Ötillö Swimrun World Championship 2022
Ötillo Swimrun World Championship done! The sheer brutality of it exceeded my expectations, by a lot. UTMB hurt me more as I still suffer from a hamstring injury that I got there in 2006 40k before the finish, climbing Aconcagua almost ended up into two amputated big toes, Everesting got me questioning for good the sanity of endurance sports, swimming 15k a day for 5 days around Lantau Island with my swim partner Bruce was by far the least likely sport project to succeed and got me more anxious than anything else I have ever done, Ironman broke me once in 2010 as I was undergoing a burnout from work that I was stubborn enough to ignore… Ötillö Swimrun Championship is up there with the hardest character building sports undertakings I have ever done. I’d say the last hour will remain in my memory all my life. It didn’t break us, but it had the potential to!
2022 main objective accomplished!!!!
‘Get into your Swimrun bubble’ said Michael Lemmel, the charismatic co-founder of Ötillö during the very emotional pre-race briefing. With 24 runs and 23 swims, meaning 46 transitions, if you’re not there, in the here and now, bad stuff will happen to do. If you don’t look at every rock you step on, often wet and slippery, if while swimming you don’t sight often enough to spot the one and only swim marker on the next island, you’re in trouble. Every time you start a swim, you have to: sight in advance, guess the potential current, check if the water entry is a slippery trap with 10cm of water or a hidden hole, strap on your paddles, put your goggles on, put your pullbuoy between your leg, zip up your wetsuit if you zipped it down during the run just before, check that your partner has not forgotten one of these steps, do the less messy water entry possible, check if your partner is also not in trouble, and start swimming. At the swim exit, decide when to stand up, try not to slip on the seaweeds, remove your goggles, turn your paddles around your wrist to free your fingers and grab rocks, start walking, make sure your partner is in one piece too and is soon ready to run, walk a few step, and when your partner is ready, run! This is swimrun, but in the archipelago, the terrain makes every single transition a challenge. I don’t think we had one single easy transition. All this was compounded with fatigue and wariness, as, for some reason (!), I kinda got fed up after 20 of these…
Technical transitions: they wear you out quickly
I let you imagine what the change of sports 46 times can do to a body too. The temperature difference between air and water, the sudden changes from horizontal to vertical and vertical to horizontal, again, are just part of the sport, but after a certain number of iterations, this race turns the competitors into zombies. At least, that’s how I felt. At times, it clouded my judgement, got me angry and impatient, as my competitor spirit progressively turned into an obsessive anxiety about not making one bad step that would sprain my ankle. A few times, my focus slipped: one time I was eating a gel and was trying to figure out where to carry the packaging until the next aid station… and I fell like a bag of rocks opening my right hand on some stones. Another time, I was making the mistake of mentally anticipating the next long swim and wasn’t watching my steps, and fell exactly the same way, re-opening the same wound. I screamed in anger more than in pain, and promised myself to never let my mind slip again. This forced focus was absolutely exhausting. And it was doubled up by the fact that there were two of us tied together on a tether, and we needed to take care of each other. Some phrases that my partner Patricia said to me got me really worried, like « my two IT bands hurt » « I have a stitch » and « is it foggy right here? all I see is blurry ». I had my moments too and Patricia was patient with me and was a great match. That’s what being in a team is about, and that’s one of the specific challenges of this sport.
The field spread thin very quickly but the first swims were triathlon-like messy
As a World Championship, it gathers the best of the World. You need to qualify to get there, either by getting a top placing at one the Ötillö races (direct qualification) or by accumulating points at Ötillö races themselves or at ‘merit races’ (merit qualification). Merit races are not Ötillö branded but are affiliated to it. We got a direct qualification on Ötillö Isles of Scilly (UK) race in June. So, a performance that would have put us near the front anywhere else got us a 33th place at the World Championship, out of 50 finishing teams in the mixed team category. Honestly, being in the second half is not something I am accustomed to, but to put things into perspective, because there is no age group category and we’re 99 years old (!), we competed against much younger teams and we were certainly among the ancesters… so I’ll take that.
The World Championship race is much longer and as a result much harder than the other Ötillö races. Most Ötillö races are around 40k long, this one is 70k long, 60k run and 10k swim. The number of transitions is way way higher too. The swims are not long -the longest is 1.8k- but again, there are 23 of them, so even a good swimmer like me gets wasted big time towards the end.
But to me, the real specificity is the terrain on the run and I still try to figure out how I could prepare for this if I were to come back one day. Basically, a large number of the runs are not runable! There are made of rocks, stones, boulders, and if you don’t train for this, you can’t invent it. So definitely, the locals (the Swedish) have a serious competitive advantage on this race. We got past millions of times by women and mixed teams chatting in Swedish and doing rock hopping while we were feeling as safe as on a slack line or stepping on a piece of soap. This was actually a little bit annoying at first as we passed the same teams over and over during the swims and the flat runs to be passed right after on rocky terrain. It soon became a recurrent pattern, in fact it almost got funny after a while as it was so predictable. I had never seen terrain like this before, or to be more precise, I think if I did see something like this, I turned around and looked for a safer way.
Rocky terrain… we were utterly unprepared for this
Another specificity of this race is the 18k run -flat-ish for the most part- occurring late in the race. When you start it, you have already swum 9k and run 36k and have been racing for over 7h. It does feel like the second half of an Ironman marathon on a very bad day. We were mentally prepared to tackle it -as we did a total of 14 Ironman, 10 for me and 4 for Patricia- and we did gain some places in that run. The issue was: after this, there were still 6 short swims and 6 short runs. When I say short, I mean it, so in my mind once the long run over, we were almost done. Surprise! The 6 runs were among the worst, rockiest, most slippery portions of all, the water entries and exits were all nasty and I had the worst fall of all, very close to the finish line (and I hope my little finger that has doubled its size because of this is not broken). It was nerve racking and at times very discouraging. I had to recompose myself and put back my warrior mask while all I wanted was a respite… but there was none. This race is merciless.
Another specificity is the pig swim, nicknamed like this because it is normally a ‘dirty’ swim. The water is in fact super clean but the waves and current can be awful (check the pig swim videos of the 2017 race!). We had this year the best conditions ever, though. The weather was gorgeous. The water was warm by Swedish standards (18 degrees on race day, over 2 degrees above the normal season average) and the air temperature was a cool 14 degrees, which was a blessing as we have to run in a wetsuit. The pig swim was a non event this year, just a 1.4k swim in flat water with very tired legs and arms.
And here comes my big questioning: what kind of race would we have had in normal (read: rough) conditions? And on a bad year like 2017? We raced for 10h55 on an easy day where all race records were broken and we had no real issues… how much harder can it be and how would we have reacted? This was a brutal experience and we almost got mentally and physically broken on occasions. I can’t imagine what it would have been in adverse weather…
Amazing weather conditions, from the beginning til the end… we were lucky
Not convinced to do this race yet?
Contrary to all the races I have done before, the race fee includes all your spending for 48h: two hotel nights, transport from the city train and bus station to the hotels and the race out and back, and amazing food at every meal. That means that you get to live with the competitors for 48 hours, and feel the warmth of the organisers all the time. It seems to be such a common thread nowadays to criticise the Ironman brand -the utter lack of respect for its competitors and the lousy service they provide among other things- so I won’t add more and will only say one thing: if you’re tired of Ironman and want to feel like being treated with care, try an Ötillö race. And if you can, qualify for the World championship. Michael Lemmel and Mats Skod have created a jewel that they have polished during the years. All I wish is that nothing changes, nothing at all. This weekend will remain as the most amazing race environnement and support I have ever experienced. In fact, it is so good that I’m not sure I want to do it again, for fear of seeing that something has changed…
Well, maybe I want to, actually…
Beauty that you have to experience yourself, even the amazing race pictures can’t fully show what we lived there