Lennox and Symonds do it again...
Jethro and Andy and their lovely wreath
After their superb win at LAMM this year Jethro Lennox and Andy Symonds got themselves together again and ventured north to the Björkliden Arctic Mountain Marathon. The following recall by Andy is kindly reproduced courtesy of the SSOT blog
…we think you’ll like it!
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Just back from the BAMM – a two-day mountain marathon which takes place every year up in the north of Sweden, well inside the Arctic Circle.
I competed in the event with my LAMM partner, Jethro Lennox, who was persuaded to take another break from his tarmac bashing marathon exploits. We’d won free entry as a prize in the Lowe Alpine Mountain Marathon back in June and with a large chunk of the flights paid for by the LAMM organisers, the rest and all other expenses covered by the BAMM team, it was too much of a good offer to turn down, not to mention the awesome opportunity this presented to visit and run in some wild and completely new terrain.
Maps were made available a couple of hours before the start, allowing competitors to familiarise themselves with the route. So by the start at 815am I had a pretty good idea of what I thought would be the optimal line linking the 8 checkpoints and finishing up at the overnight camp. Also unlike the UK equivalent races, the BAMM has a mass start and what makes it even more entertaining (and manic) is that there’s a prize for the first team to reach checkpoint 1, which happens to be at the top of a sizeable summit, 800m above Björkliden.
And so with tent, sleeping bags, food and plenty of warm clothing on our backs we set off for what turned out to be a fairly exhausting 40 minute rep. We were chased hard up the hill by another British pair who were willing to give it even more as they were competing in the shorter BAMM50 (50km instead of the longer 70km event Jethro and I were in). We did summit first, a minute or so ahead of the BAMM50 Brits and well over 4 minutes clear of the next BAMM70 team. But this pace wouldn’t be sustainable for 6 hours.
Summiting at checkpoint one
A gulp of energy drink, a ZipVit gel and, at a more “relaxed” rhythm, we set off towards checkpoint 2. For me it was obvious, keep hold of as much height gained as possible by contouring round to the right of the first hill, reach the next col and then climb the ridge to the north between the two imposing crags marked as daunting black features on the 1:50k map.
However, after descending the first top and dropping down to 1000m a height at which I thought we should avoid dropping below and starting our traverse, it became evident that the map didn’t necessarily convey all of the rocks on the map. In fact were the map portrayed albeit steep, but featureless terrain, we hit a series of what can only be described as massive great big cliffs. Drop down. It was the only solution. A hundred or so meters below we hit the flat valley floor, grazed out no doubt by millennia of glacial scraping and made our way north before re-climbing to the level we’d started out at and up between the crags (these ones on the map) as planned.
It was our first lesson in local terrain and a very important one at that. We’d quickly discovered that close contours were not to be messed with and that in nearly all cases contouring round mountains was to be avoided. It was up and over OR round the bottom – and nothing in between. The 1st rule of Björkliden nav was confirmed when upon reaching the col we realised the two chasing teams had regained the 4 minute lead from 30 minutes ago and now following closely behind they proceeded up and over the very summit of the next hill, making absolutely no effort to skirt around the side.
We adopted the “over or round” strategy throughout the rest of the race and luckily avoided too many more unexpected cliff confrontations.
Tucking in to some pastries
By second half of day 1 we’d once again established a lead and hadn’t seen any of the other BAMM70 teams for some time and so thought we must have built up at least a comfortable 10minute lead. It was therefore a shock when approaching the 2nd to last checkpoint we met a chasing team who’d opted for a more direct, but riskier, route through the last section of terrain. A 1km sprint ensued to the camp and we finished day 1 with a 7 second lead over the 2nd team and a further gap of 17 minutes to the 3rd.
The camp was great. Jethro tied his Scottish flag to the tent, I hadn’t brought a St George’s Cross, but wasn’t going to complain too much as it made for entertaining camp banter and helped our fellow Scottish mates who came in a couple of hours behind to locate and set up camp next to us.
The sky was clear and not even the congregation of midges and mozzies (it would appear that Sweden is unlucky enough to be blessed with both of these little blighters) could spoil our dehydrated chicken tikka with rice, followed by a thick and very chocolaty quinoa/oat porridge combo, not to mention the kilo of chocolate-coated raisins Jethro had stashed away for a “midnight snack” (scoffed before bed at nine pm)!
Day 2 and we set off hard. Not because there was a prize to the first checkpoint, but because we’d got a bit of a scare at the end of the first day and were keen to shed the chasing pair (one of whom had apparently been a world sprint orienteering champ, so was less likely to run into cliffs than us). After 20 minutes or so they were out of sight and we were running on our own for the rest of the day. It was a long day at over 6 hours of running and made particularly energy sapping with some massively steep climbs, snow traverses, river crossings and even a couple of hours of snow fall. Rain jackets were on for the first time.
We’d run conservatively on day 1, but today there wasn’t much holding back and as a result we built up a sizeable lead. Spaced out after 6 hours on the go and some difficultly shovelling down the umpteenth energy bar I made a bit of a slip at the end finding the last checkpoint on a bridge only hundreds of meters from the finish.
It was slightly reassuring that more than half of the other teams made the same errors as we dashed about along paths that weren’t on the map and a new bridge which equally wasn’t marked. After ten minutes of frantic faff we crossed the line and were presented with a giant leafy reef to rap around our necks to celebrate what turned out to be a victory of over twenty minutes.
Victory is sweet
We tucked into bananas and dry-cured reindeer meat, – each country has their own speciality in the protein recovery department: brioche in France, sliced ham in Italy, tins of Tuna in the States and reindeer in Sweden.
The entry was a prize from the LAMM, and with the winners of each category in the BAMM awarded entry and accommodation for next year it’s going to be very tempting to go back for this brilliant event in the north.
