I copied this off the Xtri site rather than post the link. I hope no one minds.
Norse Code
Bjorn Andersson at Norseman Extreme
The 2005 edition of the Norseman Xtreme triathlon certainly lived up to its reputation as the hardest iron distance triathlon in the world. The race starts at sea level in the small town of Eidfjord in Norway and continues up and down through very steep terrain to finally finish at an altitude of 1883meters above sea level at Gaustatoppen.
xtri.com sponsor      The previous course record was set by former Mountain bike world cup winner Rune Höydahl last year in 11h 30min and this year was supposed to be a match up between him and me. This was in fact one of the reasons why I decided to do the race since there had been quite a lot of thrash talk regarding my inabilities to compete with Rune in a triathlon like this. I took the bait and went to Norway because of this but also because I thought it was a cool race that stands out among most other triathlons.
Unfortunately I learned that Höydahl was out of the race with an injury a couple of days before the start. He was one of the best endurance athletes in Scandinavia for quite a while so it would have been inspiring to race him even though triathlon was never his major sport. Instead I had to try and beat his course record.
The swim takes place in a fjord and is a point to point course. Basically all the athletes get on a boat at 4am and they drive you out in the fjord and drop you off at 4.45am 3.8km from shore. The water was so cold this year that they had to search for warmer water in the fjord so we had to swim further out this time. This made the bike course 190km and 10km longer than it normally is. Most times I’d be overjoyed by a decision to lengthen the bike leg in a triathlon but it’s not great if you’re going for course records. And it was pretty damn cold in the water anyways.
I had a good swim and exited the water in just under 47min with a slight current. Then on to the bike which features 5 major climbs of 4 to 14km in length and with grades of 7-10%. The first part of the bike takes you up to a mountain plateau at 1300m above sea level where you ride for about 70km before dropping down a bit to start the rest of the climbs. It was 3 degrees C at the plateau and partly rainy so it felt more like a winter triathlon at times. My decision to do the race on my normal time trial bike, a Cervelo P3C with disc wheel, equipped with 58/42 chainrings and an 11-23 casette was met with a lot scepticism before the race. In retrospect it was a good one since the bike climbs great, especially with the Rotor cranks, and still allows me the benefit of a TT position on the flats. The Bike ride took me around 5h 25min and at the bike to run transition I was greeted with the warmest temperature of the day, 13 degrees.
The run was certainly no walk in the park either even though the first 25k is just rolling terrain with a small incline up to the start of the real climb. I went through this part in 1h 43min so I was running pretty well but the real run started after this with the climb up to 1880m. The first 11-12km is asphalt with an average grade of around 10%. It started raining almost immediately on the climb and temperatures dropped again. I ran well up the climb to the mountain checkpoint though I started to get really cold at this stage. At the checkpoint you get off the road and onto a small trail, if you can call it that, full of big rocks. It was impossible to run for the most part here with the wet slippery rocks and mud. The temperature was dropping to 0 degrees and it started to snow. My core temperature started to drop considerably and the last part was more survival than racing. I reached the top though in first place with a new record time of 10h 30min. The last part of the run which was 4.7km on the trail took over an hour to complete. I was the only one allowed up on this part since the weather got too bad.
This was a seriously tough race and I have never felt worse after finishing a race. I can still recommend the race though since it goes through a beautiful part of Norway and it’s bound to be an adventure for everyone competing.
Thanks to my support crew Pär Andersson and Ragnar Alne who helped me throughout the race.
- Bjorn