Triathlon at Retirement

Stockholm Midnight run!  Still running at midnight! A 10km road race at night around Stockholm one week after the Vasa MTB race. This is a hard, but really fun race with over 30,000 participants.  As my sister's apartment is practically on the racecourse, I had the advantage of walking to start. The evening was perfect, no rain and the right temperature around 18C (65f). The start is very festive with music, fireworks, lasers and everyone wearing the same shirts and being in a good mood. I had a fairly early start group at 10 minutes past 10 in the evening and warmup felt good. I still decided to take it slightly easy as I recently had 5 weeks break in training from illness. Last year I set a load of speed records on this race, and I ended up at 6th place in my age group which is not bad as some of the best runners participate.  I positioned myself in the middle of my start group and I felt like I was cruising all the way until I reached the hills at Katarina church aroun...

Cykelvasan (Vasa race on bicycle) is the largest MTB race in the Nordic countries, and it approximately follows the famous Vasaloppet cross country ski track with checkpoints at all the classical controls. Almost 20,000 participants were registered over several races and distances. I was in the main and the longest race called Cykelvasan 90 (it is actually 96km long) with over 5000 participants. Three days before this year's Cykelvasa August 10, I felt I was free from my cold and that I could participate. Five weeks with very little training had gone by. For this reason, I knew I had to take it easy to endure 96km (almost 60 miles) on an MTB. Fortunately, the weather was good on racing day. I noticed very few women in my start group. I have done this race and distance once before, but the track had been slightly changed. Instead of doing the initial climb on a meandering gravel road, we had a much steeper climb on the Vasaloppet cross country ski track. I could barely do it without...