Vasaloppet

The real one. In Sweden.

Full disclosure: Before this, I had never gone into a distance classic race with no kick wax on my skis, and the longest I had ever skied was 50k.

Vasaloppet is a 90km classic race that, at the elite level, has become a full double pole race. That might sound crazy (that's partially because it is), but it's a largely flat race. According to one of my hosts in Mora: "You are double poling uphill for the first 3k, but then the race is over". Sure. Over after 3k, and then you just ski 87 more kilometers for funsies.

In one of our many pre race chats, my hosts emphasized that the hardest hill in the course is right before Oxberg. See it on the profile at about 30 left? Me neither.

I arrived in Mora only two (three? time changes and jetlag make it unlcear) days after the Birkie. There I was set up to stay with Kerrin, a former US ski team member and the only American to have ever won Vasaloppet. Vasaloppet is crazy. It draws up to 40,000 participants into its different winter week events. 15,000 of which start together at once for the full 90km. There are all sorts of events and variations of the race in the week leading up to it, and the towns between Sälen and Mora all but shut down because everyone is volunteering for the race instead of working. My hosts, Kerrin and Jörgen, were preparing me for everything all week. I was so lucky to have their combined experience and connections to make things easy.

Preparations at the race finish in Mora.

Saturday night was brief, as I had to wake up at 3am to get to the race bus. The whole system on race morning actually felt very smooth and efficient despite servicing 15 thousand people carrying skis. After the bus dropped me at the start, I just walked to my wave’s start pen, checked in with my bib, and put my skis where I wanted to be. I was in wave 1, so I didn’t have the luxury of the special seeding treatment I usually do in the US. Thankfully, with 90km to go, and everyone going at once, there was no need to stress about my starting position. After getting everything in place, everyone just stood around and froze for two hours until the start. There isn’t much grandeur to the start, which I thought was actually really good for chaos control. At 8am exactly the gates just lifted and we started skiing!

The first 3k of climbing wasn’t bad. People were backed up and everything, but I just hopped in between the tracks and skied through everyone where I could. By the top of the hill I had jumped up to good spot, and then the race actually started. From there it was just 87km of riding huge draft trains that moved insanely fast. It was unlike any other ski race I’ve done, and felt more like a road cycling race. Kilometers flew by, and the landscape was beautiful. I felt really good double poling everything, which made me really nervous that it would all collapse eventually. Madshus’ race service gave me really fast skis, which helped greatly. As a little bonus, I got to ski maybe 10km directly behind Marit Bjørgen, which added to the fun of the race.

My brief moment on the livestream, thanks to Marit for drawing the camera's attention.

I was supposed to get a new feed belt at half way, but traffic to the aid stations can get crazy/maybe I was too slow, and the Madshus crew thought they missed me. Whatever happened, I never got it. I had tried to finish everything I had in the first belt by that point, and mostly did so. This was good because I needed all of it, but bad because everything I had should have only covered me for about 60km. After half way, the effort to keep up with my pack definitely increased, and I just rode on and off waves of energy. I tried to feed, more or less successfully, at a couple stations (I sadly never got the famous blueberry soup feed), but it wasn’t enough. It started getting pretty hard with about 13k to go, and I solidly bonked with 7k left. Only some 20 people passed me during this, but that put me at the back of the elite Visma skiers at the finish. Honestly not bad for coming into my first race of this kind. I now know that I could hang if I were training like a Visma skier for only double poling long distances all year.

The race beat me up in some weird ways. My wrists and neck were killing me from the impact, and everything else hurt after the finish/the next day. I slept for 13 hours after, and then it was time to head on to the next adventure in Switzerland for the Engadin Skimarathon.