One
Water
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Behind the scenes of ‘Road To’

One Water Race, Team 2024, Uncategorized
April 9, 2024

Meet Johan Westman and Tobias Ehrnvall, the producer and photographer behind the documentary miniseries ‘Road To’, as they share some glimpses from behind the scenes.

Tell us about the mini documentary series ‘Road To’, what will we see?

In this series, we meet some selected athletes from the different teams of the One Water Race. They come from all over the world, and they all belong to the world elite best within this sport segment.

Although they seem almost unstoppable, they all face different challenges in completing One Water Race – the toughest race in the world. In each episode, the athletes talk about a specific challenge and how they deal with it. These include coping with sleep deprivation, hunger, not hitting the wall during the race or dealing with hypothermia.

Who do we get to meet?

We have had the great privilege of meeting six different athletes from different parts of the world. We meet the debutant Vincent Meyer from Germany, the youngest participant in the race Kayla Kobelin from Oregon, and Australian former Bondi Beach lifeguard Adriel Young, who has moved to Sweden and become a firefighter. We also get to join Marika Wagner from Dalarna, who is competing for the second time, and then the winner from last year, Australian Glenn Wilkinson, who trains twice a day, despite a new born baby and a full-time job.

In addition to these stories, we will get an in-depth look at the research done on our athletes during the race. One Water Race has an extensive collaboration with GIH – The Swedish School of Sport and Health Science, and KTH – The Royal Institute of Technology. This exciting project aims to use various sensors to collect and analyze a large amount of human data from the athletes for sports and health research. The One Water Race is almost like a human experiment, and the Associate Professor Marcus Moberg tells us more about this interesting topic

It is certainly a legitimate question that we also ask them – why?

What is your conclusion, what kind of people do this crazy race?

It is certainly a legitimate question that we also ask them – why?

Almost all of them have the same answer – that it is about testing their limits, and that they have often been involved in various endurance races for large parts of their lives. But what they all have in common is that they are extremely strong both physically and mentally.

What stays with you after meeting these athletes?

What we take with us is the combination of the unbelievable dedication they put in to complete this almost inhuman race, and the joy of doing it as a team. Everyone agrees that it would never be possible to complete the One Water race without the rest of the team.

For closing, can you give us a funny anecdote from the recordings

A lot has happened during these intense weeks that we have experienced around the world. One particular thing that stands out was when we were in Australia, where we understood the Australians’ carefree relationship with all kinds of, for us, life-threatening predators such as different types of crocodiles and sharks. For example, when the team went out for a swim in the ocean and came back happy as kids on Christmas Eve and told us that they had swum over a couple of nurse sharks. And they were “only” 3 meters long.