at this point we turned down and off the wet asphalt road onto a forest trail completely covered in snow. We ran carefully down the path, trying to avoid tripping over roots and fallen branches and exited from the trail onto yet another dirt road at the bottom of the hill, where we turned left again and settled into a wheel track each. After only a kilometer or so, we found ourselves running along the western bank of Marsjön, the largest lake in the area, and both of us marvelled in silence at the gorgeous sight before us. The sky was overcast with heavy, leaden skies and the surface of the lake was still and completely undisturbed, as if it was only waiting for a pair of runners to silently pass by to complete the painting. Wonderful. We turned after a few kilometers and went back the way we came, only not turning back up towards the TV-mast but rather continuing along a gravel road towards the ruins of the old smithy not far from where the old ironworks of Bäckefors had once lain. Mud-spattered, wet and happy, we jogged up to the door of the house again, entered, took of our shoes and settled down around the kitchen table where Mama Kegel had prepared small and thick Polish apple pancakes with hot chocolate. Believe me, life doesn’t get any better than this. 

 

 

 

 On a final note, I’d like to mention my cousin Eva’s husband, Andrej, and give him a huge pat on the back, congratulatory hug and toast of champagne. Yesterday, he finished his first marathon – the ČSOB Bratislava Marathon – in an impressive sub-4 hour time! Andrej is the head of Krizovany Road Runners and can now call himself a marathoner! Maros, one of my other dear cousins, is planning to run Paris Marathon next weekend, so keep your fingers crossed for him as well. I’m dumbstruck by all of the running talent our family has displayed in the last few years, and there’s more to come. On a final, self-congratulatory note: Jakob and Jakob would like to think that we’ve helped to inspire these achievements in a small way, and hope that we continue to do so through our stories. You guys are going to add to them in the years to come.

Age. It’s wonderful.

I’m getting seriously tired of running indoors… Good mental training, blah, blah, blah. Running outdoors in Oslo during the past weeks has been a big no-no because of all the thick ice on the sidewalks. I wouldn’t want to slip and get injured but I’d also like to avoid putting too much pressure on my heel. I’ve been feeling a kind of numb ache in it the last couple of mornings, but I hope I’m imagining things. Sondre has put me on a firm and steadily increasing regimen of kilometres for the last four weeks and I’ve slowly been accumulating extra kilometers each week. After Morenic Trail last fall I would guess I’ve averaged slightly less than 50 km a week; enough to keep in decent form, but not nearly enough variation in my program to progress and excel. Which is what I’m hopefully doing now. Next week I’ll move from four to five runs a week, and even if I’ve trained up to six, a few times even seven days a week at most (topping out at nine trainings a week at the peak: three each of running, swimming and biking before Forestman) a few years ago, it’s been a while. 

I’d like to say that’s it’s age getting to me, but considering the fact that I’m not only 12 days older than Marit Bjørgen (the most-decorated female winter Olympian of all time and as of today, the female skier with most gold medals in the World Cup when her team came in first at the 4×7,5 km relay), ten days older than  Johan Olsson (who won gold in the men’s 10 km freestyle yesterday) and one year older than Zlatan Ibrahimovic himself, then, well, I should probably not complain. If they are still performing at the top of their game, then why shouldn’t I? Or as Zlatan likes to put it: ”I’m like a wine: the older I am, the better I get.”

 

So quit whining, and start running those intervals! For the record, today’s run will feature the following:

 

3k warm-up, then 5 times (3 mins (14 km/h) + 60 sec pause; 2 mins (14,5 km/h) + 60 sec pause; 1 min (15 km/h) + 30 sec pause; 100 m jog rest), and finally 2k wind-down. Around 12k in all.

 

One month to go before I venture outside. Too cautious? Maybe. But it’ll be worth it. Trust me.











Thank You For A Lovely 2014

Even though we’ve run fewer races this year than we did last year (seven competitions in 2014 compared to eight in 2013), this summer and fall saw us at the starting line of two 100+ km races, both of them in Italy: The North Face^® Lavaredo Ultra Trail in Cortina and Morenic Trail in Andrate. It’s also been a year of extremes with Jakob and Jakob’s first ever DNF as opposed to the first ultra any one of us has finished solo. I’ve always considered myself blessed by the fact that I’ve mostly had an injury-free career as a runner, with a bad case of runner’s knee prior to Edinburgh marathon a few years ago as the only exception. But this year has also seen me battling plantar fasciitis since early April, leading to the longest running sabbatical I have ever had since I started running: four full weeks in the middle of the summer. Did it help? Not. One. Bit. Finally, I started taping my heel with regular sports tape and moved indoors to do my running on the softer treadmills of the gym. Excruciatingly boring, but – as I have always maintained – good mental training. Nevertheless, the last 12 months have been lovely and full of running-related good fun. Oh! I also ran my first ever race with my brother! Which was his debut race as well! And I ran my first run as a balloon boy! How could I forget? A year full of firsts, then. Do at least one thing a day that scares you, someone once said. You know what’s scaring me at the moment? Actually managing to get a starting number to Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc® this summer. Yep, dad, Jakob and I have submitted our applications to the crazy race week in Chamonix. Jakob and dad will try to win spots in the Orsières – Champex – Chamonix, also known as the OCC, featuring 3300+ vertical metres and 53 horisontal kilometres, while I have set my sight on the Beast: UTMB. 14^th January we will know for sure. So keep you fingers crossed. The rest of next year’s races all depend on whether or not we get to fly to Chamonix in August, but the preliminary plans include a spring marathon somewhere in Europe, a brandnew Ecotrail in Oslo in May and a precipitous skyrace in Tromsø in August.

 

Meanwhile, please allow us to wish all of you, our faithful and beautiful readers, a prosperous and happy new 2015, full of exciting challenges! Here are some pics from our exploits in 2014.

 

 

A Drop In The Ocean

As most of you know, Jakob, my dad and I raised money for the charity Reece’s Rainbow during the mountainrace Lavaredo Ultra Trail in Italy almost five months ago. Reece’s Rainbow sponsor families who wish to adopt children with Down’s syndrome, that are HIV-positive or have other special needs, often from orphanages overseas. As always, you wonderful people helped us raise an amazing $ 2 325 for Reece’s Rainbow right here. A few days ago, I got a mail from Michelle at Reece’s Rainbow, asking us whether we had chosen a specific child to support yet. We asked her to choose a child for us, since we thought that she was best suited for the task and knew which adoption processes would need our money the most. Yesterday, Michelle replied that she had gone through the children on their site several times, feeling that she was unable to choose one child over another, and once again asked us to make a choice. I spent last evening browsing through the photos and stories on Reece’s Rainbow’s website and I appreciate Michelle’s dilemma. The more photos I saw and stories I read, the more I felt that our donation was a drop in the ocean for these kids. To spread all of the money out thin for all of them would accomplish a small bit, but with literally hundreds of children on the website, our donation would be only that. A drop. But the ocean would be smaller without that drop.

My wife, bless her, finally stumbled upon the child that Jakob, dad and I have chosen. Jacob is 4,5 years old and lives in China. He doesn’t have a definitive diagnosis, but probably has Down’s syndrome and a congenital heart defect featuring a ventricular septal defect. He hasn’t started to speak yet but understands the word “no” and doesn’t like to be bathed. He’s stubborn but gets along well with the other kids at the orphanage. He can roll but has poor muscle tone and can’t crawl or sit on his own. He can hold objects and follow them with his eyes. Considering his name, stubborness and diagnoses (I’ve recently started to specialize in pediatric cardiology), the choice was obvious. If you’d like to donate specifically to this small guy, visit his site right here.

If you like, you can consider Jacob the face of all of the children you have helped us support through your generous donations during the last few years with the various charities we’ve raised money for, including HOPE for Children, UNICEF, the children’s ward at Saint Francis’ Hospital in Katete, Zambia, and Reece’s Rainbow. 70 000 SEK in total and counting! Your commitment to our causes inspires us to continue our fundraising and we promise we’ll be back with a new challenge for you next summer!

In conclusion, please let us leave you with a few words by one of the greatest saints of the last century, the blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta:

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten. That is a much greater hunger than the person who has nothing to eat.

God bless!

J + J + J

Three Points

So this one was for the ego. Simple as that. My failure at TNF Lavaredo Ultra Trail in June has gnawed at me more than I have probably been willing to admit. Throwing in the towel after 103 km with only 16 km to go was probably one of the toughest decisions I have ever had to take during a race, especially since the consequences were so clear. No finish, no three qualifying points, no UTMB 2015. And that’s quite probably the problem. Regular readers of this blog might have seen tendencies leaning towards an obsession, and rightly so. I myself didn’t notice the symptoms until after our DNF in the Dolomites. Lavaredo was a singularly beautiful race run in the parts of Europe I love the most. But that wasn’t what I had focused on. I had focused on the hunt. I had focused on the three points. I had, quite frankly, focused on not the race at hand, but on a race more than a year forward in time. And that is why I failed. I forgot to live in the moment. I forgot to enjoy myself. And most importantly, I had forgotten why I was there in the first place. To spend a weekend with my best friend doing what we love best. Get exhausted with pure physical effort and then enjoy the fruits of our labours through relaxing, eating and drinking well.

Which is why Jakob and I found ourselves at a sunny terrace in Piemonte last week, studying a detailed map of the region and trying to find the easiest way by car to the eight checkpoints of my next ultra race. Jakob had politely declined another shot at the three points we needed for the UTMB, citing varying form and most importantly failing motivation as reasons. Nevertheless, he had cheerfully promised to accompany me as a morale-boosting crew member, planning to drive to each and every checkpoint, backtrack by foot along the trail until meeting me and then run with me to my next water station. My physical form was not in the best of states, but my mental form was leagues better than a few months ago. After careful analysis of the Lavaredo race I had firmly put all thoughts of UTMB and three points aside and was now focusing on enjoying a small local race in the middle of the Alpine foothills.

Morenic Trail (113 km, 2300+ m) is so called because it follows an enormous moraine left after the last ice age and placed south of the mouth leading into Val d’Aosta. A moraine is an accumulation of debris (of rocks and soil) left after a glacier has advanced over land and this particular Italian moraine had left an almost perfect circular imprint on the countryside. During the race briefing in Santa Marta in Ivrea, we were told that the race would start by the little village of Andrate (800 m) and run southeast to “six o’clock” at Ponte Dora Baltea (200 m) where it would turn northwest again and end up in Brosso (800 m). The race started at 09.00 and I felt a little odd leaving Jakob behind at the starting line, taking photos as we ran off. There were only 111 runners planning to finish the entire race on their own and an additional 50 two- or four-man teams participating in the relay, running either half or roughly a quarter of the race each. A world apart from Oslo halfmarathon a few weeks ago with it’s 25 000 participants. As I followed a small group of runners down the moraine ridge, I reflected on the profile of the race. 2300+ vertical metres wasn’t a lot compared to the 5800+ of Lavaredo, but the race map was a bit misleading. The first 20 km would be more or less downhill with the majority of the climbs being thrown in during the last 25 km, leaving the middle 70 km more or less undulating up and down between 200 m and 400 m above sea level.

I had never before attempted a 100+ km race without the aid of Jakob and this race would prove whether or not I was strong enough to finish a race of this magnitude on my own. The first checkpoint after 14 km flew past in a blur and I only stopped for long enough to shrug out of my windjacket and stuff it down my newly acquired running vest before the little pack of runners I was following disappeared. We ran on a soft and elevated path fringed by high grass on the top of the moraine with the ridge falling away on either side. It was pleasant running with just the kind of footing I like best. The temperature was optimal – around 15° C – with slightly overcast skies and a slight breeze. Perfect. I was careful not to speed up too much since I didn’t want to get carried away this early in the race. A 113 km is still a lot of ground to cover on foot. A few km before the half marathon-mark at checkpoint two, Lago di Bertignano, I heard clapping and cheering and looked up to see Jakob with a backpack smiling me along. What a sight for sore eyes! Even if I hadn’t felt too bad thus far, I suddenly ran on with another kind of spring in my step and joined in with him as I reported my status and patted him on the back. We emerged from the trees by the lakeside into a clearing where cars were parked and people where cheering. I only stopped for the few minutes it took to fill up my twin water bottles and gulp down a cup of sunwarm coke before Jakob and I set off again. I had decided against eating anything at the checkpoints this early in the race, relying on my test diet of trusted coconut gelpaste (efficient but yucky) and Snickers/Bounty bars. Jakob left me after a few minutes to jog back to the car in order to meet me at Masino, checkpoint three at 38 km. As he left, I latched on to the back of a runner I had followed earlier in the race, a short and wiry guy in black shorts and shirt, with a short crop of greying hair, a black beard, tattoos of the virgin Mary on each of his calves and with a Franciscan cross and the words Laude and Domine (I couldn’t see the rest of the phrase properly) on the sleeve of his jersey. He also had a tatto of a gun on his right forearm and other intricate designs on his left. I wasn’t sure if he was a convict on parole or a Franciscan friar on leave, but since he held a steady pace I decided to join him. We ran on with quite the clip and to be honest he was running a bit too fast for me, but I had taken the twin virgin Marys as a sign and decided to grit my teeth. Once, he glanced sideways at me with a scowl and when I managed to keep his pace, he gave me curt nod of acknowledgment and we continued together in this way to the next checkpoint. We crossed several trafficked roads and the race marshals did a good job of stopping the few bewildered drivers staring at us at every crossroad. As we got closer to Masino, Jakob turned up and I waved for him to join me down the hill towards the little town. At checkpoint three I lost my tattooed companion and I continued on my own since Jakob had to eat some lunch before meeting me at the halfway point at Ponte Dora Baltea. The moraine had become less visible in the hilly countryside and the sun was beginning to burn through the clouds in an unpleasant way. A blackclad shadow caught up with me and after a few minutes of silent running, he turned to me with the hint of a smile and said “Io sono Matteo. Piacere”, and I responded in kind “Mi chiamo Jakob. Piacere.” And just like that, we were brothers in arms, heading for checkpoint four. I ran ahead a few times and when I started to walk in order to eat a chocolate bar and gulp down some water, he would pass me and run ahead for a few minutes until we joined up again. The sun appeared again and at this point I started to suffer a bit. Matteo and I filled our waterbottles at a water fountain in a square in one of the small villages we passed through, and then continued on. He was speeding up a bit and I was having difficulty catching up. I started walking along a canal built to water the fields and after half an hour Jakob turned up like a Godsend, cheering me up and walking with me to the halfway point. After crossing the bridge, we arrived at quite a big checkpoint where I rearranged my backpack and filled up my water bottles before resting a bit on one of the benches. Matteo turned up, patted me on the back and asked Jakob to take a picture of “mio socio” and him. Wonderful, the kind of camaraderie that springs up between previous strangers in a race like this. Jakob and I started out again and dove into the forest by the side of the road, walking along the edge of a small lake before Jakob left me once again and I started to climb up through the forest.

The second part of the race featured closer checkpoints and within a short 90 minutes, Jakob joined me again and together we climbed the devilishly steep road up to Chiesa di Santo Stefano and checkpoint five at 67 km. I waved to Matteo whom I hadn’t seen since Lago Bertignano and who was getting a legmassage from one of the physios, and gratefully accepted a small cup of soup broth from a huge man in a blue volunteer t-shirt. The climb had left me with wobbly legs and a bad feeling. I was hoping to reach checkpoint six at 77 km before dark, but it would be a close call judging by my form. Jakob punched me in the arm and wished me luck before heading back to our Fiat that he had left at the bottom of the hill to eat some dinner. The 10 km to Vialfrè were a pain and I stumbled on sharp rocks several times. Darkness was falling fast and the trail had imperceptibly begun to turn uphill. Running into the small town, my mood turned upward at the lovely movie sets and cutouts of famous Italian actors that flanked the path. I ran past scenes from Amarcord and Dolce Vita before finally emerging out onto a square where Jakob was waiting with a cup of warm broth at the checkpoint. He helped me hold my running vest while I stripped out of my soaked jersey and drew out my longsleeved old Icebreaker and rummaged around in the bag for my headlamp. Feeling considerably invigorated I highfived Jakob and left the square for the forest trails surrounding the village.

In no time at all it had become pitch black. I still had 36 km to go, but from now on my headlight would show me the way. I managed to get lost almost at once, but luckily found my way pretty quickly. There were rustlings in the underbrush all around me and every now and then a loud thump in the ferns would announce the impact of yet another spiky chestnut bombarding the forest floor. During the soft light of day these thumps had been entertaining but immersed in a cloak of darkness they were anything but. I imagined all kinds of exotic creatures prowling through the bushes. Wild boars. Bears. Tigers. But I managed to keep my calm. Just. In order to distract myself in Jakob’s absence, I turned on an audiobook by Bill Bryson on my iPhone and listened to his musings about the development of mahjong and monopoly in America. After a while I noticed a headlamp moving towards me in the opposite direction and when I came closer, I realized it was Jakob who had walked quite the distance to reach me. Gratefully, I put my hand on his shoulder and we started walking briskly up the next slope before running down the final part toward Ponte dei Preti at 91 km. Sitting down next to an older gentleman by the table, I asked for my first hot meal of the day – a plate of Penne Bolognese – that I wolfed down in about 60 seconds. Feeling wonderfully invigorated, I swallowed half a can of coke and was yet again on my way with a wave to Jakob. 22 km to go, almost every single one of them uphill. I crossed the bridge and reflected that it was indeed a brutal way to finish an ultra race, jumbling in more than two thirds of the vertical metres during the final halfmarathon. I turned on my iPhone and listened to Bill talk about the words that had been contributed to the American language during World War II and the Vietnam War as I turned my steps up through the forest and into the night. It started raining after half an hour and I sent a prayer of thanks skyward that the downpour hadn’t started earlier in the day. I shrugged into my windjacket once again and pulled my neckbuff up around my head as the rain increased and the wind picked up. Jakob met me just as Bill was finishing the story of the Wright brothers and their airplane and we ran the final two kilometres down to Lago di Alice Superiore and the final checkpoint at 103 km.

Even though Jakob had chosen not to run the race in it’s entirety, I added up his own legwork today to at least 25 km, which was pretty impressive for a crew member. I hadn’t met a single runner since I had left Ponte dei Preti and sat alone with a Red Bull, Jakob and two middle aged Italian volunteers at checkpoint eight before pulling a deep breath and venturing out into the rain for the last 10 km. Bill was now talking about Charles Lindbergh and how Boeing 747 had been named Jumbojet after the biggest circus elephant in the world and I simply trodded along, past a small lake, up through a thicket of birch trees and out onto an asphalt road for the final stretch. I could hear the music long before I could see the finishing line and when I passed the church above the village square, Jakob materialized from below one of the streetlamps and gave me a highfive before heading down ahead of me to cheer at the finish line. Once again I hadn’t seen a single runner during this stretch and when I finally saw the tents and lights at the finish line a huge cheer went up from the thirty or so spectators standing around the one of the main race leaders who was yelling into a microphone. I was interviewed in Italian and managed to blurt out something about “É veramente stata una bellissima gara!” before I got huge medal around my neck and was whisked off for official photographies under the canopy of one of the tents. Jakob met me with a huge hug and we laughed and sat down together in a couple of plastic chairs while a lady handed us a beer to share. I felt an enormous sense of accomplishment and joy over the fact that I had managed to run 113 km on my own. Well, most of them anyway. And you know what? I finished 21^st out of 111 starting runners! My first ever top-25 placement!

So now I have eight points. So what? Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc? I honestly don’t know. I need to process the Morenic Trail for a bit, and then we’ll see what will come next. To be continued.

A Red Balloon

I’ve always been a bit sceptical participating in big, local races. Don’t get me wrong. I love running Nordmarkstravern in Oslo or Sylvesterloppet in Göteborg. Those are smaller races for enthusiasts by enthusiasts. They’re organized by small, local clubs and accomodate no more than a few hundred runners at most. Running in these races gives you a sense of kinship with your competitors and the volunteers, something that is even more tangible in the mountain and desert ultras we’ve competed in. This as opposed to huge local races such as the behemoth Göteborgsvarvet, the world’s largest halfmarathon where more than 64 000 runners registered for last year’s race (although ”only” 45 000 finished, probably reflecting that it’s easy to sign up for a race but quite a lot harder to actually show up at the starting line). I’ve had a huge problem with that particular race for many years and have never considered entering for several reasons. It’s just that most of those big races aren’t for me.

My wife calls me a snob. And yes, maybe I am. I am very well aware of the hypocrisy that lies in my own fascination of the biggest and most media-hyped race of them all – New York City Marathon. But I must say that the race-expo with all the NYC Marathon-branded stuff made me a bit nauseous. I have a complicated set of rules regarding my choice of races. But the simple rule generally applied is: the smaller, the better. There are a few exceptions to this rule and those are mainly the classic races like the marathons in New York, Boston and Tokyo or Marathon des Sables and Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc. Göteborgsvarvet, Lidingöloppet and Stockholm Marathon have always seemed a bit too close to home for my taste. What’s the point of running marathons if you don’t get to travel to another country – or better yet; another continent – to participate?

But then I moved to Oslo and found that this place is full of lovely local little races just around the corner from where we live. Nordmarkstravern and Grefsenkollen Opp to name but a few. But even so, I had never considered to run in one of the biggest annual events in the Oslo running calendar: Oslo Marathon. You can choose between the ”10 for Grete” (in honor of the great runner Grete Waitz: NINE-time winner of NYC Marathon, breaking the world record in that race for THREE consecutive years), the Oslo Halfmarathon and Oslo Marathon.

As you can imagine, I even surprised myself when I said yes to becoming a pacer at Oslo Halfmarathon last week. Marathon Tim, our head coach for the Run Tough-sessions on Mondays in Frogner, needed a few pacers for the halfmarathon and marathon. ”Will we be getting any balloons?”, we asked. ”I can promise you a big red one each”, Tim answered. Sold! And so it was that I found myself with a red balloon inked with the number ”1.55” tied to my running shorts last Saturday morning. My fellow Urban Tribes coaches Niklas, Charlotte and Margo had also answered the summons and we all met up in a big, white tent next to the starting area an hour before the start of the half marathon. The marathon had started at 09.30 in the morning and as we were changing into our sponsor shirts, a guy came sauntering through the tent opening with a ”3.00”-balloon trailing happily behind him. This guy was apparently so comfortable running marathons that he was pacing runners with capabilities far surpassing my own. 3.00? Not in a million years. Last fall saw me lower my PB with 20 minutes to 3.36 and I’m hoping to manage 3.15 within five years in order to qualify for Boston Marathon. But that’s still a looong way off. Charlotte tied her 2.00-balloon to her waist and Niklas and I picked a 1.55- balloon each before heading down to the start. We immediately drew a lot of attention and several runners started to inch toward us through the throng. The speaker started the countdown for our starting group (number 4, setting out 15 minutes after the elite) and just like that, we were off! Since we were running in the same group, Niklas and I decided to split up in order to accomodate more runners and I edged over to the left side of the street leaving Rådhusplassen behind and passing House of Oslo on my right. There were loads and loads of people, more than I was accustomed to during a race, and I was struggling to keep an even pace jostling between the sharp elbows of my fellow runners. I passed the first km in a bit under seven minutes which was horribly slow since I had to keep a pace of 5.27 in order to finish in time. Running through the streets of Frogner I got even more nervous and picked up the pace quite a bit in order to recover lost speed. Suddenly I felt a soft tug at the waistband of my shorts and a cry of ”There goes the balloon!” from behind me, but I didn’t have a chance to react. I had just passed 2 km and as I glanced up I saw the balloon winking at me before disappearing behind one of the trees lining the avenue down towards Skøyen. Luckily we pacers were equipped with a backup-plan in the form of signs on our chest and back sporting our pace time to give people a chance to follow us in case of balloon failure. So much for bringing my big red balloon home to little Panda. Running past the shops by Skøyen station and crossing the bridge over the highway we turned left onto the asphalt road along Frognerstranda taking us back towards Aker Brygge and the starting line again.

With the sun warming my face and the wind from the sea to our right, this was easily the most beautiful part of the race. I had written my kilometers splits next to my starting number and could see that I was 30 seconds faster than my anticipated time. Perfect. Passing Rådhusplassen and running below the old royal holdfast of Akershus Slott on our left we followed the quay to one of my favourite buildings in Oslo – the marbleclad Oslo Opera House – before entering the most boring part of the course. For some unfathomable reason or other, Oslo halfmarathon (and Oslo marathon which consists of two loops of the halfmarathon course) here swings down on narrow sidewalks of mindnumbingly boring greyness ducking in and around dusty building sites and throwing loops around parts of the industrial harbour. There are so many beautiful parts of Oslo we could have run through and they choose the ugly industrial harbour to entertain us. Why not introduce a loop around the Royal Castle? Or up around or through beautiful Frognerparken? It would have made for a much more appealing run. I don’t know if they’re worried for the amount of traffic they would hold up or if they have any other reason for not drawing the course through a few more of the scenic parts of the capital, but if New York can close it’s traffic down for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, so can Oslo. Trying to avoid tripping over bike stands by the Barcode buildings on the narrow sidewalk, I forced myself to slow down again since I was now almost 50 seconds faster than I should be running. As we ran up towards Tøyen and the Botanical Gardens I had my eyes on a swivel searching for miss H and Panda who’d promised to cheer me on around there but since my balloon had abandoned me they only found me when I passed them in a blur and only had time to shout a big good luck. I was later informed that my father-in-law Per had indeed dutifully paused his own run and given his granddaughter a big hug before running on with a wave. Some people are too focused on PB’s, my wife hinted after the race. Regardless of my time on today’s race I would indeed cash in a PB since this was the first time I was running a halfmarathon. The hill up to Tøyen was the only vertical excitement I got during the race, the rest of it being almost completely flat. Zigzagging through the centre of town at Kvadraturen, I kept an even pace and as I saw the finish line I resisted an extremely powerful urge to sprint my butt off towards the big arch by the finish right in front of Rådhuset. I passed the finish line in 1.54.42, bringing in my faithful runners with 18 seconds to spare. That’s what I call timing!

I was very pleasantly surprised with my experience of Oslo halfmarathon and would love to run again, maybe the full one next year. This race has made me reconsider participating in the bigger local races. Maybe it’s time to try Göteborgsvarvet? I was sorry I lost my balloon but I was more than compensated with the camaraderie with my fellow balloon racers and my new status as an official pacer. It was a well-organized race with perfectly spaced water stations and friendly support staff. If they draw the course past king Harald’s bedroom window and around Monolitten in Frognerparken next year, then trust me: it would be bested by few marathons in Norway.

I hope I get a balloon next year too.