The journey

This was the first trip during which a spanner was thrown in the works and I slowly begain to realise how expensive the whole goal might be. We initially had flights booked with Ryanair and I got an email about a schedule change. I was seconds away from accepting the change as the flights seemed to have only moved by 10 minutes. Just before pressinhg the button, I realised the outbound flight was actually shifted 23 hours and 50 minutes later. This meant I would land after the start gun, which wasn't exactly an option. We therefore had to ask for a refund and book much more expensive short-notice British Airways flight.

The new flight schedule also meant that we wouldn't be landing in Stockholm until after midninght. Luckily there were still a few trains running at that time and we didn't have to pay for a taxi too. Being Summer slightly futrher North, the sky was never quite pitch, rather just a dark navy blue when we were walking from the station to our Airbnb. And this was one of the more 'efficiently' laid out places we've stayed in. It was a studio in Galma Stan and was absolutely boiling when we opened the door. Through the door, there was a cupboard or two and sink on the left as well as a foor to the bathroom, on the right was a living room and dead ahead was a ladder to the bed above the bathroom. With only a foot and a hlaf from the mattress to the ceiling, all the heat got trapped up there and it was very hard to sleep.

I usually like to start running early if I can, but I was very thankful that this race started at midday. I still got a reasonable amount of sleep, even if it was in a sauna.

The race

The start line was at the old Olympic stadium which was a simple metro ride from the Gamla Stan station. It was the usual flood of people out of the station to the start line, 18,000 people in this instance. It was a pretty straight forward pick up the race number and get ready to go and we were off at 1200.

The main summary of this race is that it was hot. Very, very hot. The first few miles weren't overly memorable but we soon made it to Djugarden and the surroundings were lovely on a bright day. The route then came back into the city and we passed the tmain train station that I was coming out of not 12 hours ago. We then followed my earlier path down across the Bridge into Gamla Stan. The route ended up doubling back on itself a bit and I crossed that bridge a few more times.

The last few miles were very tough with the heat. I got an email a few days after apologising to the mass for running out of water at the water stations... luckily I was far enough ahead in the field to have the water that I needed, it must have been incredibly disapointing and arguably dangerous for those who were met with nothing. This was the first run where I tried out the survival method of breking down the last few miles into one-mile efforts, running three quarters and then walking one quarter. This worked well enough to get me to the finish line and I've had to pull the trick out several times since past 20 miles. Nothing could stop me from running around the last two hunred yards though. We headed back into the stadium for a half a lap. With the sun out, a decent crowd in the hundred year old stand and the high quality much newer rubber under foot, I had a smile on my face once again as I crossed the line.

I had a nice drink in the stand afterwards as I let my body cool down and then walked back to th Metro for the return journey. The race shirt was much appreciated as a less sweaty alternative to change into. As I limped out of the station, I went away from our Airbnb briefly to go out the other exit. I sat for a moment looking over the water and then headed back to have a shower.

The change of flights meant that we then had a late Sunday flight back after tthe saturday race. This gave us a fair bit of time to explore the next day, the highlight probably being the Vasa. As we were then getting quite used to, it was a tiring return journey then back to work in the morning.