Well despite my dodgy knee and the chronic head cold that hit me 48 hours prior, I managed to complete the 30km Lidingöloppet race on Saturday. A real experience and one I intend to enjoy for quite a while. Right now I'm not sure I neeed to go there again, but ask me in a couple of months. As a first time entrant I had no idea what to expect. I had read bits and pieces but you know how things can be interpreted differently by different people. So here's my take on the actually race course itself, complete with the high points, low points, and newby mistakes.
I was in the seventh of 10 start groups. Technically I guess there are 12 groups as there are 3 "Group One" start groups. For some reason. The start line is about 150m wide and my group was invited up to the line 10 minutes before our gun time. There is the typical music aerobics lark that you find at the start of most large events but there were plenty of people who, like me, took the final chance to have a lie down on the grass and save as much energy as possible. Desperate times call for desperate measures. The first 5-600m of the course runs the length of an open field which has a sort of rolling terrain that you would expect to find on a golf course fairway. This is where everyone tries to outrun Usain Bolt, which seems ridiculous when there are another 29.5km left to run. But there is a little method to the madness as I discovered later on. Once you enter onto the trail, the width of the course instantly decreases from about 50m wide, down to 1m wide. Being one of the last to arrive, I met a sea of people who had to stop and wait for the bubble to sort itself out into a line. Not a hugely long time in the grand scheme of things, probably about 15 seconds and then we were away again.
Over the next maybe 4km, I could have done better. If I had known in advance how it was all going to play out later on, which I now know. In this section the trail is pretty even, with longish straight sections. I was also only having to worry about my own start group. Shortly after the first kilometer, I happened across a man who looked like he was about my pace and seemed to know what he was doing. So I decided to run follow him for a while to get the feel for things. He was almost right for me, just a little slower than what I probably could have run at. I knew that at the time, but I wasn't too bothered about it as I thought I should relax for a few kilometers and get into some kind of groove. In hindsight, I should have used my time here more wisely, I know that now. Now is the time to make up the ground in your group that you lost at the very start, find the right group of people to be with the whole way, and to do all that at your own discretion. Everyone is going at about the same tempo. That was all soon going to change.
From the 4km mark, we entered more dense forest, and a narrower track. With the exception of a few road crossings, it would stay that way pretty much right through to the end of the 30km. The problem now was that the very fastest runners from the groups who started after me, were now starting to arrive behind us. Our own fastest starters had already disappeared into the distance, so the rest of our group were all pretty much travelling at the same tempo. For the next 10km I was largely trapped in with the same group I was in after 4km, as one whole other side of the track was filled with the speedsters from the later start groups flying by the whole time. My group was just a little slow for me, which wasn't a total disaster and I had plenty of spare energy later. But it meant that I would have less time later on to recover any lost time and that stressed me because I had no idea how I would be feeling later on. I fell about 20 minutes behind my planned schedule by the time we passed the 20km mark, so I gave up on watching the clock. Despite still having plenty of energy, there was no way that I could make up 20 minutes over the final 10k and I decided instead to just enjoy the journey home. I was still in a bit of a dream state about the fact that I really was here and running Lidingöloppet.
The moral of the story so far is to use those first 4km to get yourself into the pace group that you want to be in. I spent the next 10-15km trying to find an opening in the passing lane to hop out into the stream which was travelling much faster than I wanted to run, get past the person in front in front of me, hop back into the slow lane again so that the racers can fly by, and then go through the process again. I pretty much lost all control over my tempo and how I wanted to run. That's how it is in a large field, but the chances to avoid much of the stress were there if I had known about them and used them more wisely. A lesson for next time.
Once we reached 20km, the pace problem had sorted itself out. Those who were running significantly faster had already passed by us. All those around me now were running at about the same pace as me. Which made it easier to overtake or to let others go by me. The downside now was that the last 10km are also the hardest to run. There are some big hills, steep drops, and tricky terrain, right through until about the 28km mark. So although there is room to pass, the terrain doesn't always allow for the speed to do so.
I was advised to treat the first 20km as a training run and to save myself for the final 10km which is when the race really began. Brilliant advice. Aside from my previously busted knee I was in pretty decent shape at the 20k mark. I could have almost turned around and run back to the start again. That was good as the final 10km takes about the same amount of energy as running back to the start. So you do need to come into that area fresh. According to the results I passed just over 1,000 people between the first control (after 1km) and the finish. Which isn't too bad considering that we were travelling largely in single file for most of the distance. Of those 1,000 I would reckon that I passed about 700 of them over the final 10km stretch. It was like going past a train wreck at times, people lying by the side of the trail, others hugging onto trees. I was so depressed in the first half when it seemed like half of Sweden was flying by me and I was going nowhere. I got a certain amount of satisfaction in noting the the majority of the people quiting during the final 10km looked suspiciously like the racer types who blew by me after only 5km. Most of us "average joggers", while not breaking any world records, managed to struggle our way to the finish. That felt good.
As I said, the last 10km is a tough slog and I got into the rhythm of simply following the person in front of me. But here that can be a trap because it isn't all hills the whole way. You just get used to the idea of running up hills after a while. There are also quite a few flat areas where I could pick up my pace and had plenty of room to pass before slowing down to the group tempo for the next climb. I made up quite a few places that way and I also noticed that a few people woke from their trance as I went by and also started running faster. It's a mindset and, like I said earlier, you do need to make full use of the opportunities when they are there. You don't get that freedom of choice the whole way if you are in one of the back start groups like me.
We passed through a large clearing before entering the forest again with exactly 2km left. There's a small rise at the beginning, which can lull you back into "hill mode" again but it doesn't last long. From that point on I could pick up some steam on a nice relatively flat forest trail and once you pass the final kilometer sign you can give it full gas. You really only have to worry about the first half of the final kilometer as, with 500m left, you burst out of the forest and into a large clearing with the finish in full view. It feels really good, I can tell you that. Seeing the public, the finish chute, the massive tv screens, realising that "Hey, I've just run Lidingöloppet !", that final 500m flew by like 50m.
So, to summerise: use the first 5km to get yourself into the right tempo group, save at least half of your energy for the final 10km, and treat each part of the course on it´s merits. After writing this, I'm almost tempted to register myself agin for next year. Almost.
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