ÖTILLÖ World Championship: The Backstory

We're doing things a little differently this time! This promises to be a very long race report, so we're breaking out a couple pieces into their own posts, so the whole thing isn't quite as overwhelming. Theoretically. This post will cover what ÖTILLÖ World Championship is, and how we ended up there.

Most folks reading this probably know what swimrun is, but in case you don't, or if you want a little more info on how this crazy sport got started, you can read the wikipedia page for swimrun.

Trista and I partnered up and started doing swimrun races together in 2018 at Swimrun Lake James. We immediately fell in love with the sport, and have been doing as many races as we feasibly can each year, thus far all in the United States.

First swimrun! Check out those BUOYS!

As is part of any story that involves the recent past, "then covid happened". Races were largely cancelled in 2020, then started making a reappearance in 2021, as people tried to figure out how to live and thrive in a world with covid. In 2021, ÖTILLÖ's Catalina race in California was cancelled, but for the most part, the other US races were held, and Trista and I did nearly all of them. At the same time, many of the overseas races were cancelled.

Swimrun Orcas Island 2021, an ÖTILLÖ merit race, with Andy, who also did WC 2022, and Mel, who did WC 2021, and gave us so much practical WC advice.

Add in the fact that many of the US swimrun races are ÖTILLÖ merit races, and we ended up in A Situation. Let me clarify.

If you do really well at an ÖTILLÖ world series race, you can outright qualify for the ÖTILLÖ World Championship Race in the Stockholm Archipelago. Some of the best and fastest teams get in that way.

If you don't outright qualify, you can collect merit points by doing ÖTILLÖ merit races, and then you can apply to participate. As mentioned, most of the US races that were held in 2021 were merit races. That means Trista and I collected quite a few merit points, especially since the races had relatively few female teams (a thing we're trying to change!), which meant we placed relatively high in the results (which means more merit points). With people overseas having few races available to collect merit points, and with international travel still not really being all that viable.. well, here's the audio message Trista sent me during her run on 9/1/21:

"Amy, I'm in the middle of my run right now, and I'm listening to Michael Lemmel's podcast episode with the Löw Tide Böyz, and I'm a little nervous that by default, will we, I mean I know we joked about it, but will we accidentally qualify for World Champs next year, because we're doing all three races? Oh man. I don't know how that point series works. Hm. I'm a little nervous."

We weren't sure what was going to happen, but we decided we were going to apply. And if we were accepted, we were going to do it. Because who knew if the stars would ever align like this again? Once more races started happening again, and as participation in the sport grew, we might never qualify again. This was our best chance to be part of the biggest, toughest, most prestigious swimrun in the world, and we knew we'd regret it if we didn't at least try.

We let our coach know we were going to apply, and he said if we got in, he'd get us trained up to get across the finish line. He also mentioned that if we didn't qualify outright, he was pretty sure that we could apply to get in via Director's Choice. Trista and I both rejected that idea without even discussing it with each other. Director's Choice is where the race directors let a small number of teams do the race based on reputation and not on outright qualification or on merit points. This is usually for people who HAVE a reputation, like Rich Roll, but it wasn't completely unfeasible that Team Adorkable has enough of a reputation in swimrun circles to get in that way. But that isn't how we wanted to do World Champs. If we couldn't earn it with the races we'd done, we didn't want to be there on the start line.

So, merit points or bust!

Ranking applications opened in mid-December 2021, and we submitted our application, terrified and excited in equal amounts. We kept reloading the swimrun rankings webpage, waiting for more women's teams to add their merit races in late, and push us way down in the rankings. But that didn't happen. We stayed high in the rankings all the way through December and January.

ON MY BIRTHDAY in February, we got the email.

Congratulations!
We are sending you this email because you and your team Team Adorkable have qualified for ÖTILLÖ, the Swimrun World Championship 2022 through the ranking selection.

We obviously accepted. This was happening.

What followed was a LOT of training. It wasn't always perfect. We trained through weather and kids and school and work and covid and knee stitches and tattoo healing and every other distraction. We trained through terrible heat and humidity, in the middle of Texas and Georgia summers. We trained alone almost exclusively, with a few bright spots where we got together for races or training weekends. I swam more in August than I've ever swum in a single month.

Catalina swimrun training camp in March

If you already know the results of our race, or have seen pictures or videos from the race, you might get the mistaken impression that we didn't take this race seriously. We have a reputation for being fun, for being ridiculous, but I want to make it clear that we absolutely took this seriously, and we did the work to get to the start line and feel as confident as we were going to feel about our chances out there.

We had a lot of people ask us before the race if we were "ready". It's been a while since I've done a race where I honestly couldn't answer that question. How would we know? We were attempting something that was so far beyond what we've done before in swimrun, we just had to trust in our coach, our training, and our ability to suffer, and do the best we could.

We were super fortunate that we found out about Coach Nicolas and Envol Coaching late in 2020. He trained us all through 2021, and once we qualified for World Champs, he was right there ready to modify our schedule to do the exact training we needed for this particular beast of a race. We showed up in Sweden not only with the proper training, but also as part of a team, most of whom we'd never met, but who immediately adopted us as one of their own in training, in fika, and on race day.