I went to a summit at the start of the Swedish EU presidency. It was a different kind of trip, because naturally the Swedes wanted to show off their wild and wonderful homeland, so off we all went in a chartered plane, to Sweden’s northernmost town Kiruna, way above of the Arctic circle, whence to discuss the presidency agenda and priorities.
It’s different there because this far north the nights are long in the winter (20 hours plus) and the only hope for natural light rests with the magical – but fickle – aurora borealis, or Northern lights. So when we arrived at four in the afternoon, to be greeted by the chairman of the Sameting (parliament of the indigenous Same people) and other local dignitaries, all decked out in impressively serious and furry winter gear, it was in pitch darkness. The Commissioners were whisked off to the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, while the skeleton crew of foot soldiers (myself included) was shipped to a rather more mundane hotel inside the security parameter of the conference centre.
Not that I’m complaining. We had a minder assigned to us, and actual hotel rooms waiting when we arrived – unlike some of the security detail (there were hundreds of policemen flown in for the occasion), who rumor had it were lodged all over, in old military barracks and even bunk beds in local garages; not a pleasant place to sleep when it’s -10C, but still preferable to standing watch outside the premises in the snow throughout the night, as some did.
It’s easy to forget how quiet it gets when a place is covered in snow. All noises are dampened by it, and so as we took a ride through town it was eerily silent. It wasn’t just due to that, tho. Kiruna is a mining town, situated literally on top of the world’s biggest iron ore mine, and because the latter is expanding, the former has to move; the old part of town is being evacuated so that mining operations can be carried out right underneath it, and that means most of the houses are vacant, staring emptily at us as we drove around. It’s effectively a ghost town.
That feeling of otherworldliness is further enhanced by the sight of Iron Mountain (Malmberget) across the valley, covered in lights and smoke in the darkness, like a vision of Mordor (mining goes on 24/7, as there is little point to adhere to a normal working day when you’re miles below ground). Add to that the fabulous wooden church that looks more like a temple to Norse gods than to their middle-eastern counterpart, and you get the feeling you’re in some Tolkien/post-apocalyptic/Viking/snow zombie crossover story.
The next day couldn’t be more different: while the Commissioners have a chance to hob-nob with the King of Sweden, open a satellite launch site, and other media-friendly events, those of us who weren’t allowed near the Ice Hotel last night are now given a guided tour of the venue, and it doesn’t disappoint: it’s like a very different kind of fairy tale, one where you are transported to a world of ice – the rooms, the furniture, even things like chandeliers and glasses are made out of ice, and the designs and decorations are incredible; the hotel is rebuilt every year, but they save the best rooms, so over 30 years they have accumulated an incredible array of weird and wonderful rooms (not all of them conducive to a good night’s sleep, it has to be said!). The overall impression is one of a winter wonderland (in the Elsa-from-Frozen-meets-C.S.-Lewisian sense) and the setting – all forests and snow covered vistas plus the frozen river (from which the building blocks of the hotel are taken) – doesn’t do anything to diminish this.
It’s easy to see why it’s popular, but since the sun barely makes it over the horizon (at noon it is fully visible for less than an hour) it is soon dark again, and the politicians get down to business. They spend the afternoon hammering out a work program and looking at various high tech business displays, and then there’s just enough time for a joint press conference of the Swedish PM and the Commission’s President before we all hurry back to the plane and travel back south.
Our 24h adventure is at an end. As we rise into the velvety darkness I peer out for a last chance to see the aurora, but there’s nothing there. Reason enough to come back? Maybe. I find myself next to one of the Commissioners, and discuss the possibility of bookending the presidency with another meeting at the height of summer; he is keen to see the midnight sun but less so about experiencing midge-infested marshes. I tell him how the indigenous people spend a night in early summer sleeping naked in the marshes, getting stung enough to aquire immunity, yet he seems unconvinced by my implied solution. My one attempt at direct lobbying is apparently a failure – but who knows? We’ll see in July.
I had left it until late in the day to plan any activities with the kids for the summer hols, so when my sister suggested we come along on a four-day river raft in Wermland, I jumped at the opportunity. It didn’t start well.
We had driven deep into the forests the previous day and late afternoon we found the rafting outfit. We got our equipment in large, no-nonsense wooden chests, and pitched our tents by the shore in a meadow. Then we got the debriefing: a rundown of the logging history of the region (long and winding), the nature of the Klarälven river (ditto), the potential obstacles we might encounter (submerged sand banks, low-hanging trees, backwater maelstroms – all fun-sounding…) and a quick walkthrough of the knots we’d be using to tie logs together (Did we learn them well enough? We did knot.).
Then a harsh surprise: roll-call tomorrow at 0700 and a 0715 departure to the place up-river where we would build our rafts. That seemed uncalled for, until they finally divulged the reason why; constructing the rafts would take between six and nine hours! The web page made it sound like it was something you could do in an hour, tops…
Given that the seven of us were going to share a whopping three rafts, latched together into one mega-structure, there were no prices for guessing how long it would take us. The forecast for the next day? Nothing. But. Rain.
Not featured: rain and curses.
We woke to a steady drizzle, and drove for about an hour under incontinent skies before we arrived at the construction site, where piles of logs awaited us.
So there we are. It’s an intimidating sight. The stacks are as tall as I am, and the logs range in size from solid to massive, every one of them slick with rain. One 3x3m raft weighs about 1.5 tonnes, so we’ll be shifting the equivalent of three cars’ worth of timber into the river. Bonus: the heftier logs go into the bottom layer (of three), but the piles are a jumble of sizes, a real logjam, so getting them out is akin to a giant game of plockepinn, where every movement can make the logs shift and crush your hands.
We start lugging logs as best we can, dividing them into different sizes, rolling the heaviest ones into the water so we can latch them together. The rain keeps falling, and the kids are questioning our sanity. Did we really volunteer to do this? And pay money for the privilege? I am inclined to side with them, but we are committed to this now, so on we trudge.
The water temperature is a decidedly chilly 15 degrees, numbing our hands and feet; the current is just strong enough to make holding the logs together even more difficult. The clay of the river bottom retains an iron grip on our sandals, but the same clay makes the shore incredibly slippery, so once you wrench your foot free of the water you are likely to slip back down again – all while juggling 600-pound logs. Such fun.
No-one remembers any knots, but after half a raft we at least figure out that we can use the thinner logs to create impromptu rails, which makes getting the heavier ones into the water quite doable – the kids join in and roll tree trunks ten times their weight into the river, which they enjoy.
Timber!
By lunchtime we have finished one raft, and the food dries our dampend spirits, but we’ve got two more to go, so into the river we slosh once again. Other, smaller groups finish their rafts. They load up their kit under the tarpaulin tents and get on board, only to find that the weight of the vessels is now so great that they are instantly stuck. So there they are, stood atop their beached whales, trying to push off with the help of barge poles, effectively trying to lift themselves. Our dreams of Huckleberrying it down a Swedish Mississippi seem shattered, replaced by a robinsonade – we are clearly doomed to be marooned on this beach!
It’s a measure of the general exhaustion level that it takes quite a while for anyone to figure out that the way to get afloat is to get off the raft and lever it free by wedging the barge poles underneath it. Once that is done it is child’s play to set it adrift, but the ordeal isn’t over; several rafts only make it fifty yards or so before settling on a submerged sand bank – we’d been warned about those, true, but so soon? It didn’t seem fair, somehow…
By the time all other groups had pushed off and sailed down the river at what seemed an impossibly slow speed, we were still building our last raft. All in all it took us just under nine hours of backbreaking work, and no-one felt like getting on it when we were done. Instead we pitched our tents and crawled into our sleeping bags, wrung out and cold to the core.
After a fitful night (I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired, or slept so badly), we woke to another dark grey sky, had breakfast in the rain, and finally set off, making sure we steered clear of the first sand bank. Behind us, a timber truck was already offloading the next stacks of logs.
The tempo takes some getting used to. It takes us three quarters of an hour to drift around the first bend in the river. Klarälven is wide and stately, and moves at a decidedly measured pace – rafting here is not for speed demons!
The meandering course is caused by silt deposits that build up on the inside of the main water flow, where the slower speed causes particles to sink to the bottom, which in turn reinforces outward pressure on the water, causing it to press even more against the outside of the next curve. If that all seems a bit technical, all you have to remember is that there is a reason why real estate is cheaper on the outside of any river bend – sooner or later the waters will take it.
This also means that the main flow of the water will always be tending towards the outside of any given curve, and you want your raft to steer clear of the inside, where silt deposits will make sand banks all but a certainty. That’s the general rule, but it ain’t always the case, as we soon discover.
Because there has been a lot of rain lately the risk of running aground on sand banks isn’t great, they told us. Well, two hours into our river run we beat the odds and get firmly stuck. The water is shallow enough that we can stand on the bottom and lever the raft off, but then because we haven’t really gotten used to the (lack of) speed with which we are traveling we make a mistake – ahead of us is an island, and we had been warned not to try and get past an island on the inside, as that would see us marooned, so we pushed on into a narrow canal on the outside.
Of course, it turns out that this wasn’t the island in question (that one we will pass just fine – much, much later), and we have just forced 27 unwieldy square meters of timber plus a canoe into a very tight backwater squeeze. It takes us the better part of an hour to round this islet, using nothing but our stakes, and after that we paid better attention to the map and the flow of the current.
After this, things run a lot more smoothly. The rain stays with us, and we hide out under the tarps as best we can for the most part, only venturing out to push away from the shore line when we get too close, or when a fallen tree juts out into our path. There’s a learning curve to this, too, but gradually we pick up how, when and how hard to push to achieve the desired result. You want to angle the pole right or you won’t be able to push at all, and you want to time it so that there is no risk of the raft catching up with the pole, in which case it might very well snap it in two, something that my sister discovered first hand (mass and momentum are powerful things even at low speeds). Finally you don’t want to push too hard, because that will make the whole raft pivot, and cause the aft end to get raked by the very obstacle the front just managed to avoid. We don’t always get it right, and a couple of times we plow through trees that whip the length of the raft, but we come away more or less unscathed.
My nephew has brought fly fishing equipment and keeps casting in the rain, but to no avail. Luckily we have stocked up on lots of food, because there is not a fish to be seen. The guy at the base camp spoke of all manner of species that could be caught, but although we cover nearly 60km of the river in total there is not the slightest indication that there is anything fishy going on – apart from selling us fishing permits in the first place.
Thankfully the landscape is very pretty. The river runs (well, saunters) through deep forests, and it’s easy to imagine them full of moose, bears and lynx (all of which do exist here, even though they don’t show up on our radar). We spot a couple of beaver huts along the way, but otherwise there is little going on, possibly because the riverbanks are very steep, and there are virtually no spots where you could land, let alone pitch a couple of tents, so it’s a good thing we didn’t try to move out on the first evening.
As it is, it isn’t until late afternoon that we find a suitable meadow on a promontory, but as we realise it quite late, my brother-in-law and I have to jump in the canoe and pull the raft inwards. What we should have done, of course, was to paddle ashore with a long tethering rope that we could latch to a tree and let the raft be pulled to shore by the current, like a pendulum, but instead we paddle like mad and fight the stream all the way, scramble up and secure the taunt line to a grassy knoll; it’s touch and go – as we touch land we see the raft go past us – but in the end we manage: a near impossible task that ensures that our muscles ache just as much the following night.
The next morning couldn’t be more different. The sun is out and it’s warm. It feels luxurious. Even the kids thaw a little. We lounge on deck, reading, snacking, snapping pictures and doing small excursions in the canoe – sandbar islands being a favorite, not least in order to avoid having to use the toilet bucket. We’ve learnt to anticipate the movements of the river and the raft, and there are no incidents to speak of. I feel like all that is missing is a straw hat and a corncob pipe and I would’ve achieved rafting level: Huckleberry.
We even catch something while fishing: a tree. The lure snaps off when caught in a branch, but we have a bit of luck; in what must be said to be an act of desperation, the fisherman had used an enormous, neon-yellow fish lookalike – it’s easily visible in the shallows, so I manage to retrieve it with a quick rescue operation in the canoe.
The last day we feel like old hands, regular log jockeys. The weather is still lovely, if a tad too windy, but we raise our tarpaulins and manage to move on unperturbed. We pass several moored rafts, amongst them one with five nubile Danish women skinny-dipping next to it, and for a fleeting moment I feel like Ulysses when he encountered the sirens.
Alas, that kinship is reinforced a mere hour before we are to arrive at our destination, when we run the gauntlet of another homeric challenge; a long stretch of open water provides the headwind with enough run-up to push us into a bend where a backwater maelstrom awaits us. We push back like mad, but the waters are deep and the barge poles make little difference – except when mine gets stuck at the wrong moment and vaults me into the river! Even paddling with the canoe is futile – but at least it enables us to make land. In the end we have to resort to pulling the raft along the shore using ropes to get out of the ordeal, but at least the Scyllic breath doesn’t blow us into the Charybdis-like whirlpool, like it does another raft that’s right behind us. When we finally do get out, they are still turning helplessly in the backdraft.
Confident smiles all around, five minutes before Scylla and Charybdis.
With this Odyssey-like rite of passage finally behind us, we are quite relieved when we come upon the disassembly area. It’s hard work, too, of course, taking apart the whole craft, but it seems like nothing compared to putting it together. And it’s quite fitting – logs have always been sent down the river this way. Once freed of their shackles they will be collected downriver and used anew. If that’s not sustainable tourism, I don’t know what is.
I always try to sum up the year that was. This time around, it’s both easier and more difficult than usual. Easier, because life has been reduced to the bare essentials in many respects, and more difficult because… well, you know.
Corona/covid came out of nowhere and walloped the world in the face, and the world responded by reeling around like a clown as it tried to come to terms with this new reality.
As the illness went from being an underreported event in a far-flung place to conquering the world, masks became ever more commonplace, as did questions about Sweden’s approach to Covid, which I felt supremely unqualified to answer. Social distancing was the catch phrase on everyone’s (hidden) lips, and then Lockdown was a reality. The inherent flaws of humanity (Loo Roll Riots) and its capacity for empathy (daily Healthcare Applause) were on full display.
In our case the kids and their mom went on holiday to northern Italy in February, just when things got started there, so they had to quarantine before most people. Throughout spring the kids struggled with isolation, an entirely new work interface, and teachers who seemingly had no notion of the burden they were placing on their wards. Luckily for us, there was little work for interpreters, because there was no infrastructure in place to hold large multilingual conferences via internet, so we could help the kids with their transition to distance schooling.
Summer holidays were different, shall we say. Having struggled to even get to Sweden, we isolated as best we could. Whether rafting with the kids and my sister and her family, or kayaking with my brother, I slept outdoors pretty much the whole time – either in a tent or in a hammock slung between a couple of trees. It was lovely, but very brief, as I didn’t get all the leave I asked for (in spite of there being absolutely zero work, my employer insisted on having people on standby…), meaning I had to return to Belgium, where I was forced to self-isolate, and so couldn’t work anyway, of course.
Instead, my mind turned to all the things I had been contemplating doing for a long time, and hadn’t got around to. August saw me take on a flurry of projects: getting solar panels installed, buying a hybrid car, getting bees, planning a swimming pond, constructing a duck house, volunteering at a wildlife rescue center, getting an e-bike, making jams and juice and canning fruit and sauces. It was good.
Then September came around, and a return to school and work, but not as we knew it. School was a strange hybrid, work even more so. Even after more than half a year, both organizations were clearly struggling to come to terms with the new parameters. There was still precious little work for me, so I planned on going to the French alps for a week of paragliding. It wasn’t to be. La rentree had the predictable effect of making cases surge again, and I had to stay home. This was a blessing in disguise, as our beloved cat Misty suddenly died; had I gone I wouldn’t have been there to bury her and grieve her passing with the kids – a poignant reminder of how many people lost loved ones without being able to be there! As it was we buried her in her favorite spot in the garden on the last day of summer. She left a painfully large void in all our lives.
And so we struggled on. Like everyone else we have tried to cope as best we can. In many ways we have been incredibly lucky, in that no one in our family has died from Covid. We still have our jobs. We haven’t been too affected by the many nasty (and under-reported) side effects of Lockdown and isolation, such as domestic violence, depression, substance abuse (ok, fine, sugar consumption levels have been too high). The garden has been an oasis and a constant source of joy.
It does sort of seem like a lost year in some ways, but at the same time I feel very strongly that the world needed this enforced pause to stop and take stock and reflect on where we go from here. I have certainly done so. And even though my ambitions for this year were largely knocked sideways, I have still managed to fulfill some of them: apart from the projects already mentioned I reconnected with old friends and made new ones – you know who you are! – and I did have some fantastic adventures in spite of the limits on travel. Forced to stay at home I did read a lot more than I otherwise would, and played a ton of piano – ninety-nine more years of solitude and I might even get good at it…
So there you go. A year like no other. Some good things, mixed in with a LOT of crap. But this, too, shall pass. Vaccines are coming, the Trump era is hopefully nearing its end (and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to see him and his cronies go to prison!), and maybe, just maybe, we can build a better world on the ruins of this one*. If there is one thing that this year has instilled in me, it’s the need for everyone to pitch in and do what has to be done in order for all to prosper.
Here’s to making sure that things improve in 2021!
*Of course, we probably have not seen the last of it yet. Trump declaring martial law in 2021 seems unlikely but then so did Brexit in 2015, and now we have Russian oligarchs buying lordships in the House of Lords even as the country prepares to hurl itself into the abyss.
It’s fair to say the year ended on a bum note. Things don’t always go as planned. But what of the rest of the year? Time to look back and reflect on what went according to plan, and what didn’t.
But for the butt injury, I might have had a sporting chance at reaching my distance goals for running and biking (averaging a marathon distance per week for each), but realistically that was too much. I did do that much on average when at home, but traveling got in the way, and that lowered total mileage significantly. Need to set more realistic goals, especially with next year’s runstreak requiring time every day.
I did my first ever triathlon – an Ironman 70.3, and the result was better than I had hoped. Still not sure whether a full-length one is worth the trouble, but maybe… saying I did half-something jars my soul!
I didn’t lift weights, swim or do yoga anywhere near as much as I had planned. I did some, but found it difficult to fit it all into my routine. Will have to find another balance to make it all work. And actually learn how to swim.
So much for fitness. I didn’t read as much non-fiction as I would have liked, but what I read was good. I’ve played a lot of chess and piano, and studied French, too, but I’m still not sure how to measure progress here. I know I am progressing, but how to tell? The system of dividing up the day into half hours to ensure that things get done works, at least, so I will continue doing that. And only watching Netflix when I’m on the stationary bike will kill two birds with one stone…!
Travels and challenges, then? I certainly travelled a lot, and two themes emerged: island hopping around Africa, covering Pemba, Mallorca, and Madeira (following on from Malta), and hiking in the alps in France, Bavaria and Sweden (ok, so we don’t have alps, but parts of Bergslagsleden were really hilly!). Add to that the two(!) trips to Andalusia – once to see Alhambra, and once to learn how to paraglide – and a nice long weekend in Paris, and you have what I would deem a pretty good year of wanders. More of that, please.
Lest I forget, the year has brought some wonderful new people into my life, as eclectic a bunch of characters as one can hope for: an Argentinian telenovela starlet in Tanzania, a Scottish philosopher in Spain, my own personal stalker, a Phillipina philanthropist, a Swedish ultrarunner in Amsterdam… in fact, if I were to write a book about them all it would probably seem outlandish, which brings me to my last point: this blog.
I’ve continued to write throughout the year, about everything and anything, from great tits to particle accelerators, and my readership is steadily increasing (visitors up 25% (to 2800+) and views up 50% (to 5500+) at the time of writing), something for which I’m immensely grateful! It’s humbling to foist your words on people and have them not only actually read them but also come back for more. So thank you, dear reader. I hope you have enjoyed the ride this far.
It’s four o’clock in the morning, and I’m in a tent in a dark forest, hiding from the rain together with close to eight hundred other people, all of us preparing to go out and run Ultravasan, Sweden’s most prestigious ultra marathon and – more to the point – a trail ninety kilometres long. It’s more than double what I’ve ever done before.
The atmosphere is akin to what I expect it must be in an army right before battle commences – there are a lot of grim faces and thousand-mile stares, as people make last minute adjustments to their kit. Some try to sleep, others make surreptitious dashes into the wet darkness to empty their bowels, like birds of pray before taking flight.
There’s four in our group; myself, my sister Sofia, my brother-in-law Anders, plus Magnus, a friend whom I talked into signing up in early January, and who I suspect has regretted the decision several times over since. As we get closer to the starting time there are embraces and selfies and jokes, as the gravity of the situation is sinking in – we’re going into the unknown, and anything can happen. We line up in the start pen with ten minutes to go, the announcer’s incongruous natter finally replaced by stirring music, and the feeling of going forth is further reinforced when the soundtrack from the Hunger Games comes on, drones hanging in the air above us, filming for television. “We who are about to die”, I mutter, giving a half-hearted wave to one of them. Then suddenly it’s a matter of seconds, the Vasaloppet theme song comes on, and we’re off.
Up, up and away!
The first thing that happens as the crowd starts moving is you pass a signpost saying Mora 90, Smågan 9,2. The former is too huge a number to compute, so I focus on the latter, marking the length of the first section. Vasaloppet famously starts with almost eight kilometres of uphill logging roads, but people are too fired up to care, and shoot off like Superman. I force myself not to get drawn in, and have scores of people overtake me. Sofia and Anders quickly leave me behind, and Magnus disappears behind me. The rain hangs in the air like a particularly invasive mist, but it feels good.
There are plenty of places along the way offering drinks and refreshments, so I’ve elected to leave my Camelbak at home, which means all I’m carrying is a flip belt (essentially a double cummerbund with openings into which you can jam things) with some toilet paper (in case I have to Pope), paracetamol pills and three energy gels, plus my iPhone – not essential, but since I want to document the adventure I take it along both as a camera and a safety precaution. My secret weapon is inside the little bag that my sis bought at the expo yesterday, which is hanging on the outside of the flip belt in the small of my back – it’s supposed to be used for carrying litter, but I’ve stuffed it with chocolate protein balls.
Eight in all, these magical pills full of goodness will have me flying along – or that’s the idea, until five k into the race I realise that disaster has struck! Like the U.S. paratroopers invading Europe on D-day, I’ve been betrayed by untested equipment; they were issued canvas bags to store their weapons in only the day before their deployment, and the overstuffed bags mostly ripped clean off the soldiers and disappeared into the void, taking the weapons with them. In my case the bag was still there, but without me noticing, the balls had been bouncing out of the bag, leaving only one at the very bottom. Like Hansel and Gretel, I had been leaving a trail of sweets behind. Unlike them, however, I had no intention of turning around, so gritted my teeth and pressed on into the forest proper. I would have to make my own magic.
Run, Forest, run!
After Smågan we’ve reached the end of the road. The trail becomes exactly that, a single track trail leading deeper and deeper into the forest. Pine tree roots have you Fred Astairing your way forward, as they try to trip you up, and rocks are everywhere, meaning a fall would be most unforgiving. It’s beautiful though, the mist hanging low, and the rain lending every surface a fresh polish, making for a landscape where trolls seem less part of mythology, and more like a distinct possibility.
Then it’s on to the bogs, wetlands where only stunted trees grow in the acid waters, and you have to balance on boardwalks, slippery with rain and algae, laid out on top of the grassy knolls, as stepping off them would mean sinking to untold depths immediately – there’s no telling how solid the water-sick ground is; you might only sink foot-deep, but if you’re unlucky you’re instantly submerged – this is the kind of landscape our forefathers used to depose dead bodies and ritual sacrifices in, after all.
Another sign of clear and present danger is literally carved into the boardwalks themselves. They are made of sturdy two-by-fours, but every so often I come across places where furrows have been raked into the wood as if it’s nothing but warm butter. They’re territorial markings by the brown bears that roam these lands, and they leave precious little to the imagination. It’s a disquieting sight – the fact that bears apparently make use of the boardwalks to cross the bogs as well doesn’t inspire confidence in the construction so much as conjure up visions of what the consequences of a close encounter with a 700 lb version of Mr Cuddles would be.
Feed me, Seymour!
Thankfully no incidents occur, and the inhospitable terrain requires full focus, so the kilometres slip by almost unnoticed. I pass Mångsbodarna, the first of the depots serving food, and realise I’m ravenous. Breakfast was at 0200, and now, five hours and 23k later, my body is craving nourishment. Pancakes with jam, blueberry soup and chicken broth, anyone? I eat it all with gusto, and wash it down with coffee and water. In the cold and rain, the warmth of hot beverages is a godsend to be savoured.
I had worried that eating too much would affect my ability to run, but since my strategy is to keep a pace where I don’t get out of breath or my heart rate too high, it seems not to be a problem. The theory is that by keeping that kind of slow pace, your body never switches into aerobic mode, which means you can go on more or less indefinitely, as your organism doesn’t burn fuel the same way. I don’t know. I read it in a book. I thought seven minutes per kilometre would do it, but my feet seem to be saying 6,40/k, and who am I to argue? I’m only along for the ride, after all.
Fairy trails
And so on it goes. The trail stays lethal, an obstacle course made up of jagged rocks, but I am too distracted by the man in front of me wearing a sports bra to pay much attention. Turns out it’s a good way to prevent bleeding nipples, apparently. That still doesn’t explain the bright pink colour, of course…
The final destination is still much too far away to contemplate, but getting to the next station in Risberg is intimidating in itself, as the section prior to it is infamous. By this stage I’ve done 28k, and know the next five will be nothing but uphill. I walk parts of it, and try not to think about the fact that I still have two thirds of the way to go.
Risberg to Evertsberg, the approximate halfway mark, feels long, but thankfully the surroundings are mesmerisingly beautiful, even though the rain keeps falling. I pass little lakes in the woods, where moose would be grazing on less crowded days, old mills and cottages that look like they belong in Middle Earth, streams and burbling brooks. By the time there’s a signpost saying we’ve now gone past the finish line of a regular marathon I still don’t feel the least bit tired, and note with satisfaction that I’ve done it in about the same time it took me to do my first ever marathon, Berlin, which is famously flat and easy running – not something that can be levelled at this race.
The Halfway Inn
The kilometres keep rolling by, and before I know it I roll up at Evertsberg, which has loomed ahead as a Fata Morgana for quite some time. More pancakes, gherkins and blueberry soup, but more importantly, this is where the drop bags await, with whatever provisions you have seen fit to send in advance. Bench upon bench full of people taking stock of their situation. I strip off my wet t-shirt and socks and apply liberal amounts of Vaseline all over, in places I wouldn’t even point at in public under normal circumstances. No one gives a damn – they’re all busy doing much the same. New, dry clothes on. Two of my toes have gigantic blisters, but since they don’t hurt I decide against changing shoes. This is probably a wise decision, as doing so will prove Magnus’s downfall. He will go on to develop so many blisters that he essentially has to hobble the last twenty k’s.
After Evertsberg it’s gently downhill for six kilometres, and that, combined with dry(er) clothes, a stomach full of food, and asphalt, glorious asphalt to run on make these some of the easiest kilometres of all, whizzing by at breakneck speed – sub-six minutes, even. Joking aside, my strategy to not go out too hard is starting to pay off, as I now start overtaking other runners instead of vice versa. It’s not my prime objective – that was always just to finish the race – but it feels good, even so.
Wood sprites
Another thing that helps is the support you get from onlookers. By now I’ve been out for close to seven hours, the rain has finally stopped, the sun is out, and normal people are starting to wake up. Given that the race is run in the wilderness there aren’t many supporters, but what they lack in quantity, they more than make up for in quality.
Some groups and individuals clearly follow a particular runner’s progress and if you keep up with that person they show up several times along the way. A trio of bikers – a giant of a man who looks like a cross between a bear and a troll, plus his wife and mother, of similar stock – start recognising me after I urge them to do the wave as I pass, and soon they are looking out for me and doing their wave as soon as I show up. Others join in, making me feel like a superhero.
There’s a mother-and-son duo from Norway that show up more often than anyone else, always enthusiastic and shouting encouragement (at least I think they do – it’s in Norwegian), but my personal favourites are the two beautiful young women who suddenly appear around the 70k mark, offering candy to all runners.
At this point I’ve had my only low of the entire journey – I had been running together with a woman from the UK for awhile, and although Lucia was as pleasant as can be, her tales of having run a 30-hour race in the Lake District just two weeks previously, her plans to do another ultra in Switzerland in two weeks’ time, plus the fact that I couldn’t keep up with her, conspired to bring me down a little, and when I twisted my foot on top of that, I started to wonder if I was going to have to walk the rest of the way.
So I dropped behind, and walked for a bit, but when my foot didn’t get any worse I started running again, and then there was the silly Volvo video thing you can see at the end, which raised my spirits quite a bit, and then there they were, like two dryads with a huge bag of candy, and in spite of my parents having told me never to accept sweets from strangers, I happily deviated from that rule, and made sure to tell them just how glad they had made me with this selfless gesture. They, too, would pop out of the woodwork (as it were) several times more, to my unbridled delight.
The long game
The last twenty kilometres? Well, it’s weird. Twenty k is a long run by any standard, and yet it seemed easy. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was still able to run, even trundling up inclines that I would previously have used as a welcome excuse to walk a few steps.
Sure it helped that it was mostly slightly downhill on relatively easy logging roads, and sure I wasn’t running fast by this stage, but I was running when most runners weren’t running at all. I passed most everyone I saw, with one notable exception – occasionally along the trail there would be the odd runner I would overtake, only to find them ahead of me again, over and over, and at the end there was Zebra Girl (you name people when you see them again and again, and she had striped tights. I’m not at my wittiest after ten hours’ running, what can I say?), whom I overtook around the 80k mark but who then kept pace with me, occasionally ahead, but mainly right behind.
Coming in to Mora, I passed a man on the outskirts of town who said we would probably make it in under eleven hours. He seemed a little doubtful though, and since my GPS-watch had long since given up the ghost, I had no choice: I found resources left in me to sprint the last six hundred metres, running hard, rejoicing in the feeling of seemingly endless strength.
The audience cheered and clapped, but I was particularly pleased to find my two Candy Angels waiting just across the finish line. If you look at the video you can actually see how I swerve as soon as I crossed it to give them both a huge hug and to tell them again how much they had meant to me. It was a delight to be able to share that moment with them, as they symbolised all the good people who had helped me along the way; volunteers, onlookers and well-wishers, all giving freely of their time to spur me on.
Karma goes both ways tho, because a minute later Zebra Girl taps on my shoulder to thank me for having been there for her – for the longest time, she said, she had only managed to keep running by literally following in my footsteps. We hugged as well, united by our struggle and our accomplishment, sharing goofy grins and the joyful realisation that we had done it!
This more than anything symbolises ultra running to me: regardless of how and when you finish, you are a victor. Sofia and Anders beat me by more than three quarters of an hour, but I ran what felt like a perfect race – I was never overexerted, never had a negative thought, and finished strong. I might have been able to do it half an hour faster, but at the prize of my enjoyment of the experience. As it was I loved every step of the way, I took in the beauty of the nature, the goodness of my fellow runners and all the other people involved, and even managed to spread a bit of happiness in the process. You can’t ask for a better result.
I’ve long thought I should try to write a travel entry on the topic of Sweden; I’ve lived abroad long enough that it’s a different country from the one I grew up in, after all, and for most readers it will be just as exotic as any other place I experience on my journeys.
This week offered the perfect opportunity: I went to a town I’ve never visited before, in a part of the country that is oft overlooked – Norrköping, Östergötland. The name means Northern chipping (or market town) in the Eastern part of the Land of the Gotae – one of the three original tribes that populated what is now Sweden- and in some respects I suspect it has remained essentially the same since this was Viking heartland.
This feeling is enhanced upon arrival. Even flying into Stockholm, the capital, the impression is one of forests and smallholdings right up to the edge of the city, and going by train to Norrköping showcases more of the same – an infinite number of lakes (the result of the perma ice having retreated from these lands relatively recently, thus not allowing the land to rise up just yet), all of them dotted with little red wooden cottages along the shores, and often with woods growing right up to the water’s edge.
Norrköping itself has been a city proper almost since the time of the Vikings, but the town has been razed and burnt several times over, so today the oldest buildings are no more than two hundred years old. This, together with the grid layout of the city blocks, it’s eclectic mixture of new and old, scruffy and chi, and the well-to-do hipster look sported by just about everyone makes it reminiscent of Brooklyn.
I am instantly smitten. Of course it helps that the Swedish summer is in full swing, meaning blue skies and glorious sun during the day, and white nights on top of that. I wake at four thirty every morning, simply because it’s light outside already. There’s also the fact that nearly everyone looks good and healthy – the Lamp hotel breakfast is a wonder to behold, easily beating the finest hotels I’ve ever been to, and no one smokes, or is obese – and when I go to the gym in the evening this is borne out by the fact that people from all walks of life have found their way there – old and young, men and women, immigrants and Viking descendants, they are all here.
I’m dead serious about the latter, by the way. At the board of Transportation, the authority hosting us for the week, there is a immensely large man called Thorbjörn Kämpe (Thor bear fighter) – it doesn’t get more authentically Norse than that. In fact, replace the cardigans and stupid trousers, give them an ax and shield and most every one of these muscular, bearded, tattoo-sporting hip folk look much like their infamous forefathers.
You can accuse me of sugar coating it of course, my head soggy with nostalgia, but for the life of me, this kind of town – a Nordic Brooklyn in the wilderness, with bars and coffee shops littered generously throughout, with a sex shop facing the town church, with the minister of the latter going to work on his mountain bike, with Valkyrie-look-alikes and spry octogenarians out and about with equal grace, and immigrants being seen as normal rather than a matter of controversy – is my idea of the ideal place to live.
Skiing is a strange pastime. You drive endless hours to get to a mountain somewhere, dress up in outfits that make you look like the Michelin man in a space cadet’s armour, only to let yourself get literally dragged into an environment that is as harsh as any you’re likely to find; an ascent into hell.
It’s the Greek version, an icy inferno, featureless save for the stunted, gnarled trees that the relentless winds whip into submission, like howling demons tormenting the shadows of dead people. You assume the foetal position, curled up in the lift, questioning your sanity for submitting yourself to this torture, your extremities going blue in the whiteout, and then suddenly you’ve reached the summit, and it all makes sense as you enter a powdery paradise.
It’s Fifty Shades of White*, and you might as well be blindfolded as you hurl yourself down the slope, your body moving instinctively, hard steel against sinuous curves, skis caressing the snow, nothing existing but the sounds and the feeling of your body against the land itself.
It’s elemental, exhilarating and exhausting, and it’s over in a matter of minutes, only for the process to begin again. Insane? Maybe, but they say being in love is temporary insanity, and I’m in love with skiing.
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* Like all good SM-relationships, you get as much out of it as you’re prepared to put into it, but this mistress doesn’t take any crap; one false move and you wipe out. Or so I’m told.
I’ve travelled back north, to the land of my ancestors. Here, winter has come with a vengeance*. As you rise in the morning, the darkness is Absolut: 100% proof and able to knock you out. Dawn has evidently chosen to have a sleep-in. The quicksilver in my mother’s thermometer has shrunk back to a decidedly frosty -18 Celsius. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the landscape is transformed, snow crystals rendering every surface diamond, like an enormous treasure trove, every encrusted tree sparkling, every pale golden clump of grass glittering in the hesitant morning sun.
There are no Northern lights in the sky, but Northern light is quite singular in its own right. The sun barely makes it above the horizon before it’s gone again, but it makes up for the brevity of its presence with a light show of spectacular proportions; the palette runs from apricot orange in the morning, through pinkish hues of every nuance, to a purple haze before dusk that would have made Jimi Hendrix give up drugs and take up ice skating instead.
Ah, ice skating. It’s one of those inventions that can barely be improved upon. Vikings skated these forest lakes on ice skates made out of moose antlers 1,000 years ago, and there is every likelihood that the Bronze Age people buried in the pine-clad premonitory on the water’s edge did the same 4,000 years before them. How miraculous it must have been for them to walk on water – as indeed it still is for us today.
The ease with which you can traverse a frozen lake, its surface like a ballroom floor, is unlike any other means of self-propulsion I know of; the speed, the silence – broken only by the deep singing of the ice itself – the sensation of going where no man has gone before, however fictitious – it all comes together to create an experience at once exhilarating and meditative.
In spite of the unforgiving cold we keep at it for hours out of sheer joy, reaching parts of the lake it would take ages to get to in summer. Finally, hoar frost in my beard, be-icicled eye brows, buttocks burning and wobbly-ankle’d I struggle back indoors, thence to thaw in front of a roaring fire**. By four in the afternoon the Stygian darkness outside is total once more, and hibernation seems the only option, at least until tomorrow, when we will begin anew…
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* George RR Martin would feel at home, even if white walkers haven’t been sighted… yet.
**Generations come and go, kingdoms and civilisations pass into oblivion, but this is a scene that has remained virtually unchanged down the millennia. It is a comforting thought, somehow.
Part 2
I wrote previously of the tremendous, primeval joy of ice skating, but these last two days we have indulged in even more ancient pastimes. The children and I have engaged in wintery traditions older still than that most time-honoured ritual of enticing the sun to return (the original rationale behind Yule), namely snowman building and snowball fighting.
Anyone who has studied philosophy (Calvin and Hobbes, to be precise) knows that deeply satisfactory feeling that comes from making effigies to appease the snow demons – surely something humans have done since opposable thumbs first encountered snow?
As for snowball fights, there is no archeological evidence (for rather obvious reasons), but it’s impossible to imagine that those first humans who came here to live in the shadow of the inland glacier did not enjoy a good snowball fight. Why else come here, after all?!
The one activity that has them all beaten in terms of its unchanged connection to the past is running through a frozen forest. There is something peculiarly primordial about entering that darkness in midwinter on foot, running in absolute stillness through the trees; permafrost provides a hard easel upon which is stretched an infinite canvas of white snow, where innumerable tracks show just how full of life the wilderness is – from the smallest mice, rabbits and hares via foxes, roe deer and badgers to the red deer and majestic moose, every one of those tracks (but the wild boar) is an open invitation to leave the invisible path and enter the snow-clad sentinel pine on a hunt – with so many mammals, and me the only MAMIL* for leagues around, it’s easy to channel that inner cave man.
Palaeolithic lifestyle be danged, though. After an hour or so outside I’m convinced that there is nothing better than a hot shower, a glass of red wine and some cheese, and I’m not likely to cave in any time soon.
It’s fair to say the year ended on 
I’ve long thought I should try to write a travel entry on the topic of Sweden; I’ve lived abroad long enough that it’s a different country from the one I grew up in, after all, and for most readers it will be just as exotic as any other place I experience on my journeys.
