Its hard to talk about 2024 without looking back at 2023. Its no secret that pulling out of the 2023 race left us disappointed it also left us with a monkey on our back coming into 2024, when we saw how easy it was to get unlucky with illness our minds were constantly filled with worry, what if it happens again? how would we deal with it if one of us becomes sick again in 2024? But it also lit a fire in us all to come back in 2024 and prove to everyone and most importantly ourselves that we could make it to Landsort.
We had a good year of preparation, its never perfect and we always wish that maybe we could have done more but the feeling in Arholma when we were all there, our equipment was ready, everyone was healthy filled us with a good nervous energy, we were ready to give it everything we had.
The race plan was to have an easy first day and have energy for a solid second and third day of racing. From the first hour Daniel was on fire making great navigational discissions together with Johan putting us in the lead. The thing about being in the lead in One Water Race is you give all the possible advantages to the following teams, every checkpoint they know exactly how far we are ahead, they know what route choices we have made, they know if the route we have taken is good or bad, slow or fast, easy or hard. But even know it’s hard knowing they have this information and sometimes stressful not knowing how far we are ahead or where the other teams are, we like racing out the front, we like setting the pace and racing our own race without other teams around us.
So, day 1 we settled into our pace, we had a constant headwind from the start of the race so the swimming was slow but we still held a good solid pace as a team, focusing on eating and making good decisions. The night fell and we had a great night, at one point the live following camera ran out battery, so we were alone in the dark the 3 of us doing what we love in the nature, we had good spirits and we really enjoyed what we were doing. The second day came, and the wind continued to blow from the south, so the swimming was again slow, but we continued with a good pace on both land and in the water.
When we arrived on Utö late on the second day the strong southerly wind we had been fighting for 2 days finally died, and that lifted the spirits, could we be so lucky that the long swim across Danziger Gatt could be still? It’s a hard swim at the best of times with 7-8kms across a shipping channel, in the dark with nothing to sight towards so to get nice weather would be a huge advantage. As we approached the swim late into the second night, we were met with a completely different scenario, the wind came up now strong (12 m/s) directly from the west, the exact direction we were going to swim, it was almost like it was planned to test us. As we changed into our warmer wetsuits the wind was howling, we could hardly hear each other speak, were we really going to do this? When we jumped in and started swimming, I thought, this is not going to happen, we hardly moved forward against the wind and waves, I was sure we would get rescued. But Daniel and Kristin were full of confidence and that lifted me, I guess we are doing this. It was almost impossible for our support boat to come near us so we just put our heads down and gave it everything we could. We had short stops to stick in a gel because we were just getting pushed backwards if we weren’t swimming. After 2hrs and 45mins we clawed our way up the rocks to checkpoint 15, a huge relief this is mentally a huge box checked int the race and the finish for the first time feels within reach, ever so slightly.
The sun started to rise on the 3rd day of racing, the last 4-5hrs of the race now, we kept our selves awake and kept moving forward, finally we dragged ourselves up to Landsort and met Johan for the last run, (the world’s longest 3km gravel road) and then we saw it, the green door we had been dreaming of for 2 years. We did it, we put together a great team performance, a performance we are all so proud of. A performance that is so much bigger than just the 4 of us, we have a whole team of support behind us they make this possible and we are forever grateful.
