Touring Sweden!

In my neverending quest of making training into an adventure and doing so with friends, I concocted a short bike tour last year. My notion was to combine a few days of huge bikevolume and enjoying some nice scenery at the same time. As well as getting to spend some qualitytime in “the peloton” chatting it up with some of my favourite people!

Last years biketour over the southern part of Sweden was wildly popular so I promptly decided to run it over the same course this year as well.

We´ve been fortunate enough to hook up with Scandic Hotel and hence the name of the tour; Scandic Bike Tour! It also requires us to ride between cities that do indeed have Scandic Hotels but it´s been working out great in the end. We also have required the help of a couple of busdrivers who are in charge of the rather critical detail of getting our luggage from point to point. My co-organizer Ted Ås could convince his parents that five days of busdriving around Sweden was a supreme idea and we could happily ride come rain or shine in absolute trust that there would be a bag with clothes at the end of the day:)

The five-day ride takes us from Borås which is my hometown as well as Crafts through Halmstad, Lund, Karlshamn, Växjö and back to Borås. Depending on how close one follows the maps and the straight route the distance varies but we ended up doing around 830 kilometres over the five days. We obviously stay away from the freeways and in general try to find scenic and rural roads that evokes the joys of riding! At least that is what we tell the group when we sometimes get lost….that it´s just the scenic route to wherever it is that we´re travelling!

The 12 hardy souls that rode this years Scandic Bike Tour were treated to four sunny days and one day with rain; all in all a pretty good trackrecord for being the first week of May! And even during the rainy day we were all in jolly good spirits. We had to! No turning back. The bags and the next hotel is 170 kilometres away. Ride on!

To really burn off any excess weight from overeating at the breakfast buffet we also made sure to run and swim most every day. At least some of us put in a pretty solid 2-hour run on the morning on the first day and we followed up with runs of the bike or pre-breakfast. We also had an extraordinary display of character in Växjö when we managed to complete a 5000 metres swimming session in one fell sweep.

The riding itself varied from pretty easy to damn hard! As there were several elitetriathletes along for the ride there were an abundance of testosterone flying around at times and we all had to generate some major wattage to stay with whoever was strongest at the time and wanted to put the hurt on everyone else.

This is an awesome way to train and I can´t wait to do it again! Adventuretraining baby!