Island resident and Wight Tri member, Rob Johnson, competed in the gruelling SwimRun World Championships in Stockholm, Sweden, last month.
This was a race he had to qualify for through the global SwimRun series with his SwimRun partner Chris Goodfellow, which they did by earning a qualifying space at the Engadin SwimRun in the Swiss mountains in May this year. The race is a 65km off-road run, interspersed with 10km of swimming. A total of 24 runs and 23 swims, all in the same wetsuit and running gear throughout.
Rob’s race partner Chris Good fellow is an ex-pro rugby player and a university friend, who transitioned to long course triathlon before also taking up SwimRun adventures. Chris typically leads the swims and Rob leads the runs, creating a well-balanced team.
This race was something Rob had been working towards for the last 3 years, but due to logistics, global pandemics and injuries a prolonged qualification period was required to be one of only a handful of British teams within the 140 team pairs competing in the World Series finale.
The race’s origin is when a group of Swedish men placed a ‘drunken bet’ amongst themselves that they could go from the most northern Island of the Swedish archipelagos to the southern island, running and swimming between them all. A total distance of 63km of running and 10km of swimming: the equivalent of an ultrarun and ultra-swimcombined.
On the day of the race, athletes had to be up at 3:00 and on to a final ferry to the northernmost starting point, then, after the sun just started to rise, a short run of 2.5km through the local village and woods before entering the first and longest swim of the day, a 1 mile swim in the cold Swedish waters, whilst the sun rose, before starting the technical footwork required to cross the archipelago islands across rocky coastlines and wooded sections, often without a path. The toughest of technical sections is in the 1st 3rd of the race, where often there were no paths just rock jumping.
Rob did well up until a 3rd of the way through, before entering one of the toughest swims of the day, a 1.1km swim called the ‘pig swim’, where Rob got very cold and a cramp down his left leg caused his pace to slow over the next hour before recovering in time for the mid-section of the race; a mere 20km straight run. After this point, there were further physical challenges with back spasms and muscle issues; however, Rob and Chris pushed through to the final set of islands that are the most technically challenging of the day with lots of short runs and shorts swims, scrambling over slippery rocks at the entry and exits to each.
After a long day and some great competition with global teams and another from the UK, Rob and Chris ended up as the 2nd British Male duo, and 24th Male Duo overall, in a time of 9 hours and 22mins.
Rob believes living and training on the Island is a perfect way to hone his swimrun skills, as well as being part of the Wight Tri Club and having others to share training with. Rob hopes to qualify again next year and learn from this year’s race.
