Ö-19: The first loops 🇬🇧
At Easter, the SwimRunners come out of their hiding places
In this Substack, SwimRun duo Sander and Bart blog weekly about their journey to the starting line of the Ötillö, the birthplace of the sport in Sweden. In 2025, it will once again serve as the World Championship of SwimRun. We are sharing training tips and SwimRun events, including those in the Netherlands, hoping to accelerate the growth of this relatively new sport.
De Nederlandse versie vind je HIER.
It was quite the chatter in the SwimRun Living Room this past week. First of all, there was a message for participants of the SwimRun(s) in Scilly: apparently, the Netherlands was officially at war with the Scilly Islands for no less than 335 years. Fortunately, peace was signed in 1986, so Dutch SwimRunners can safely race on this island group. The SwimRun there has grown into a full four-day event, the Scilly60. Definitely one for the bucket list, if you ask me!
On top of that, a question about whether there is a sports watch with a dedicated SwimRun profile (I can feel a Gear-special coming up soon) revealed a shared irritation about how the swim and run splits generated by Garmin watches with such a SwimRun profile end up as tons of separate swim and run sessions on Strava and TrainingPeaks. Surely there's a solution for this, Garmin, Strava, and TrainingPeaks?
Easter
And then the Easter weekend came into view, and it seemed as though Dutch SwimRunners were suddenly coming out of their winter sleep all at once. The real die-hards, including the HRE crew and the Twiske SwimRunners, had already been spotted in open water for a while, but now the first group invite appeared in the Living Room for a shared SwimRun session in Delft. Within no time, there were 8 sign-ups — I’m curious to see how big the group will get today.
Not me though. I promised myself I wouldn’t go into open water until after the 100km del Passatore — one challenge at a time. But I was inspired by the message nonetheless, and this weekend I did my first RunSwimRun: I ran (in SwimRun gear, of course) to the pool, swam for an hour, and then ran back home. It’s an easy combo that barely takes more time than just a swim session. In fact, it actually saves time, since I now also logged an hour of running. You don’t get weird looks that early in the morning, and besides, I don’t care about that anyway.
Fun fact: compared to swimming with just calf sleeves, adding a pull buoy gave me an almost 4-second advantage per 100 meters. I also took one stroke less per 25m, so it saves energy too. I already knew I swim more relaxed and faster with a pull buoy, but I didn’t realize the difference with calf sleeves was this big. After the tip from Erik and Niels last week, this is yet another reason to seriously start considering using a pull buoy during SwimRuns. I feel a Gear (test) special coming up soon…