Rockman Swimrun 2023 Race Report
It started with a promposal.
In 2018, Trista sent me this photo.
We did our first swimrun in early 2018, and we fell in love with the sport immediately. Completely hooked. We wanted to do them all. We mostly chose our bucket list races based on photos, and when we saw all the videos Marcus had created and shared, we knew we needed to do this race.
But we were brand new to swimrun, and knew it was too soon to do something of that magnitude in 2018. And my husband and I were already planning to do our 20th anniversary bike adventure from London to Stockholm in 2019, which would eat basically all my available vacation. So 2020 it was! I obviously accepted her promposal immediately.
We got a coach in late 2019 and started training. We were committed. And then, well, 2020 happened. And Rockman didn't happen. And then 2021 happened. And Rockman didn't happen. But definitely 2022 for Rockman! Except.. then we accidentally qualified for ÖTILLÖ World Championships. And we couldn't assume that would EVER happen again, so we knew it was now or never. And we knew that the way our lives and jobs were configured, and the way the two races were configured, we couldn't do both in 2022. So we made the painful decision to postpone Rockman AGAIN, to 2023.
This whole time, Thor, the race director (RD) for Rockman, was AMAZING. He was our biggest cheerleader, chatted with us regularly to keep us excited about the race (unnecessary, we were so excited anyway, but super fun), we got to finally meet him at World Champs last year, and we just really felt like a part of the Rockman family from the time we first decided that it was a race we really wanted to do.
And I won't force any further dramatic tension on you: it did finally happen in 2023! The stars aligned, and we made it to Stavanger Norway for Rockman 2023!
Training went well. As well as training can go through the middle of Texas and Georgia summers, with jobs and kids and lives. It mostly consisted of normal swim workouts, and then a billion squats and stairs and hills and runs that contained squats and stairs and hills and more squats and stairs with some hills. It contained very little.. running. No long mileage runs, really. Which seemed weird for a race this long, but coach did Rockman last year, it was still very fresh in his mind, and we trusted that he knew exactly what we needed to do to be prepared.
And despite being convinced SOMETHING would happen at the last minute to push this race off another year, we showed up in Norway relatively healthy and very happy, ready to race!
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One neat thing about this race is that it mostly has very clearly defined sections. When writing the race report for World Champs, and really for most swimruns, it all blends together. "And then we alternated swimming and running for a few hours, and I have no clear memory of what happened where."
With Rockman, each section is so unique and so epic and so stupidly challenging, it's not easy to get it mixed up with other parts. You don't forget that kind of trauma/pain/fun easily. What does that mean for you? Obviously it means more words! Sorrynotsorry.
Another thing that is unique about Rockman (one of many things) is that it starts with a swim. You might think "the sport is called swimrun, don't they all start with a swim?" Not so, my friend! Until we did Rockman, we had never done a swimrun race that started with a swim! It's just complicated logistically. But also, as it turns out, a lot of fun! But I'm getting ahead of myself...
First we had to get TO the race start, which required getting on a ferry! Trista and ferries have a rather tumultuous history. But this ferry was largely inoffensive! It was an easy walk from our accommodation. It had bathrooms. We didn't have to book passage on it separately months in advance via an incantation using crow's teeth and frog guts. And most excitingly, it was our start line! Our ferry drove us out into the fjord, and then we jumped off of it to begin the race!
But first we had a 90 minute ferry ride to the "start line"!
It was a very chill ferry ride. A lot of people slept. I don't know how. I definitely couldn't. We chatted. Snacked. Pooped. Made sure to document our cute socks before they got less cute.
Rasmus was updating us on what was going on abovedecks, as we got close to passing Pulpit Rock. When we got there, we went up there, and it was.. amazing. It was SO BIG. It was our first experience being down in the fjord and seeing the cliffs above us. And we were in a very large ferry. Soon it was just to be our tiny little insignificant human forms in there.
This also gave us the first taste of how WINDY it was. That was a little alarming, since it hadn't been windy in Stavanger, but it's always windy on a ferry, so it was hard to know how concerned to be. Plus we had more important things to worry about: it was time to get ready to go.
People were awake now, and everyone was pulling up and zipping their wetsuits, putting on their swimcaps and goggles, stashing all their gear and nutrition in a dozen hidden pockets. So much nervous energy.
Because the course would almost immediately have a bottleneck, they asked the slower people to let the faster people, those who were looking to win or place, go up to the front. We knew exactly where we belonged, and moved toward the back.
We ended up with some ladies we'd met in the secret bathroom line, who we'd hit it off with as they seemed equally dedicated to being loud and inappropriate in the secret bathroom line. We'd already nicknamed each other The Poo Girls. Obviously.
We could hear the race starting outside, but our section of the line was still inside the ferry, so we just started slowly, slowly moving toward the door to the bow, sorting out the last of our equipment. Just as we were about to step outside the door, one of the Poo Girls pointed out to Trista "The velcro on your wetsuit isn't done up." She hadn't fastened the velcro that holds the neck closed, and when she went to do that, she found HER WETSUIT WASN'T ZIPPED UP AT ALL.
PRAISE the Poo Girls. We're enough of a shitshow without STARTING the race with the wetsuit unzipped. Plenty of time for that later!
SIDEBAR THAT DOESN'T FIT ANYWHERE ELSE SO LET'S JUST CRAM IT HERE:
Based on predicted water (cold) and air (warm) temps, I only brought one wetsuit: The ARK Uto, and so that was the wetsuit I was going to wear. I committed before leaving home. (Just kidding, I also brought the Vigg, but that was just for shakeout swimruns, and was NEVER going to be my race suit, since I would have frozen.) Trista brought the Utö and the Ornö X, and was pretty convinced also based on water and air temps that she would wear the Uto. Until the night before the race, when she chatted with Thor and he convinced her to wear the Ornö X. It wasn't hard to convince her, that's her favorite wetsuit and the only one she ever wants to wear, and that's exactly what she wanted to be told. Both of us were extremely happy with our decisions, and never had any regrets. Neither of us wore sleeves. We also never cabbed down the entire race. The highs (air) were in the low 70s, but it was overcast and windy the whole day, so we never got hot other than on the stairs. The water temps were cold (low 60s to maybe upper 50s) but entirely manageable.
Trista zipped up, and we made it outside, just a few teams between us and the start line. I went ahead and put on my goggles, even though it was going to be a few minutes still. I wanted to work out all potential vision problems with plenty of time to spare, not while standing on the platform with people waiting for us to go.
I heard Matt call our names, and I spun around looking for him, then realized I needed to look UP! We gave him a wave, excited to see him again in some number of hours in the future, somewhere on the course, and then moved up. Closer. Closer.
And then there we were! Marcus was the master of ceremonies at the jump platform, and we gave him a big group hug, knowing he was just as excited for us to begin this journey as we were. And probably just as nervous for us!
As we stepped toward the edge, he stopped us and said he needed to raise the platform up a bit, which really just seemed rude. We're already pretty high up, fairly sure he was just making it higher to mess with us. I see you, Barton.
(I started to explain the why, and justify, but hey, this is my race report, you get my version of history.)
As we stood on the edge, I didn't even feel nervous, just excited. This was going to be a long day, but I'd be spending it doing stupidly amazing and tough things with one of my very best friends. It was finally here.
Trista asked if we could just go as soon as the team in front of us was clear, Marcus confirmed, and so once they had swum out a bit, we looked at each other, counted down, and hopped off the ferry to begin our grand adventure!
Trista and I tether on nearly every swim (sometimes we'll skip it on very, very short ones when we're not already tethered for the run), and we were somewhat concerned that there would be so many people clumping up out there that we'd have trouble finding each other, and staying with each other. They asked us not to tether for the ferry jump, which is very reasonable, but we wanted to hook up as soon as we could in the water, so I held the loose end of the tether in my hand when we jumped. When I hit the water, my buoy came out from between my legs (not unusual, especially when trying to pay attention to way too many things at once), and I managed to cram it back in place while also finding Trista and following her off to the side.
Once we were clear of the ferry and any other swimmers, I handed Trista the loose end of the tether, we hooked up, and we started our first swim!
The First Swim, in the Fjord, off the Ferry
(as I mentioned earlier, nearly every section of this race is Big and Epic in some way, and many have obvious names; some do not, or I don't know them, so their sections get less concise names!)
The water was cold, but definitely not shockingly cold, and not face-numbingly cold, and definitely salty (as a not-frequent ocean swimmer, salty water is always shocking, even when I try to remind myself it's going to happen).
I don't remember anything notable about this swim, other than noticing as we approached the swim exit that there was some congestion from a relatively small exit space, and several teams all trying to exit in that space at once.
I just followed Trista right up to the rocks at the swim exit, and looked to follow her lead on where we were going to get out and how. I kinda swam up on her legs a little as we got to shore, and as we went to exit the waters of the fjord in this amazing many-hour journey of extremely epic endurance, I said, "Ow. You haven't shaved in a while, huh?"
I'm a goddamn delight.
(Look, she confirmed she hadn't, okay?)
The footing on this exit was slippery and rocky and the waves were pushing us around, and it probably would have been a lot slower if it weren't for the AMAZING volunteers who were standing in the super cold water, reaching out to all the swimmers, and pulling them up onto their feet so they could safely exit. When you're out there in the elements, especially somewhere as Big as this, with the cliffs towering over you and the fjord stretching out behind you, the moments where you feel safe and protected are very rare. These people made me feel safe and protected, and it was such a great feeling, and I wanted to hug them all.
But we had STAIRS to prepare for!
The Flørli Stairs
THIS is one of the big, epic sections that Rockman is known for. 4444 stairs. (Except it's more than that.) The longest wooden stairway in the world. Usually at the end of the race, but with the race reversed this year, the first "run" in our very long day of swimrunning.
First we ran by our first aid station. We didn't really NEED an aid station 6 minutes into our race, but there's no aid station on the stairs, and we would be on the stairs for a WHILE (a while whose duration we absolutely could not estimate), so we stopped and got some water, and then continued on at an easy jog toward the stairs.
I had raised my goggles up onto my forehead after the swim, and as we continued toward the stairs after the aid station, I detached the tether from Trista. I mention these seemingly pointless details, because evidently that's ALL I managed to do between the swim exit and the stairs.
This is in stark contrast to Trista, who, while I wasn't paying attention, took off and stowed her swimcap and goggles, stowed her paddles, and generally got all of her belongings situated for a sketchy, interminable slog up a set of tiny wooden stairs. Like a smart person.
Meanwhile, when *I* hit the stairs, I still had my swimcap and goggles on, I still had my paddles on my hands, and I still had the coiled up end of the tether in one of those be-paddled hands. Not a big deal under normal circumstances, but nearly impossible to do anything about once we started the stairs. So for most of the stairs.. those things continued to be true.
The stairs, man. We'd had no time to warm up (especially in the cold water), so we hit those suckers very cold. And my heartrate immediately shot up.
Now, it's all relative. Trista and I have very different physiologies and skillsets. One of the places we very much differ is that her heartrate runs pretty high, whereas mine is typically very low. So when I say mine was high, I mean it was holding steady at 145-149. Which doesn't sound high! But my max HR is around 163, and my Garmin had that HR number in red, to make sure I knew that what I was doing was very ill-advised, and maybe I should reconsider my life choices?
But there was no reconsidering at that point! When these stairs were at the END of the race, I have to assume you could navigate the whole way up without seeing any other teams, if you were near the back. With it at the beginning, we were all still completely clumped together. A conga line of ridiculous-looking swimrunners trudging endlessly up the stairs. You cross your fingers that the people in front of you aren't going so much faster than you that you're falling behind and slowing down the people BEHIND you, and you hope that the people BEHIND you don't want to go so much faster than you that they want to pass you. Because passing was NOT an easy task.
These stairs, man. Whatever you envision when you hear the word "stairs", these are not they. They absolutely don't support anything other than single file. There's no passing most places on the stairs. They're pretty shallow and narrow, so you have to take little steps (that benefits the Amys of the world, MUCH more so than, say, the stairs at Manitou Incline, where each stair is roughly two Amys in height), but also not evenly spaced, so once you get into a rhythm, one will be a little taller or a little shorter, and you'll hook a toe.
No problem, you think! Just lean on that handrail for safety!
Yeah, about that.
Nothing in my life has ever given me a greater appreciation for a solid wooden handrail. Because some parts of the stairs DID have a solid wooden handrail! You could lean on it and be relatively confident it would push back and hold you up.
And then some parts.. not so much. Most of the stairs had a very thin flexible metal cable as the handrail. You could, and should, hold that as you go up, and it gives you some confidence that if you fall, it will catch you. But it won't STOP you from falling. It'll just allow you to hang there contemplating your imminent demise unless the people around you help drag you back onto the stairs. (Theoretically. I mean, I never tested this, nor saw anyone else test it, but I think my science is sound.)
And then SOME places, that cable existed alongside the stairs, but was located so far away from the stairs that you had to STRETCH your arm out to touch it, and that threatened to upset your center of balance, so it seemed safer to NOT hold it.
So you're trudging up, heart rate high, heart rate higher if you have any fear of heights at all, paranoid you're slowing down the people behind you, trying to make sure you stay right on the heels of the people in front of you so you're never part of the problem, trying not to hook a toe on the uneven stairs, and if you're not a smart person, you're doing all of this while wearing a very warm swimcap, and carrying two hand paddles and a tether in whichever hand isn't holding the "rail".
Because the location of the rail changed! You'd slog up for a while with your left hand on the railing, then there would be a "platform" of sorts, which was basically 3 longer 2x4s that put you over on the OTHER side, so that you would then have your right hand on the railing. This was basically the only place you could pass another team, and we did have one team pass us about halfway up. But if you step off to let a team pass you, you are then committed to letting every other team behind them pass you, until there's a break. We got lucky that there WAS a small break behind the team that passed us, and we could immediately jump back in, and didn't have to wait there on the platform for 15 other teams to pass us by.
So mostly everyone just put their heads down and kept their legs moving.
The stairs were labeled every 1000 steps, so you had some idea where you were and how far you had to go. The first 1000 seemed to take a long time to arrive, but it was fun to celebrate! Then you got to 2000 and realized.. you weren't even halfway there. And you'd been out there a LONG time.
My calves were burning. I was breathing hard. My heart rate was high. And I had done ENDLESS STAIR REPEATS in training. More than once I said, "I swear I trained for this!" Which just makes me fear what a disaster I would have been on those stairs if I HADN'T spent hours every week doing stairs and squats. Thank you, coach, even though I cursed you at the time. (And during the race.)
We passed by Rasmus and his camera, who were much higher up than we had been led to believe he'd be, and it was a delight to see a friendly face.
We realized somewhere up around 3000 that it was time for us to eat, if we were sticking to our a-gel-every-30-minutes schedule, and so Trista fished out a gel from her wetsuit, because she was a free agent, and I got my heart rate presumably even higher trying to get out a gel from my pocket while holding paddles and a tether. But I did manage to get the gel out, eat it, and store the trash in my pocket without falling off all the way back down into the fjord.
It felt like we'd been climbing the stairs for hours at this point. It felt like we'd always been climbing the stairs, and we would forevermore be climbing the stairs. This was our life, on the stairs.
This sounds terrible, doesn't it? But then every once in a while, we'd get to a particularly safe-seeming spot, and we could briefly turn around and look behind us. And there was the fjord. The racers behind us. The stairs. Just stretched out behind us, amazing. It was stunning. You couldn't look for very long, but it reminded you how truly epic (and stupid) this race was, and we had barely begun.
And then just as you accept that you're probably going to die in an endless slog up these tiny stairs, we could see what must be a false summit ahead. And the stairs start to stretch out. And slowly they turn into planks. Those planks continue to go upward, but aren't traditional stairs anymore. Just two planks stuck together with some little cross-beams affixed to them.
Our first question was clearly "ARE THESE STAIRS, BECAUSE WE HAVE NOT GOTTEN TO 4444 YET AND IF THIS DOESN'T COUNT AS STAIRS I'M GOING TO BE ANGRY WE'RE NO LONGER MAKING PROGRESS."
Then there was a 4000 marker on the planks, so yes! These still counted as stairs! Still making progress! Almost there!
I'm not sure whether I'd consider these planks an "improvement" over the stairs. You didn't have to engage your legs as much to make forward progress, but the cross beams were awkwardly spaced. At least for Amys. You wanted to put your feet on the crossbeams, because that gave you some stability, but I had to take very large strides to land on each one, and it wasn't comfortable. So I'd take a few big strides to stay on the crossbeams, then a few smaller steps just walking on the sketchy smooth plank. I thought I was playing it off pretty well, but Trista was behind me now, after swapping places when we let that team pass us, and she was like, "... Those are some big steps you're taking there, Amy." Not as smooth as I thought I was.
Also there was NO rail here, even though it was still very possible to fall in a terrible way. There was a giant metal pipe to the right, but it was awkward to use it for a rail. Rail was awkward, boards were awkward, Amy was awkward, it was like middle school all over again.
AND. Because of course there's an and, once we got onto the boards, we left the relative protection of the trees, and suddenly we had an intense crosswind to contend with. On these slick, sketchy 2x4s with no appreciable handrail, teetering roughly 3 billion meters above the fjord.
It's fine. I probably would have mentioned at the beginning of the report if either of us had died, and I didn't, so you'll be happy to hear that we both lived! I think overall Trista's stairs experience was lower of heart rate and of drama, but that's a theme for the whole day! Spoiler alert.
We hit the sign for 4444 stairs, and then as we knew it would, it just kept going. I'm not sure what the actual final count is, but it's not TOO much past 4444.
And then we were back on rocks, and down a little hill to get to the first of the lake swims!
According to my Garmin, that first run, from swim exit to swim entrance, was 1.17 miles, 2,539 feet of elevation gain, and took us 57 minutes and 12 seconds.
We've barely begun this race, and that's how many words it's taken to describe it so far. Buckle up, it doesn't get any less wordy!
The Three(ish) Lake Swims After the Stairs
We did it! We completed one of the major epic portions of Rockman! Only another .. many, many miles and feet of elevation and swimming to go!
First up, a series of 3 lake swims up top, before heading back down to the fjord! We got all our gear back in the proper places, swimcaps, goggles, tether, etc, and waded into the first lake. And it was cold! Noticeably colder than the fjord. And choppy. As we headed down to the water, we could see the wind that had hit us at the top of the stairs pushing the water and the swimmers around in the lake.
The wind was whipping at us from all sides, making breathing unpredictable: would you get air or water?! You never know! But it was a short little ~400 swim, and mostly uneventful. Other than swimming up on another team, and Trista was clearly trying to pass them on the left. But the other team just kept veering further and further left, pushing us away from the swim exit, and finally Trista just came to a complete stop, cut a hard right, and swung all the way around them so we could have our own water. Then a straight swim to the swim exit! During which time I thought, "I'm fairly sure they said these mountain lakes were drinkable!", and I was thirsty after all those stairs, so I just opened my mouth while swimming and took a big gulp of cold, delicious water. I ended up doing that three times during that swim. It's funny, because I end up taking in a decent amount of water when swimming, unintentionally, but it feels SO different to seek it out and intentionally get a mouthful and swallow. It was cold and it was delicious! Thank you, Norway!
This exit was one of the few that was slick with plant life. Very reminiscent of the "green beans" from Casco two years ago, and just as slippery. We picked our way up the beany rocks, and then made our way across the big, licheny rocks, following the markers. This was very alpine, with few trees, just scrubby bushes and rocks and squishy moss. It felt very high up, but also very inland, in that we couldn't see the fjord, there were no steep drop-offs, and aside from being buffeted by the wind, nothing really super notable. It was less than half a mile to the next lake, but decently hilly.
Then a little squishy licheny descent to the second mountain lake, just as visibly choppy from the wind as the first.
This entrance was a bit of a steep bare rock slide, and the female team in front of us was going full sit-down-slide-on-butt, so we kinda picked our way off to the side and went around them. And found that this water was COLD. Definitely colder than the previous lake, which had been colder than the fjord. And even choppier than the previous lake. We were getting buffeted around and tossed about, and it was pretty fun. This swim was only ~250 yards, so in a few minutes, we were climbing back out onto the rocks.
There were two volunteers just up the rocks from the lake, and I think we took some candy from them. Chocolate, maybe?
Then followed the markings up the rocks toward the third lake swim!
And up and up and up. We ended up on a fairly wide gravel road that was just very unpolitely steep. Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad (but it probably would have been), but on top of that, it was WINDY. I know, I've been talking about how it's windy, but it was WINDY here. The combination of a strong, sustained headwind and a relentless hill meant I just leaned forward, stared straight at the ground, and made my legs turn over and over and over. I think Trista ducked behind me a few times to get out of the wind (because I am Big, and an obvious target to draft off of!), and I just kept pushing as hard as I could into that wind so I wouldn't get blown over backward. It was incredibly intense, and also funny, just because it was SO much to be thrown at us all at once. We get it! It's difficult! Okay!
But THEN, on top of that, something was hitting us in the face. I couldn't figure out what it was. Was it sand from the road, being kicked up by the team further up the hill, and then blown into our faces by the crazy wind? Was it raining, but.. sideways? WHAT WAS HAPPENING? It wasn't until we got to the top of that brutal hill that we figured it out.
There was a little pump house of sorts for the third lake, and it had a little fountain going (was it supposed to be shooting up water? Unclear), and the water it was shooting a couple feet in the air was all being picked up by this wind and pushed directly into our face. So BASICALLY it was raining, but sideways. Mystery solved!
Now the wide gravel road was going downhill, which was infinitely better than steeply uphill.
We started cruising down the road, chatting about the crazy wind, and suddenly a car appeared in front of us, and we scooched way over to the right side of the road to let it by. Well, that was unexpected. It looked like an official car of some sort, park rangery, maybe, and we hoped that it didn't mean that some team was in distress behind us. There was also a marshal on the road, here in the middle of nowhere, that took note of our number as we ran by.
The flags for this section were tied to a guardrail along the road to our left, near the ground. Very obvious we should be going the way we were, following them. But then we saw some other flags off further to the left. In the brushy stuff off the road. We could just see one or two flags over there, but they were definitely the same color flags that marked the path we were on. That's weird. The teams ahead of us were still ahead of us, and we were pretty sure we were all going the right way.. ?
And then we realized that that was probably the path over to lake swim 3, and that we were not, in fact, going to get to do lake swim 3. It looked like the area had been re-flagged to keep us on the road rather than taking us over to the lake, and even though the third lake swim was supposed to be the shortest, we didn't really blame them for prioritizing our safety, given how intense that wind was.
We did question, though, whether this was a pre-cursor to us learning that the fjord crossing had also been canceled, which we DEFINITELY were going to be sad about. We knew that was always a possibility in bad weather, and we were crossing all our fingers that things were calmer down fjordwards, and we'd get to do that big swim.
That did mean a slightly longer run down to the fjord, and not broken up with a swim, but this part was actually one of my favorites. You see so much footage of the stairs and Pulpit Rock and the fjord, but I don't remember having seen this part. It's a gravel jeep road (not Trista's favorite), but that means it's one of the few places on the whole course where you can look up and look around without being concerned about face-planting.
And the view was worth looking up and around.
We'd come up and over a ridge, and now we were running down into a valley, and all around us were mountains, towering over us. We felt tiny. Nature was enormous. And we were fortunate enough to be tiny specks in this giant landscape, doing an easy downhill run and gazing upward around us in awe.
And then we saw our first SHEEP of the day!
I mean, we knew they were probably out there somewhere. SOMEONE was out there. There was poop everywhere. We learned a lot about sheep poop and its form and consistency during this whole Norway trip, but starting during this run.
We actually weren't even sure the first sheep we saw was real. Like the dedicated athletes we are, we ran off the trail a bit toward it, just to make sure it was real and alive, and when it turned to look at us accusingly, we giggled with glee. Sheep! Then more of them off in the distance to the left!
We looked at each other and just laughed. And as we would so many times over the course of the day, we said, "Are you fucking kidding me?!" And "This is ridiculous!" And "This is just stupid!" Sometimes the stupidity was about how hard it was, but mostly it was about how unbelievably big and beautiful everything was. It was so grand as to seem fake. Nothing could possibly be that amazing and beautiful and just right there for us to access and enjoy. Norway is just stunning.
Soon our gravel jeep road continued on, but the flags indicated our time with it was over, and we began a bushwhacking journey that would eventually take us back down to the fjord.
This part started out fun and easy, hopping little streams, running through little gullies, hopping up and down off of little rocks, wondering what in the world the random huts and cabins out there were for, but then eventually got steeper and steeper as we made our way back down.
Eventually the trail aggressively began to lose all the elevation we'd gained doing the stairs, and it got a little treacherous. The trail was very dry here, and the loose dirt meant that you'd do a lot of sliding. Fortunately there were a lot of trees that you could aim for, and then hook a hand or an arm around once you got there to arrest your momentum and get your feet back under you. Trista pointed out that no matter how unpleasant this downhill slog was, it would be even MORE unpleasant going UPhill. Though we had plenty of unpleasant uphill slogs to go that were previously downhill!
The trail started to level out a bit, and came out of the trees into a section of houses. As we emerged from the trees, we could see the water of the fjord, and it looked.. pretty calm. Okay, maybe this swim could happen after all! Maybe it was protected down here in this valley, and the water would be nice and glassy.
Dramatic foreshadowiiiiing.
We got down to the swim entrance with the Poo Girls from the ferry coming in just behind us quietly and subtly. Just kidding, they came up behind us, yelling something like, "HEY, IT'S THE POO GIRLS!!!". As we'd been promised, we were given a hi-vis buoy to wear to cross the fjord. One per team, and I'm the swimmer in the back, so the volunteer wrapped it around my waist, snapped it in place, and then we stepped up to the water's edge, on the sea wall.
Trista chatted with the volunteer, making sure we knew exactly where we were headed, and getting recommendations on where to sight, and how to compensate for the current. We were excited. It was allegedly about a mile across the fjord, and it definitely looked far away. But it looked doable. We could do this.
There was a ladder we could have climbed down into the water, but we do like a nice little hop.
1 Mile Swim Across the Fjord
And so hop we did.
We'd already demystified the fjord earlier. It was not as cold as the lakes. It was salty. It wasn't super choppy. It was nice. This was happening. We were doing this. We were checking another major item off the Rockman Experience Checklist!
And so we swam! For a while we just kept out heads down and swam. The other shore looked much further away now that we were down in the water, but we like swimming. This is our strong sport. We just settled in and cruised.
At some point I couldn't stand it anymore, so I hit Trista's shoe to get her attention, so I could start the process of yelling about LOOK WHERE WE ARE and LOOK HOW AMAZING WE ARE and WE'RE DOING THIS SHIT OH MY GOD. She whirls around and as I start to say "LOOK AT.." she says "Is it jellyfish?! There's jellyfish everywhere!" and I said "I .. haven't seen a single jellyfish", and she said something like "Well, if it isn't jellyfish, we need to keep swimming!"
So I sadly lowered my head back down and kept swimming. Just kidding! I mean, I did keep swimming, and I DIDN'T see any jellyfish (and wouldn't for that entire long swim, despite Trista allegedly seeing tons), but we stopped several more times to briefly gaze around us in wonderment.
Especially when we got to the halfway point. To our right was the iconic view we'd seen only in pictures but longed to see in person. Here it was. The cliffs to the right, the cliffs to the left, and us out there, dwarfed by their size, two tiny little insignificant humans floating in the water far beneath and between them. It was indescribable.
Trista was continuing to aim for the white house to the right of the red roof, and was thinking she was going to have to start aiming for the actual red roof soon, because otherwise she was going to swim way too far right and overshoot the swim exit.
And then things got exciting.
It was never really "like glass" out there. It was windy, and the wind was making the water a little choppy the whole time. But it wasn't bad. And then it got worse. And worse. And then it was bad.
At first I was able to breathe bilaterally just fine. But my preference, especially when I need comfort and stability, is to breathe right. I get my most successful breathing done in that direction. But now there was no breathing right. Right was just waves of water, hitting you directly in the face.
And the waves started just tossing us around mercilessly. It's even more noticeable when you're connected to another person. Sometimes a wave would take Trista one direction and me another direction, and the tether would get stretched out as we separated. SO GLAD we had that tether. I honestly couldn't imagine being a solo athlete out there doing this swim. I felt so small and vulnerable, and so glad that I was out there with someone I trusted and could depend upon.
We fought against the waves and the current, which was now very much pushing us to the left, and it looked like we completely stopped making forward progress. The last half felt like it took twice as long as the first half. And where Trista was thinking she was going to have to start aiming for the red roof.. no longer an issue. She was now being pushed the wrong way, and having to figure out how much to overcorrect to try to fix it.
I knew there was a current, I knew it was brutal, and so I managed to stop myself from ever hitting Trista's shoe and saying, "Oh, um, hey, I wasn't sure if you'd noticed, but we seem to be drifting further and further left, possibly eventually to be swept out to sea? I just thought I'd point it out in case you hadn't taken note..."
She knew. And distracting her would only push us further the wrong direction. So I just stayed on her feet, trusting that her feet would end up at the right place.
Plus I had plenty of other stuff going on, by which I mean I was trying not to vomit. I usually don't get motion sickness in any situation other than maybe things that spin quickly (LOOKING AT YOU, DISNEY TEACUPS), but for some reason the combination of wavey water and salt water was making me a litttttle nervous. The waves alone weren't a problem. But because I'm incapable of NOT automatically breathing right, 50% of the times I went to breathe, I'd swallow salt water. Do not recommend. And the combination of salt water on TOP of the waveywaves was making me feel a little gurpy. Each time I'd swallow salt water, I'd kinda gag and get as much back out of me as I could, and then cross my fingers and hope I didn't start to feel nauseous.
And I never did. It was probably more likely I was going to get sick just because I was so PARANOID about getting sick. So I tried not to dwell. But man, the thought of doing the rest of the race with motion sickness was a little terrifying.
Happy to say you don't have to read about many more hours of dizziness and vomiting! (Or do you?! Who knows what's going to happen later!) (Note: It's not dizziness and vomiting. I'd tell you, friends.)
This is where I'd show you a dramatic picture of how we started out on a perfect course to swim right into the swim exit, and then got pushed off to the left at the end, but THIS is the map Garmin gave me for this swim. It has the right time, and (I assume) the right distance, but that's all we get credit for on the map. Fairly sure that's not accurate. Fairly sure I'd remember if we got dropped from a plane into the fjord and then airlifted back out shortly thereafter. Hrmph.
So you'll just have to take my word for it that we ended up left of the dock as we got close to the end. Trista assures me that everyone was far left, most worse than us, some being collected by boats, but I was being very good and not looking around, mostly, and also I couldn't see anything when I illegally sighted anyway, since it was just waves and water hitting me in the face.
We were swimming toward the dock, but also being steadily pushed into a very, very large rock to the left of the dock. I had full confidence that Trista would not let us get swept out to sea, but maybe only like 99% confidence that she wasn't going to get us dashed into that giant rock. We were getting pretty close there at the end!
As we closed in on the last few meters, there was a guy much further off to our left, and he plaintively asked, "Where do we get out?!" He was so far left that he couldn't even see the dock. He had a much greater chance of being dashed against the giant rock! But we pointed to the dock and said it was RIGHT there, and then swam hard for it ourselves.
We were fairly curious who this guy was, though, because he was wearing a team bib, but there was only one of him. Was his partner even further out to sea?!
As we finally forcibly made our way alongside the giant rock (avoiding being dashed into it) and up to the swim exit, we looked up and saw Matt! What a delightful way to end a challenging, endless swim! I mean, we knew he'd be there, but a lot had happened since we last saw him on the ferry that morning.
As Trista was almost to the rocks, she recoiled and said "I didn't come all this way to get stung by a jelly now!" as she evidently swam through a swarm of jellyfish. Which.. I predictably saw none of.
Matt offered a hand down, and managed to pull Trista up without causing her any serious injury. Oh, should we talk about how Trista has a jacked up shoulder? Well, if I don't put it in the intro, it will be introduced very late in the game here!
Trista had a jacked up shoulder. She tried ignoring it, she tried PT, life got in the way, and ultimately she just decided it was gonna be whatever it was, and we'd deal with it during the race as we needed. Which.. turned out to be a non-issue, overall. The windy swims meant that sometimes the wind would catch your paddle during a stroke and wrench your arm around, or pull your arm the wrong way in the water, which didn't feel good even on a non-jacked shoulder, but overall she definitely never complained about it. At least not in an amount that stood out above everything else we complained about over the course of the day! So there you go. I didn't mention it because it was never an issue, but it should be mentioned for the record.
And Matt managed to extract her from the water without making it demonstrably worse! And then did the same for me, who had normal shoulders.
And there on shore we found what was presumably the partner of the guy we'd helped guide into the swim exit! He looked like he'd been there a minute or two. And he looked very cold. Shivering. Fortunately, as seen in the video, his presumed partner was right behind us. And the next section promised to warm a person up REAL fast.
Matt took our safety buoy back, since we only needed it for the crossing, got us some water to wash out the salt from our faces, and sent us on our way! Thanks, best volunteer Matt!
Scree-field ascent, Old Man Ian and his Waffles, Sheep Road Back Down to Songesand
Okay, after a nearly 40 minute cold, choppy, salty, windy swim, we were back on our feet, and suddenly tasked with being upright and agile!
The "trail" was a boulder field, with flags forming switchbacks to take us zigging and zagging up the cliff. It was a tough, technical climb that would have been challenging at any time, but was extra tough when we were trying to wake our legs back up and get feeling back in our bodies. It also required using your hands to scramble in some places, and I once again was still trying to get all my gear situated as we were traversing this insanity. Trying to get my buoy properly on my back, with my paddles on my hands, trying to use those paddled hands to catch myself on the rocks.
As we hopped rock to rock, we chatted some about the swim. Even though it wasn't frigidly cold, we both suffered a bit for being in the cold water for that long, in that we both had several incidents where our legs tried to cramp. Fortunately we were both able to fend it off by holding our feet in ridiculous positions or doing ankle circles, so we both came out of the swim with maybe some cold feet (Trista's were probably frozen stumps, but that's normal), but otherwise none the worse for the wear.
We also talked about how this was our Pig Swim. When you do ÖTILLÖ World Championship, everyone tells you about the Pig Swim. It's cold, it's choppy, it's windy, it's difficult. For us, on our bluebird day, the swim was warm, delightful, smooth, no issues at all. And that was NOT RIGHT. We did not get a proper Pig Swim. So this. This was our Pig Swim. It had all the elements we had been denied last year. All was right with the world now! (We still have to go back to WC and do a proper Pig Swim during that race, though.)
That took us up through the rocks and the trees, and then we could see a beautiful vibrant green lawn ahead! We figured that must be the start of Ian's farm, and that meant waffles.
Okay, so, we were told that there was a farm, and that's where we'd find Ian, and he'd have waffles. That's all we knew. Lacking other details, I decided Ian was a grizzled 80 year old man who grew up on this farm and now lived there alone with his sheep, making waffles for passers-by. I was excited to meet this legend and eat some of his waffles from the recipe handed down from his ancestors.
Of course, first we had to GET to Ian. When we saw the beautiful green grass ahead, and figured that was a lawn. Like someone's front yard. Except when we got there, nobody's front yard continues on at a SIXTY DEGREE ANGLE. We were climbing what looked like a manicured front yard, using our hands to pull us up. Clearly this lawn was not manicured by someone with a lawnmower. That was extra obvious because this lovely lawn was COVERED in sheep poop. Which, as we learned many times over the course of this race, and this vacation in general, looks very much like human poop. Not cute pellets. Man poops.
Man poops meant sheep were nearby! And they were. They were all staring at us disinterestedly as we crawled hand over hand up their ridiculous cliff of a yard.
Finally it leveled out, and we got to a gravel path, which took us to Ian!
I'd like to say that he was in his rocking chair, smoking his pipe, beckoning us in with the smell of fresh waffles, but it turns out Ian's a really nice mid-20s guy with two kids who were frantically running around the car, and also Ian had just lost power, so had no waffles to offer us. It was a confusing time for me.
But we got some water and electrolyte drink from him, I managed to understand the incredibly basic one sentence in Norwegian that he yelled to his kids ("In the car!"), and then we traveled on down the road, waffleless.
Back out onto the road! The literal road this time. In a race that is nearly non-stop technical trail, if it can be called trail at all, there's this section of a couple miles where it's almost an intermission for your brain. You don't have to watch your feet. You don't have to figure out where to go next. You just run down a road. Literally down, because this part was a steady decline back down to undo all that elevation we'd climbed on the scree field. Trista hates road running, and says she would have probably died if this was several miles of UPhill road running (which it usually has been in the past, with the course running the opposite way), but she was willing to endure it for a couple miles of downhill.
Especially because there were more SHEEP! First there was a sheepfriend off to our right, just off the road, and then suddenly there were two sheep, a mama and a baby, basically IN the road, on the "wrong" side. Clearly that meant they wanted to be our best friends, so we started angling toward them, hands outstretched in the international sign of BE MY BEST FRIEND. As we approached, we hear a voice behind us yell "LEAVE THAT SHEEP ALONE!" (You're gonna hafta imagine that in my best/worst English accent. Loudly.)
The Poo Girls! I'm just gonna say, their names are Jude and Pat, and call them that from now on, because that feels less weird.
Fine, fine, we didn't pet the sheep, and we kept running down the road. We expected them (Jude and Pat, not the sheep) to pass us then, but they hung behind us for quite some time. Slowly they crept up on us, and then eventually they were running with us, which was fun, and we had a nice little chat! Mostly about how much cattleguards suck when you're running over them, and why that one van drove back and forth on this road in the middle of nowhere like 4 times while we were out there.
It should be noted, this was a REALLY nice, recently-paved road, just out in the middle of nowhere. And it had a bridge, and we always give a thumbs up to (most) any bridge.
Eventually that nice road emptied out into a parking lot by the water, and there was an aid station, and our next swim entrance!
There was a lot going on around this area. I suppose part of that is because, I know now, this had been the race start for the short course race! I knew on a high level where it was, but at the time my brain didn't make that connection. Meanwhile those guys were long gone, so it was just long coursers coming through, spectators, volunteers, and Marcus! This was the first time we'd seen Marcus since we hopped off the ferry, so there were hugs and exclamations and water drinking and general merriment. We told him what a great time we were having, and what an amazing course it was, and how much we loved him, and he kinda kicked dirt and sheepishly said, "Yeah, well, you're about to hate me..."
Spoiler: Accurate.
But not yet.
So we hopped up on the wall, Marcus filming. Trista suggests we do a cute jump, maybe something cute with our legs, and I'm like "Yeah, no, if I do cute legs, my buoy will fall out, and we're being filmed here. Be profesh."
So we hop in, we turn and start swimming, and then Trista turns over and yells that she forgot to zip her wetsuit.
I won't even attempt to do justice to Jude's reaction. I'll just include the video, so you can hear it yourself.
Now you can imagine that voice telling us to leave the sheep alone. Just a delight.
Fjord Swim 3
Boring name because this is one of the few sections of this race where.. there was really nothing notable! I mean, we were still in Norway, so we were surrounded by cliffs and waterfalls and amazingness, but it was a short swim, less than 600 yards, and relatively free of strife!
In fact, it was delightful, because even though we were back in the fjord, which was still cold and windy and choppy, the wind was blowing from our left, which meant I could breathe right to my heart's content, and you better believe I did.
And that's the only section you'll get with so few words, so let's just enjoy it and move on!
Seaside Sprint
Sorry to spoil the mystery for future people doing this race, but the name of this section, Seaside Sprint, is supposed to be funny. It's irony. It is not a sprint. It's the opposite of a sprint.
This run section is just over a mile long, and it's pure technical rocks. And it was my demon going in. It seemed like the kind of thing I'm worst/slowest at. And it was!
But it was also so much fun.
It started out by going straight up, which seems to be a theme, which I guess makes sense when the swims are in a fjord, and the only way to go to run is up. And then it continues along the seaside, all big boulders you have to hop between, then past a tree that you have to hang on and drop down, or swing around, holding on with an arm so you don't fall into the water.
I was pretty cautious through this section, because I have short legs, and some of the drops were pretty far, so I'd sit on the rock and slide down when necessary, or use my upper body to lever me down if I felt unsafe. I almost managed to get through uninjured, and in fact I didn't fall in this section, but I did just randomly hit my knee directly into a rock for no real reason. Other than "generally clumsy". Mostly bruise, a little blood. First blood!
We had a few teams pass us during this section, including some female teams. Trista's loyalties are always tested during these parts, as she starts chatting with whoever's passing us, and ends up picking up her speed to stay with them, until I eventually call out forlornly from behind her, "I can't keep uuuuup." Then she has to decide whether to stay with them or with me. So far she's always picked me. Fingers crossed that continues!
To drive home how slow and technical this part was, we'd been going for.. a while. It felt like a long while. And Trista asked how far we'd gone, presumably thinking maybe we were almost done with the Seaside Sprint mile. And I looked at my watch and just laughed. I said, "Do you REALLY want to know?" She did. We'd gone 0.15 miles. Clearly this was going to take a WHILE.
But we just kept playing in that boulder playground, having a lovely time, putting all my demons to rest. I may not have done it quickly, but I had a blast doing it, and my fears of falling or getting injured were unfounded, because I didn't lose my head.
And then eventually the trail cut off to the right and started going up. This offended Trista greatly, because the sea was to the LEFT, and so to go RIGHT meant we were going AWAY from the sea, which meant we were no longer SEASIDE, and this was the SEASIDE SPRINT.
We kept going right, and Trista started to question whether we were even still on course. Was this right? At some point we didn't see any markers, and Trista said, "Where do we go?!" And a booming voice from directly above us said, "UP HERE."
Arnold Schwarzenegger?! GOD?! Hello?!?
We look up, and there's a very stoic Viking man towering above us on a rock ledge. Oh, hi!
Turns out it was a member of the safety team, and there were two of them up there. That's always a good sign that it's going to be an exciting part of the course, if it requires two safety crew to survey it!
We had to climb up some rocks to even get to Mr. Viking, and then we were at the chains section!
Basically a cliff face with really sketchy footing, with a chain pounded into the cliff so that you can hold onto that and hopefully not plummet to your death.
Trista started across, and as I reached for the chain to follow her, she said I might want to wait, because this whole section was one chain, and if two people were pulling on it at one time, in different directions, it could pull the chain out of one person's hands. I had just gotten onto the ledge as she said that, so I released the chain I'd just grabbed, and instead I just tried to find some rock handholds I could cling to until it was safe to grab the chain again. This put me directly facing the stone-faced safety guy. Because I'm me, and can't let go of an opportunity for an awkward interaction, I said to him, "Okay, I let go, if anything happens, you have to catch me!" And he immediately replied in his stoic monotone, "That's why the chain is there."
Okay, then!
There was a second safety guy just after, and we bounced several one-liners off of them, Adorkable-style, and they had NO response. They were there to do a very specific job, they took that job very seriously, and they had no time to entertain or be entertained by us. Fair! Fair.
The chains were fun and probably terrifying for people who don't like heights or sketchy situations, especially because the rocks were slick and slidey.
We re-entered the forest, and as we descended through the trees, Loyd the podcaster, who had hosted the pre-race informational video, and his partner (who loved Dutch candy, relevant to nothing, but just so you know that there's ALL SORTS of random information I could include in this report to make it even longer, but I'm not, and you're welcome) ran by us, and we chatted with them a bit. As they went off into the woods ahead of us, they started putting on their swimcaps and generally re-equipping, and we were like, "Oh! Oh, is this section almost over?! Are we swimming soon?!" And they confirmed we were! Okay! So we suited back up, too, and then soon emerged from the trees onto a seaside dock!
I feel like you need a reminder here. This section was for the Seaside Sprint. All of these words. It ended up being 1.23 miles total. 1,104 feet of ascent. 54.5 minutes. And all of those words. This race is no joke.
The volunteers at this swim entrance were a delight. Music playing, so full of energy, fun, and completely receptive to when I looked in the box of candy at their aid station and said, "Those looks like gummi penises!" Evidently they were .. cherries? I don't know. They looked like gummi penises. That was mentioned several times in the short time we were there.
I realize that I could have left out the whole gummi penises thing. It really adds nothing to the summary of the race. But Trista said her mom insisted I leave no details out of the report, so here we are. Darlene, these gummi penises are for you. Sorry, and you're welcome.
At some point during the race, it started raining, and then it rained on and off for the rest of our race. Trista and I had trouble pinpointing exactly when the rain started, but she insists that "those penises were wet", so there you have it. The rain had already started. And the penises served a valuable purpose in this report.
I really can't imagine why the length of these race reports spirals out of control.
Oh, and as we were having these important penis-based discussions, we saw something out in the water! We thought it might be a seal! One of the volunteers assured us that it almost certainly was not a seal, because I think he thought people would NOT want to swim with a seal, and that's what they'd want to hear. But we sounded very sad that it wasn't, so before we got back in the water, he saw it again, and confessed that maybe it WAS a seal, and that was exciting. (Just gonna spoil it now, we saw no seals.)
And then back into the fjord! The dock had tires affixed to the outer edge on the long side, and those looked a bit wobbly to stand on, or try to jump over, so we asked if we could jump off the short side, the direction of the swim. They said absolutely, it was safe, have at. I didn't fully believe that was true, but it was deep ENOUGH to do a very cautious jump, so we hopped off, and I fully bent my knees, and sure enough my feet brushed the bottom, but my over-caution meant it was no problem, and off we went for another fjord swim!
A Really Long-Ass Fjord Swim
Our last swim in the fjord for the day! Trista said it was around a mile, but like our last fjord swim, it was along the shoreline, so again, while the water was rough, it was hitting us from the left, and maybe a little from behind, so I could breathe right, and we were probably getting a mild current assist?
This swim felt LONG. And it was. My watch is set to beep every 500 yards in open water, and after it beeped 1500, I expected the swim to be almost over. But we still couldn't even see where to get out. It ended up being 2450 yards, according to my watch.
And it took us FOREVER to figure out where to get out. It was a long, straight swim, but with cliffs jutting out periodically, and so you couldn't see ahead of you in some cases, and everything is SO BIG out there, with the cliffs, and actual people are so tiny in that environment. Trista would come up and say she couldn't see where the exit was, and I'd say, "Welp, guess we keep swimming!"
Just like the other swims, it was a cold, choppy swim, now with some rain, and we weathered that just fine, but we saw a LOT of boats patrolling and pulling people out of the water. It feels like, swimming along the shore like we were, if you needed to get out, you could just swim to the shore. But the shore was almost all sheer cliff faces, and so there wasn't much you could do if you were in distress aside from flag down a boat.
I DID see my first and only jellyfish during this swim! Trista did some sort of weird spasm while swimming, and right as I was about to come up and ask what THAT was all about, a jellyfish went by under me! It was super cute. So we both came up and exclaimed about a jellyfish at the same time, and I appreciate Trista going out of her way to make sure I had a jellyfish experience during this race. She knows what I like, and she's very good to me.
(Neither of us were ever stung during the race, though we heard that other were people. I will continue to find jellyfish adorable and magical until I get stung by one during a race, and then I will reassess my relationship with them. Stay tuned.)
With the swim being so much longer than expected, it really made it feel like we were clearly missing the swim exit, but we just couldn't find it. There were boats at the shore, but several of those, and none clearly the exit. And it was hard to tell, with the waves and rain and cliffs, what exactly we were looking at, any time we saw safety orange.
But eventually we did swim up on the dock that was the exit. But once we got there, we couldn't figure out how to get OUT. It was confusing, because the ladder to get out was on the FAR side of the dock, so we couldn't see it until we'd swum PAST the dock, and had to swing back around.
Brattli to Skogavatnet
The second Trista touched the ladder and her ears emerged from the water, the world's MOST ENTHUSIASTIC VOLUNTEER descended upon her. She was still trying to climb up the ladder with her frozen limbs, recovering from almost 40 minutes of choppy, salty, fishy water, and this guy told her his NAME, and there's WATER, and ELECTROLYTE DRINK, and FOOD, and CANDY, and are you cold because there's BLANKETS, and also a FIRE, and MUSIC, and AAHH DUDE YOU'RE AT A 12 RIGHT NOW AND I NEED YOU TO DIAL IT DOWN TO A 6 OR SO.
Fortunately Matt was ALSO there, lurking calmly behind this very helpful and sincere volunteer, and he managed to help us navigate getting up and out on the ladder, never an easy task when you're tethered together, and onto solid ground again.
I think we ate something there, and drank some water, but we didn't refill our water flasks there, which we now realize we really, really should have. Hindsight, man.
This aid station was a bit of a carnage field. People were wrapped in blankets, being seen by medical teams, Marcus was there, but so busy doing RD stuff he couldn't come play with us, clearly this had been a really rough swim for a lot of people. We were cold and a little discombobulated, but not enough to stop us from.. dancing? And then moving on, because we knew that's what would keep us warm enough to not end up in the blankets ourselves.
Oh, it should be noted, Eye of the Tiger was playing. That's such a great song to have playing as you go through an aid station in a race. What a fun coincidence that it was playing for us just as we went through!
Yeah, no, Matt assures us that the aforementioned enthusiastic volunteer played it OVER AND OVER AND OVER all day. Great for each individual team moving through! Not as great for his fellow aid station volunteers' sanity.
As we headed out, Marcus told us we were going to hate him for this climb. Noted. Prepared to hate Marcus.
The climbing began immediately out of the aid station, if you watch that video again, and try to ignore our amazing dancing, you can see other athletes in the background, beginning the next "run" section.
As we started the climb, I said, "... Do you smell smoke?" Trista's like, "Uh, yes, there was a FIRE in the aid station, with people gathered around it. Kinda hard to miss." Clearly I was braining on a very high level.
Oh! And as we were leaving, Trista remembered there was a time cut-off at this aid station. We'd been vaguely watching the watch to see if this was going to be problematic, and it looked like we were going to be okay. I think the original literature said we had to be through here by 3pm, but with the adjusted start time (30 minutes late), we had to be through by 3:30pm. And I believe we were through even before the original 3pm time, so we felt pretty good about that. I could look up actual times here, but you're living through my eyes at the time, and I didn't know, and so now you know as much as I can remember knowing at the time!
And so we climbed. And climbed. And climbed. A steep climb. An endless climb. At some point I said to Trista that I had burned through all of capacity for hating Marcus, and there was NO END IN SIGHT to this climb. I had to begin tapping into hidden inner Marcus-hatred reserves I hadn't known about in the past! But those reserves carried me through the 2.54 miles of relentless ascent, 1992 feet of elevation gain. It took us 2 hours to go those 2.54 miles. This course is insane.
We climbed until we emerged from the tops of the trees, and there was the fjord again! Norway just does that. You're traveling along doing normal-person things, and then BAM, fjord. Cliff. Waterfall. Herd of sheep. Sneaks up on you with its amazingness.
Fortunately one of the female teams we'd been leap frogging with passed us through there, and they had a gopro! And so we graciously offered to snap a few photos of them from up top, and they graciously offered to take some of us, as well.
We emerged from the trees and we had a little bald rock running and climbing with majestic views.
There were a lot of rocks... man.
Photo by Geraint
A little drive-by chat with photographer Geraint from Isle of Sky, and then back into the trees again to descend.
Photo by Geraint
It's amazing how quickly the landscape in this race changes. We immediately went from barren mountaintop to lush jungle in a few minutes.
Eventually the trail flattened out a bit, and from up ahead, we heard someone yell that it was his favorite US team! And it was our friend from packet pickup the day before who had dogs! I obviously asked to pet his dogs, and so we chatted a bit and found out he would be out volunteering at the Skogavatnet swim. Which evidently was where we now were!
Unfortunately he did not have his dogs with him. He also didn't have any water. When we asked if he had water, he said he didn't have anything for us like an aid station. We eyed the bagel he was holding, and said that clearly wasn't true, but he wasn't willing to donate his bagel to our cause, sadly.
He pointed across the lake to our swim exit, and we hopped in for our first non-fjord swim since swim 3!
Skogavatnet Swim
This was a relatively short lake swim through a really lovely forested area (a skog, if you will, which means forest in Norwegian). The main notables of this 600 yard swim were (a) the water was a WEIRD color. Sorta.. brownish orange? Trista said Fanta. It was like.. if you said "Make this lake the color of Fall." Pumpkin Spice Vatnet. It didn't taste weird or anything, it was just an unsettling color for a lake.
And it was COLD. I would say this was the coldest swim of the day, but since I don't have actual temps for any of the swims, I can't verify that statement. So let's just assume it's true, lacking evidence otherwise!
Actually, when we waded in, I thought we were going to start swimming, so I hit the split button on my watch and flopped my whole body in. Trista wasn't ready, evidently, and started fiddling with something, still standing in the water, and I told her OKAY GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER AND SWIM, IT'S REALLY COLD.
And then oddly.. halfway across the lake, it warmed up. I wondered if Trista had managed to pee so much that she warmed an entire half a lake with it? She was having the same phenomenon, we compared notes afterward. We both wondered if it was so cold, we were hypothermic, or our skin was no longer feeling cold, because we couldn't feel anything anymore. But it turns out it was probably just another source of water coming into the lake at that point, that was warmer. That's probably for the best.
We made it across the lake, exiting at what we first thought was a volunteer, but turned out to be half of a short course team that we'd seen a few times (but only half this time!).
Skogavatnet to the Crossroads
This next section "run" section is a doozy, so we're gonna break it up into manageable pieces, which is how we had to mentally do it during the race.
First we had to run from the Skogavatnet swim up up up through the trees to the Crossroads.
When Trista and I were reviewing what happened during the race, making notes for this report, neither of us could really differentiate this section from any of the other 268 wet forested rocky relentless uphill slogs. Nothing notable really happened.
But THEN Trista remembered this was where we spent basically the entire time talking about PIZZA.
I said I was ready to be done and eating pizza. Trista asked what would happen if we got done with the race, and they had pizza, but they ONLY had pepperoni. I've been trying out vegetarianism for almost a year now, so it wasn't that strange a question. I said I would absolutely pick the pepperoni off the pizza and eat it anyway.
We somehow stretched that one topic out over about an hour of race.
We also spent a lot of time looking for trail markers.
You see, they had done an amazing job marking this course. In many hours of racing, we never got lost, and we very rarely had to look around to figure out where to go next, which is impressive in a race this messy and random. One thing that made their job easier is that much of this race was part of the established Norwegian hiking trail system, which they mark with spraypainted red Ts. These are always marked, so it really cut down on the marking the race itself had to do.
However, any time the race deviated from the hiking trail, they had to hang little colored blazes up in the trees, or put signs on the ground, so that we'd know not to follow the Ts for a bit. These are frequently referred to as confidence markers.
Since we knew that Marcus had marked much of the trail, during this section, we renamed them to Confidence Marcus. Look, it's a long race, we have to keep ourselves entertained somehow.
When we weren't talking endlessly about pizza, I also got into my own head a bit during this section. With the Crossroads coming up, that also meant we were coming up to the last time cut-off. The official cut-off wasn't until we got BACK to the Crossroads after an out and back to Pulpit Rock, but once we got to the Crossroads the first time, we'd have a pretty good idea whether or not we could make it back in time to beat the cut-off.
And for some reason, I got it in my head that we probably weren't going to make it.
And I found I could accept that. I didn't love it. I wanted to finish this race with a time, and not a DNF. But also it had been SUCH an amazing experience. Even if we didn't have an official finish time, we had this enormous day together, in this amazing natural environment, in Norway. I could think of no better way to spend a day, and no better person to spend it with. And so it was okay.
Plus, the way Rockman does cut-offs, if you don't make the Crossroads cut-off, you basically.. still have to finish the race. You just go straight back to basecamp on the tourist trail instead of adding on a little loop at the end.
This race isn't one where you can stop at an aid station and a car will pick you up and take you to the finish line. If you're being transported, it's probably either by helicopter or one of those single-wheeled trail gurneys. And it's not the finish line you're being transported to.
So even if we didn't make the cut-off, we'd still basically do the entire race. And it would be an epic day anyway, even with no official finish. And so I was okay with it.
I mean, I didn't love that a DNF would pretty much be on my shoulders. Trista would never, ever blame me or say anything, but even though we both struggled and were slow on the endless climbs, I was clearly the one slowing us down on the technical parts. Of which there were many. And we knew that going in. It's just not something I'm naturally good at, and as much as I trained, I was never going to be able to stay with her. She knew that and had no problem with it. And I didn't have a problem with it until it meant we might DNF. That's a lot to cope with.
So as we continued slogging uphill, I wrote and edited several captions to go on the post I'd make when we DNFed. "I'm okay with it." "We had an amazing day regardless." "I love that Trista still loves me, even though.." I had a lot of time to consider which words I'd use.
As I wrote captions internally and talked about pizza externally, we saw colors in the trees up ahead, and Trista pointed out that it was the ultimate Confidence Marcus... Actual Marcus!
Which probably meant we were close to the Crossroads!
He was being quiet and still (rare), which meant he was filming us as we approached. It's not like we were going to break into a run, still going uphill, but we tried to at least keep our shit together. Tried. I was still being super clumsy, and I grabbed onto a tree to catch myself as we approached, and it was one of the many, many stupid trees that are just covered in thorny needles, which stick in your hands. As we got to Marcus, I held out my hands and said, "Marcus, heeeeeeeelp!" and he kindly picked the needles out of my hands for me.
Sometimes, like the amazing volunteers at the first swim exit, you just want to feel taken care of for a few seconds. Thank you, Marcus, for picking thorns out of my hands.
Marcus told us we were doing great, and that coach had just checked in to see how we were doing. And right at that second, coach called Marcus back, so Marcus put him on speaker phone for a motivational speech.
Coach Nico said "You are doing great, girls. Don't stop, keep going!"
I love coach. I do. I don't think he really understands slow people like us, but he is endlessly supportive, and prepares us for these ridiculous races, and we always feel ready on race day. But right at that point in the race, I was very annoyed by that particular motivational strategy, and I said, "We ARE going! We haven't been stopping! We're just slow!"
Look, I was tired. And hey, it WAS motivational! Even if maybe not how it was intended to be.
As we got to the Crossroads, Trista asked where the water was, so we could fill up our flasks to carry us through the rest of the race. And Marcus said there was no water.
Sad trombone. Very sad trombone. We'd basically drained our water flasks at this point, and we hadn't refilled in Brattli because we'd figured we'd refill at the Crossroads, but that was clearly the wrong strategy.
But nothing to be done. Marcus said it was 1 mile out to Pulpit Rock, one mile back, and it was basically 5pm at this point, so we had 45 minutes to get there and back to make the cut off.
45 minutes to go 2 miles. That doesn't sound challenging. But we'd had a HELL of a day so far, and we had no idea what the terrain was like for this 1 mile. But were we going to try? You bet your ass.
And so we set out to see if we could keep ourselves in this race, once again chasing a time cut-off in an epic race we weren't ready to be done with.
As we ran out, one of the aid station volunteers offered us crackers. BUT THERE WAS NO WATER SO IT REALLY JUST SEEMED CRUEL.
(Turns out we get really dramatic when we're chasing time cut-offs in epic races!)
Out and Back to Pulpit Rock
We had been in the trees for quite a while at this point, and protected from the weather, but it turned out it was still very rainy and windy in the exposed areas. And Pulpit Rock is VERY exposed.
This was TERRIBLE weather for tourists to go out and enjoy the view from Pulpit Rock, which was GREAT news for us, because it meant there was practically nobody out there to keep us from running exactly where and how fast we wanted.
We couldn't truly appreciate how lucky we were until the next day, when we hiked back up to Pulpit Rock in beautiful weather, and it was SO CONGESTED. It would have been hellish to try to chase a time cutoff through those crowds. But we had no crowds at all in our dismal, grey weather!
Instead we got to actually see other teams! It had been hours since we'd seen other teams, and we felt like we were truly out there alone. Not so! As we ran out, we saw quite a few teams running back in, and even quite a few running out as we were running back! Out and backs are always so amazing for making you realize you're not alone.
We were FOCUSED. After hours and hours and hours of hiking uphill or sliding downhill, we could finally actually run. Mostly. There were still sections of double-height stone steps that I cursed loudly. Especially when the stairs went DOWN on the way out, which meant they would be UP on the way back in. I needed the whole out to be up, so the whole way back we could just cruise down. Grr.
To truly show how focused we were, one of the very few tourists we ran by out there asked us if we could take a photo of him as we ran by. Trista is a genuinely kind, personable person, and loves to help people realize their photo dreams, so when she said, "I'm sorry, we can't stop, we're in a race," it was one of the roughest parts of the race for her, and I'm still not sure she's gotten past it. So proud of her strength.
We ran past some mud, and Trista cut hard left before I could follow her, and some tourists were far right with no way past them, so I barreled through the middle of the mud, shouting "I don't fucking care!" I'm sure that really enhanced their tourist experience. Sorry, guys.
We ran past the "railing" section that's covered in locks, and Trista cursed Marcus for not telling us that locks were A Thing, so we could bring our own and add them. (Presumably add them the next day when we were touristing, though I wouldn't put it past Trista to carry a heavy lock the whole race just to add it near the end of the race.)
We ran past a Rockman-branded pop-up tent that was sort of sheltered in a rock nook, that had some volunteers, and nobody seemed to take our number, or say anything to us, or tell us what to do. So.. we just kept running? We still weren't at the actual Pulpit Rock overlook, and as far as we knew, that's where the turnaround was.
After we passed that tent, we asked a team that was coming back in if we would know where to turn around, and they said just turn around at the overlook, there was nobody actually there. And sure enough, when we got to the overlook.. there was nobody there. Like almost LITERALLY nobody. It was SEVERELY AND SCARILY WINDY up there. We were having to lean forward into the wind to make forward progress.
The only person up there was a woman up against the cliff with her phone. As we ran up, she asked if we wanted a photo, and we said that would be amazing, having no idea how we were going to ever see this photo, because we had no idea who this person was, but she clearly knew about the race, so we crossed our fingers we could find it later! She followed us into the wind far enough so that you could tell we were on an overlook, none of us wanting to get anywhere near the edge in that wind, and she took our picture. Proof we made it to Pulpit Rock during the race! And proof of how few people there were up there, in stark contrast to the next day.
(And ultimately we did find her after the race, and she was kind enough to send us the photo! Thank you so much, Kim!)
Contrast that with this same rock the next day:
Wait, let's zoom in on that hair a bit.
And then it was time to run back! We hadn't really made note of the time we left, or how far it actually was before we turned around, so we couldn't know whether it was likely we were going to make it back in time, but the sorta fuzzy math we managed to do showed that we thought it was at least possible.
So we ran like hell.
We do well under pressure. We discussed that maybe we should just go faster earlier in the race, so that wouldn't HAVE to do well under pressure, but hey, this seems to work for us, so we're just going with it.
There were still several teams coming out as we went in, and as we got closer to the Crossroads, it was obviously more unlikely that these teams were going to make it under the cut-off, but we cheered our heads off to encourage them.
Those tall downhill stone steps from the way out were, as anticipated, truly terrible uphill steps on the way back in, and I hated them intensely.
As we got close to the Crossroads, we realized we might make it. And that our reward for pushing ourselves hard to make this time cut-off, burning so many matches, was.. many, many more hours of torturing ourselves with this race. Oof.
But we made it back to the Crossroads.
Marcus wasn't there anymore, and it wasn't very clear where to go, and the volunteers were all sort of hiding from the wind, and we were like, "Where do we go?!" and they pointed for us to take a left. And Trista said, "Did we make it?!" and they just sort of nodded and kept hiding from the wind.
Okay! Guess we made it! With no more time cut-offs on the course, guess we were going to finish this thing, barring unforeseen catastrophes! Guess.. I need to cancel that "we DNFed and I'm okay with it" draft I had written up in my head! Oops. New caption was going to be needed.
Hidden Trail
Whew. Okay. On the one hand, we weren't going to DNF. We were going to finish this race. On the other hand.. we knew this last section had taken Thor around 3 hours to mark. It wasn't just a little victory jag to the finish line left.
The good news is that we were pretty much done with the hills. I mean, there were some hills left, but all that intense climbing was over. It was time to lose some of that elevation. First we ran down the tourist trail, which sounds like some sort of ADA compliant paved sidewalk, but is all tall stone steps and jumping and slippery. They build their tourists different in Norway.
Then a little gravel path in the trees, where we came across Rockman! He was out there to wish us well on our journey home, and also make sure that we didn't miss the turn for the Hidden Trail. We like to believe that we wouldn't have missed the marker if he hadn't been there, but it definitely is NOT a "trail", it's pure bushwhacking for this part.
As we headed onto the Hidden Trail, Rockman told us it was about 1k to the next swim. That sounds doable.
He also yelled after us that we weren't last. Which.. we didn't particularly mind being last, as long as we finished at all. But it IS nice not to be last. He said some friends of his were behind us, a mixed team. Any mixed team friend of Rockman is a friend of ours. ... But now we knew we'd prefer to stay ahead of them, if we could. No stress.
I'm going to try to keep this short, but probably will fail. I'll start by saying.. the Hidden Trail was maybe not my favorite part of the course. No fault of the race, the RDs, my partner, Rockman, or anyone other than my traitorous body.
Because on this 1k section of trail, I think I fell about 50 times. I have no idea why. Sure, we had 10 hours of nonstop hills and cold choppy water under our belts at this point. But my legs didn't feel TIRED. No extreme fatigue. Trista didn't fall 50 times. But I just couldn't stay on my feet. Just extremely dumb falls.
The good news is, this whole section was downhill, through the trees, and extremely mossy and spongy. So I never hurt myself. Scratches all over my legs, sure, but no real damage. But EXTREMELY frustrating. I'm sure as the frustration grew, it just made me fall more. It was a bit of a spiral.
Meanwhile, as mentioned, Trista was having a lovely upright time, and she'd trot on ahead, then she'd realize she couldn't hear me, or I hadn't answered a question she asked, and she'd turn around and I'd be sprawled out on a bed of moss just off the "trail", and I'd yell, "FINE, I'M FINE, EVERYTHING'S FINE." And get up and start down the path again. Just.. over and over. It was more rut than trail, so I'd step one foot off the edge, and pitch to one side. I'd grab onto a tree to stop myself from falling and end up with a palm full of thorns (and no Marcus to extract them now). My feet would slip out from under me and I'd end up on my butt. It was truly absurd.
Fortunately as frustrated as I was, I couldn't not laugh about it, because TRISTA couldn't not laugh about it. Her immediate and uncontrollable reaction to anyone falling, including herself, is to laugh. A lot. She can't help it. She feels bad about, and says so through the laughter. But .. yeah. It was all falling and laughing through this 1k.
This was another section where we would go for what felt like 45 minutes, then check to see if we were near 1k yet, and we'd gone 0.05 miles. HOW?! It became a running joke, that we only had 1k to go. No matter how far we'd gone. We figured at the end it was way more than 1k, and that's why it took so long, and Rockman's estimate of the distance was just very short, but NO, looking at Garmin, it was LESS THAN 1K. IT TOOK US 29 MINUTES TO GO LESS THAN 1K. HOW?!
Suffice it to say I was VERY happy when we finally finished that "1k" and got to the entrance to our next to last swim.
Oh, at some point, probably at the Crossroads the first time, when we saw Marcus, we found out that the last swim had been canceled, for safety reasons. Evidently the safety kayak couldn't even safely be on the water because of the wind, so clearly it was a no-go for the rest of us.
As people who prefer the swimbits to the runbits, we were sad that we were now losing two swims in this race, but completely understandable.
Last Two Swims
After so many epic sections requiring so very many words.. these last two swims, to a little island and then to the shore again, were incredibly and relaxingly uneventful. They were cold, but not worse than we'd already experienced. The island was short. We seriously cruised through that last swim, realizing as we exited the water and were practically pushed onto the shore that we had a very hefty current assist. Can't hate your last swim also being your fastest-paced swim of the day.
And then we only had one more run.
One More Run
Just a little dash over the finish line, right? Clearly no. Have you learned nothing from this race so far?
We honestly didn't know HOW far it was, because it was supposed to be a 2k run, a 700m swim, and THEN a little dash over the finish line. But with that last swim being removed, we didn't know what that did to this run.
So we just gave it what we had left, hoping that every curve we went around would reveal basecamp, and the finish line.
Instead every turn revealed MORE MUD. It had been raining for several hours at this point, and the more it rained, the muddier the trail got. Some was avoidable if you went around the edges. Some was just a slide hazard, or just coated the bottom of your shoes. By this point, though, most of it was (a) unavoidable, (b) ankle deep at a MINIMUM. You never knew when you stepped in if you were going to sink to your laces, your ankle, or even your knee.
I'm not even kidding, at one point Trista turned around because I was laughing hysterically, to find me sunk TO MY HIP in the mud. I mean, sure, that's probably only just above the knee for your average-heighted person, but it was ABSURD. And hysterical. And I got to employ all those tactics we learned in 80s movies, where we were told that sinking in quick sand was a relevant daily threat.
The only other major drama from that run was one fall where my leg folded under me, and bent fully in half. Like if you get down on your knees, then lean back until your back is on the ground. As a very old person at this point, I can't do that even if I warm up for an hour, and I definitely should not have done it at that point. My knee let me know that very, very decisively. Trista looked back and it looked like I had just fallen again, which at that point we were just calling "Sunday", but then I didn't immediately pop back up, yelling "I'm okay! I'm okay!" before even having time to establish if I was (which is my normal MO, which entertains her greatly). Because I wasn't SURE I was okay. My knee bent a direction that it really shouldn't.
But! It was fine. I carefully got up, took a few steps, shook out my legs, did a few up-tempo steps, and declared it good enough to run another 1k or 16 miles or whatever we had left in this neverending race.
And it was. We continued to slog through the mud, across boards, across weird corrugated plastic sheets, through a disc golf course, next to some water that we very much wanted to swim in but weren't allowed, toward a building that was far, far away that we initially joked about how we hoped THAT wasn't the finish line, har har, because it's so far away, but it turns out absolutely was, and wow, it was still far away.
The team behind us did eventually move up behind us. The man was clearly feeling better than the woman, and clearly wanted to pass us so that WE would be the last place team, but each time he'd run up right behind us, he'd realize that he'd left her behind to do so, and would fall back to be with her again.
Trista joked that she wanted to find her inner superhuman strength, like when a car starts to roll toward a child, and the mom taps into her superhuman strength reserves and stops the car and saves the day. Trista wanted to tap into hers so we could bust out some 6:30 miles and get this shit DONE finally.
But instead we just didn't stop, kept going. Thank you, coach, for your sage advice.
And we made it to the grounds of basecamp. And we ran along the gravel path. And we got to the finish line, which was up some ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME AT THIS POINT, REALLY TALL FUCKING STAIRS?!, and coach's adorable children came and ran us up the stairs and across the finish line.
We did it.
Those of you who know Team Adorkable well know that at some point we started doing some sort of finish line shenanigan at the end of every swimrun. We've done some crazy things. We keep raising the bar. We have maybe built expectations up too high at this point.
Since we don't live in the same place, we never get to practice our finish line moves until we get to the race itself. We had a great idea in mind that we thought would be realistic for the Rockman finish line. It didn't look too hard. And when we got to Norway, one of the first things we did was to try it out, and no. It was too hard. And that was with healthy, rested bodies. It just wasn't realistic.
On race morning, we found a much more realistic, silly move that we thought we'd be able to pull off with Rockman-tired bodies, or at least give it a good effort. We only got the chance to try it out a dozen times, and only 2 or 3 of those was really any good. But it would have to do.
As we ran the last run section (which ended up being 2.11 miles, for those keeping track at home, but took us 1:09:41, roughly 45 minutes of which was probably me stuck in the mud laughing my ass off), Trista said she really had no commitment at all to a finish line move. And I agreed.
It had been a long race. An amazing race. An exhausting race, both physically and emotionally. We just had nothing left.
So I suggested maybe our finish line move this time was something I felt like we both really needed and earned, which was an incredibly sincere and deserved hug.
And so that's what we did.
----
12:41:56
21.24 miles of "running"
7500 yards of swimming
11,000 feet of elevation gain
This race was tough. This was the most technical race I've ever done, and only a tiny fraction of the running was actually running. I've heard it said it's more an adventure race with swimming than a swimrun, and I don't disagree, though I have no problem with it being called a swimrun.
As we were heading toward the finish line, I compared it in my head to the other Big Swimrun Race, ÖTILLÖ World Championship, and.. honestly I'm not sure they can be compared. They both have swimming and running, but they're completely different beasts. I did decide that it might be a good idea to have to qualify for Rockman like you have to qualify for WC. If you get out there and you're not prepared, it can be somewhere between frustrating and incredibly dangerous.
I'm very glad that we didn't go out there in 2020, before we knew what we were getting ourselves into. It was so hard for us this year, and we barely made the cut-offs, and we had SOME idea what we were getting ourselves into this time, and had done a lot of appropriate training. We might still be out there, if we'd made the attempt in 2020.
When we finished World Champs last year, it felt like such a beautiful experience. It felt like the land in the archipelago held our hand and escorted us on a beautiful journey of friendship across the islands to the finish line.
Rockman felt like the land said IF YOU WANT TO GET TO THAT FINISH LINE, YOU'RE GOING TO FUCKING EARN IT, AND YOU'LL BLEED ALONG THE WAY, BUT YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO STOP SMILING, AND IT WILL ABSOLUTELY BE WORTH IT.
And we did. And it absolutely was.
So many thanks to Thor for putting together such an epic and amazing race. It took us a while to get there, but with your help, we did finally make it, and we loved it. And thank you to Marcus for everything you did to not only help get the course and the race ready, but to help get the Adorkables ready, mind and body.
And all the love to Coach Nico and Envol Swimrun for never giving up on us: what we lack in speed, we make up for in determination, and while we may have cursed your name during all the hills and squats and stairs, they were the reason we made those cut-offs, and the reason we had such a fun and successful day.
I have now completed my epic task of reading this report. Kudos to you both on your adventure!
ReplyDeletethank you for sharing this! I always love reading your reports, even all these years after you taught me that anyone can be "an athlete". <3 fool
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