Success in the Björkliden Arctic Mountain Marathon 2009

Last weekend Andy Symonds and I traveled over to the far north of Sweden to compete in the Björkliden Arctic Mountain Marathon. The prize for winning this year's Lowe Alpine Mountain Marathon was to go and compete in the elite (BAMM 70) category of this race. It was definitely worth the trip with some great scenery, welcoming guests, good running and some stiff Swedish competition.
It was a very similar setup to UK mountain marathons the main differences being that no torch was on the compulsory kit list (it never got dark) and it started with a mass start - which made things interesting from the start gun. We managed to hold off fellow British team, Nick Barrable and Ady Whitwam, for the hill climb prize to the first checkpoint. After that we settled into a more steady mountain marathon pace (well steady for Andy - fast for everyone else). We got our first navigation lesson when we tried to contour the early hills and ended up in some interested rock formations. We had arrived late and missed the briefing where it was announced that not all cliffs were on the map. This basically meant that the top two Swedish teams then caught us up and so we ran with them for a couple of hours. Although one of them tried to take a sneaky different route between two checkpoints only to emerge just behind us to claim that they had been running on nice grassy slopes - not sure I believed that since the route they took did not look like it could have sustained any of the local reindeer population.

After a few more hills Andy's "steady" running seemed to be doing the trick and we were suddenly on our own with the end of day one in sight. We started chatting a bit and taking the odd photo and generally enjoying the scenery. We then took a bad route choice to the penultimate checkpoint and suddenly one of the Swedish teams had caught us up! It was then a dash down to the finish to keep hold of our lead but only by 7 seconds. We were not overly pleased as we had had around a 6 minute lead but it was a good lesson in complacency and certainly got us fired up for day 2.

As forecast the weather was slightly worse on day 2 with the odd sleety shower giving us an added reason not to hang around. The plan was to take it steady and then really push on in the big climbs later in the day. True to form Andy charged up to the first checkpoint like it was the finish (not sure what happened to the plan) and we soon gained a considerable lead over the second team. About halfway through the day we saw the second place team coming down to a checkpoint we had been to and estimated we had around a 20 minute lead - much better than 7 seconds. From then on it was a matter of battling onto the end through the odd snowshower, increasing hunger, fatigue and the desire to sit down. Coming over the final hill the sight of the finish was very welcome. All we needed to do was find the last checkpont next to a bridge and run into the hotel. This proved a lot harder than anticipated with several paths not on the map which resulted in us and several other teams wasting 10 minutes finding the checkpoint. Just as well we had a 30 minute lead. Finally we found the last checkpoint and I got my Scottish flag out of my bag for the run into the finish line and some welcome reindeer meat and bananas.


I would highly recommend this great event located 150 miles north of the Arctic circle in the wilderness of Northern Sweden. Thanks to BAMM for the hospitality and to Inov-8 for the ever reliable Mudclaws that got me round.
Results here
More photos here