Tour of Sweden – day 3
A moose, a storm, and an uphill race.
Plans to run to and from a pool upon arrival in our next city, Jonkoping, reduced the morning run group to just Clas, Marco and myself. We ran 7.6 miles down from the hotel to a lake in the center of town, around the lake and back up the hill to breakfast. This was the first run where I was able to hold a conversation, as Marco is very stoic so Clas and I had a chat in english as we cruised along. It was a rare treat for this age grouper to talk triathlon with a world class professional on a training run.
We had a long ride ahead of us, so we planned to be on the road by 10:30, once Jonas finished giving an interview to a Swedish outdoors sports magazine. Bjorn didn’t join us today, as his training plan called for specific run intervals then swimming.
We got into a good rhythm and for the first two hours enjoyed sunshine and a tail wind. We climbed through many miles of forest roads dotted with elk towers used by hunters. We passed huge stacks of lumber stockpiled from a devastating wind storm of three years ago and at one point I saw a large boulder stacked on top of a 15 foot tall stump by someone with a sense of humor.
At 50 miles the wind kicked up, lightning lit up the blackened sky and a cold driving rain pelted us for 10 minutes. The sky cleared again in time to see a moose running away from us across a farmer’s field, but we we’re going to be cold and wet for another 50 miles.
We stopped for a quick coffee at 60 miles and from there time flew by as we reached Jonkoping at 91 miles. We proceeded past our hotel and out to the climb of Klevaliden, a classic of Swedish cycling. My roommate, Joakim, attacked immediately with Clas in pursuit. I dangled in 3rd, wondering how long it would go on and how steep it could get. It had several steep kicks but finally the top came and we had a downhill ride back to the hotel and dinner of rice and beef stew.
We have time in the morning for a swim so I skipped swimming tonight and opted to wash my bicycle. The roads are quite sandy and we accumulated a lot of grime today as even after the rain stopped falling the storm tracked ahead of us leaving wet roads in its wake. A pleasant surprise is that wet roads in Sweden don’t get slick and their engineers laid things out safely with no decreasing radius turns and good sight lines.
