So I got pleasantly pressured into trying a SwimRun last weekend. Sounded like fun and one of my junior triathletes was keen to try it out as well. I’d been thinking of testing one out for years (Sweden is the hub of this crazy fringe sport) but never got around to it. There’s a lot of gear and strategy one has to learn as well so that always held me back. Anyway two experienced swim run hot shots from Kalmar helped us out with some gear and took us on a training session last Thursday so we could learn the ‘ropes’. (You are tied to your teammate with a 2-3m bungee cord 😉🤪)
That went great and was the most fun I’ve had in training for years. So off we went Sunday morning to see how many rookie mistakes we could avoid making. We ended up throwing caution into the wind and went out at a good hard pace with the leaders. We kept gaining time on the run then losing time getting gear in place before we jumped in the water, then holding our own in the swim. We were actually really quick getting out of the water and Simon (my patawan) made sure we were straight back to full speed on the runs 🥵. There were seven run and swim legs so we started to get a little more efficient as we went and other than forgetting to put the pull-bouy on for one of the swim legs and a face plant tripping over a root (most of the running was serious one-track forest trails) we did pretty decent and ended up winning 🥇 the short race.
So that was a nice way to finish off the season and we’re already thinking about doing a few more of those next summer. I highly recommend trying one to any triathlete – they are great fun and good training for triathlon plus the races are more old school like triathlon was 20-30yrs ago. Big thanks to Malin and Linda (team Malinda 😎 who one the women’s long race btw 🤩) for hooking us up and teaching us some strategy.
