One Water Race Preview: Meet Team 2 – Sweden

The One Water Race is an extraordinary adventure race of 250km down the Stockholm Archipelago which combines navigation, swimrun and adventure racing.

Participating teams need to excel at orienteering, become masters of the challenges of multi-day endurance racing with an abundance of swimming in open water and long distance running. 

Here we meet Team 2 – Sweden of Rickard Norlin, Martin Flinta, Johanna Edman and Staffan Bjorklund. 

About the team

Team 2 have completed a number of small adventures together and all have been into swimrun for many many years. We all live close together on the Swedish west coast. We signed up for the race for various reasons, both the good cause of improving water environment, be part of the extreme physical challenge together as a team and the prize money. We discussed variants of a long multi-day swimrun even before this opportunity was a reality.

What do you think will be the biggest challenge that you will face during the race?

All of it. The length on both swims and runs, the temperature, the navigation and all the unknowns…

What is your top tip for first time swimrunners for training?

Make it simple, bring a friend and just try the joyful feeling of combining swims and runs on a sunny day.

And would your advice be for swimrunners going into their first race?

In one way it’s just to team up with a friend and dare to try, you will learn a lot by your first race. There are a lot of teams that do their first race with almost no preparation, just get the gear and tie the cord together in the start area!

If you want to be better prepared you can train the same distances as the competition together with your teammate and with all the mandatory race equipment. You will avoid any uncertainties and no need to take new decisions on the race day.

We all learn in different ways but our strong recommendation is to be out in nature and experience what’s suits best for you. Here comes a small list of things you can test with your teammate during nice swimrun adventures:

1. Which shoes works well on different kinds of terrain. Do they drain well, do I get a lot of dirt and sand in the shoes, do they add a lot of drag during the swim?
2. Wetsuit.There are a lot of really good swimrun wetsuits on the market. Also the less expensive “beginners” wetsuits are good enough for racing and can be more robust. As for all wetsuits and shoes: we have different bodies and need to try what fits the best.
3. Try out the elastic cord together. Which length is optimal and when and how do you as a team take it off and on efficiently.
4. Train with the pull buoy in different water entries and exits and how you can run with it in a comfortable way. One alternative is to buy a really big one and cut it if you felt that it was too big, trickier to change in the other direction.
5. Get used to your hand paddles as well in water entries and exits.Test different ways to carry them during the run in different weather, in really windy conditions some can experience it tricky to keep them on the hands.
6. Train in different weather conditions that can be reality on the race day.
7. Specific race equipment can vary but test or think through how you want to wear things like race west, time-chip, safety equipment and safety buoy.