The conquest of the capital

Veni vidi vici!

We came, we saw, we conquered! It has been an incredible weekend. The ultimate Norwegian national relay event took place yesterday: Holmenkollstafetten in Oslo. Around 3500 teams from all over Norway participated with in total more than 50000 participants. It was a historic event for my club Varegg: we participated with four teams, and traveled from Bergen to Oslo with a group of around 50 runners. For the first time in history Varegg participated both with a men's elite team and a full women's team. In addition we had a mix team and a men's veteran team. The achievements of all four teams were above all expectations; in particular the men's elite team came in number 6 of 20 elite teams, who are composed of the best runners of the country. This is an amazing result, considering that the team qualified for the elite class just last year! However, I will be writing mostly about the women's team which I was a part of: we came in as number 6 of 27 women's teams in the senior class. This class comprises of runners between 18 and 34 years. It is the ultimate competition class where the age group is supposed to represent the time a human being is at his/her strongest, and thus both younger and older runners are allowed to race in this class (the opposite is not possible). We raced in this class with ten out of fifteen runners above 35 (in fact most of them above 40), and did so well! We finished in 1 hour 10 minutes, and we were 50 seconds away from qualifying for next year's elite class!!

Let me start from the beginning. We traveled altogether from Bergen to Oslo on a completely full late afternoon flight on Friday. After arrival to the hotel and checking into our rooms, we went for a light meal before getting back to the hotel for the night. We stayed three or four people together in the rooms, and you can imagine how much laughter and fun (and how little sleep) there was - it was almost like being back at school. Saturday started with a light run to the Palace gardens before breakfast, and after that we had the briefing and pep talk meetings with our team leaders, where everybody got their start numbers in a ceremony.

Then it was up to each of us to find our starting points and get there. My leg was one of the furthest away from downtown, so I decided to take the metro to make sure not to get lost or too tired or too much pain too early. I arrived there well ahead of time, and I had plenty of time to run through the leg several times and test my speed. My leg was one of the shortest, just 630 meters, and it was mostly slightly downhill, so it was a very very pleasant leg to run. However, I was really nervous beforehand as I was studying its description on the web pages of Holmenkollstafetten. In particular it said that the "normal" completion time of this leg was between 1:30 and 2:30. This really got me stressed. Running 630 meters in 2:30 means that you have an average speed of 15.1 km/h. I just recalled that I used to be able to do two minutes on the treadmill in this speed, but I did not remember whether I could do longer. I comforted myself saying that this was long ago and I am probably a better runner now, but on the other hand I haven't had speed training for months, so I was really not sure whether I could finish my leg in 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Getting more and more nervous at the start line, I was thinking that at least I was very lucky with the weather: it was wonderfully sunny just until 5 minutes before I started running. Then, several minutes before I expected to see her, my team mate Gro already showed up in the distance! I got the baton and started running. I ran faster than I ever did before in my life, and it was the most painful 2 minutes 20 seconds I could remember in a long while (aferwards I was coughing for at least an hour). Yes, 2:20!!! Well within the "normal"! With an average speed of 16.2 km/h!! (3:42 in pace.) In fact, none of the runners in my class did better than 2 minutes on this leg, and several of them were behind the "normal" schedule (I wonder how they calculate this "normal"). I had been so worried that my injury would slow me, and really afraid of letting down the whole team. Thus you can imagine how relieved I was when I passed the baton on to my team mate Sara-Rebecca, and not the least when I got back to Bislett Stadium and learned the results.

From that point on, it has just been a long long party. We are all so happy and pleased with our achievements, and so proud of ourselves and of each other. As always we are so grateful to our team leaders Johs, Hege and Trygve, who took care of all the organization, preparations, practical matters and gave us this amazing experience. I was really looking forward to this weekend and thinking that it would be great fun, and it was actually even more fun than I had imagined.

Go Varegg!