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Last weekend, I rode CykelVasan! It is a 95km long montainbike race with a total of 16,000 participants!

Over the past four years CykelVasan has been my fitness goal for the season, and I have done sooo many kilometers ahead of this race. I began in January with studded bicycle tires and did a lot of riding on ice roads around my hometown Östersund.

Mountain biking is the perfect workout for rally / rallycross drivers. While the heart is beating you have to make quick decisions, such as determining which surface it is, how fast can I go here, when do I have to brake and so on. Exactly as in the rallycar.

This year I was entered in the highest class. I know since making this race before that it goes very fast and the first few miles of the events have the toughest hillclimb. Up to the first checkpoint I had an average of 34.5 km per hour, which I also felt in my legs, but I still felt very strong. The race continued well and I ended up with a good bunch of cyclists who ride fast. When we had 30km to go I could barely hang on to that group of people as I was starting to get cramping sensations in my legs. But after drinking a lot of water the cramping released and I could start pushing again and advancing.

My goal for the race was to ride the race in under 3 hours, which I did! I finished with the time of 2:58.09, which out of the 16,000 people that started the race I finished 152nd place! A result I’m super stoked about, not bad for a rally driver..

For those of you that are interested, this is how a training week would
look like for me:

* Monday, Interval Workouts, MTB, 5min * 5 Rep, a total of 1.5 hours.
* Tuesday, Distance ride MTB, 3-4 hours.
* Wednesday, Rest
* Thursday, Interval Workouts, 2 minutes * 8 Rep, a total of 1 hour.
* Friday, Strength / balancing training at the gym
* Saturday, Rest
* Sunday, Distance ride racing bike, 3-4hours.

Over and out for this time / # 18 Sandell

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