Intro

I won’t lie. Sitting down yesterday to start this recap, when the past seven weeks have been defined by injury, didn’t feel super inspiring. But it’s also a part of sports – setbacks, that is. And as my mom would have said: “Det är inte hur man har’t, utan hur man tar’t” (a Swedish rhyming idiom, loosely translated “What matters isn’t how things are but how you handle them”). In the end, I want to say I haven’t dove straight into a dark hole and stayed there. If someone would have asked me prior to it all, how I would have dealt with the idea of two months away from running, I probably would have said something like “I could never deal with that” or “I’d go under” or something very dramatic, such as “I’d say shoot me now”. But perspectives change. Upon the run where my injury surfaced (it came out of the blue, but more about that later), we had our first backyard race scheduled three days later. The first disappointment was thus realizing that I wouldn’t toe that starting line. And then you think you’ll be back in a few weeks, and what’s a few weeks in the grand scheme of things? And then you start listening and reading about other similar stories, and you see no improvement – and then you all of a sudden start to think “it’ll probably be a few months”, and somehow that’s okey too, because the realizations have come gradually. It shows how the human brain works: we might need time to get used to new things, but at the end of the day, we’re excellent at adaption.

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After plenty of pondering, head-scratching and thoughts back and forth, we’ve finally decided what races we’ll run this summer. The reasons why the decisions took some time for us to get to are: 1. Peak racing season in Sweden is very concentrated, with many of our bucket list ones happening around the same time. Luxury problem: you can’t do them all but have to pick and choose. 2. We put our names into the OCC draw back in December, which would – if we got in – dictate a good part of the season. Hence, we had to wait until mid-January to find out if we did. Luxury problem: there is none, because we didn’t get in. Not to worry though, because fortunately there are many more years to come! 3. The distance dilemma – right after Ultravasan 90 last August, we were like “let’s never in a million years do this again!”, but an hour later it sounded more like this: “This was the best day of our lives!”. Luxury problem: you need to choose the distance you want to go yourself.

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It’s been a wondrous year, 2018. Looking back at our training and racing efforts these past 12 months, we can’t be anything but pleased (even though it’s easy to focus on what didn’t go as planned). This year was really the first year we started taking things seriously, and while we’re still lightyears behind many people out there, it’s very satisfying to see that things have moved in the right direction. That, among other things, will propel us into the next year full of motivation and belief in further improvement. The purpose of this post is really just that of sharing details, insights, highs and lows regarding our 2018 training year, so – here we go. Let’s start from the beginning:

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