Valhalla, I am coming!
Herbert Krabel first told me about Norseman. He said, Lanzarote, housewives do it. Embrum, Inferno, Altriman: mom and pop events. Kona, sure it’s hard to get into, but then what’s hard about it? Not getting the little umbrella in your drink? I’ll tell you what’s hard, Norseman is hard.
We come from the land of the ice and snow from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow
So I looked at the website and saw the picture of people jumping off the car ferry into the glacier water at 5 in the morning and thought, “Well that’s cute.” Then I thought, what the heck, I would put in for the lottery and see what happens. I figured if I got picked it can’t be that hard and we’ll have our summer vacation planned. And if I didn’t get picked, oh well, it was a fun fantasy while it lasted. But sometimes fate has a sense of humor, and of course I got picked…
The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands
So that was about 4 months ago now. Or roughly 250 hours of biking, swimming, and running in the freezing cold down here in southeast Tennessee. We, and by we I mean me and my homeboys, have been focused on coming up with the hardest training we can think of this winter… If there’s no chance of losing life or limb during a training session, it was not hard enough.
We’ve been swimming in the dark in an outdoor pool that has an inflatable bubble over it in 20 degree weather. The air in the bubble is so cold, your hand freezes when it’s out of the water, and then the entire pool deck is covered in ice that you walk on bare foot.
We’ve been mountain biking, night-time mountain biking, road biking, night-time road biking, road bike racing, mountain bike racing, time trialing, crit racing, and night-time mountain-bike uphill crit racing. We been riding in all temperatures and all weather conditions. I’ve gotten to the where I am only happy on the bike after four hours of riding in freezing rain.
We’ve been running up and down every hill we can find, preferably in a cold rain and after biking. We’ve been running, then biking, then running, then biking, then running to that stupid freezing cold pool to swim. We’ve been trail running, track running, and road running. I bought a dog last year and didn’t have to pay to get him neutered because I ran his nuts off this winter.
A typical weekend’s training is a morning half-ironman and then an afternoon half-ironman… On recovery days, it’s an Olympic tri followed by a century. On off days, we do leg presses, leg extensions, calf raises, squats, hack squats, power cleans, dead lifts and then cool down with 200 sit-ups and 100 one-armed push ups.
To fight the horde and sing and cry
So I hope this race is as tough as Herbert said it is. I hope that world-record extreme weather hits Norway on August 7th., I hope 30 foot seas rock that car ferry until everyone is seasick. I hope freak currents drive pods of starving killer whales into the fjord. I hope the entire bike ride is straight into a hurricane force headwind with pouring, arctic rain. I hope that during the run the rain eventually turns into golf-ball sized hailstones and then into white-out blizzard conditions. And I hope, as we climb the base of the final mountain, which is in complete darkness due to an unexpected solar eclipse, but is occasionally illuminated when ball lightning tumbling down the slopes explodes, that the race will then, and only then, be hard enough for me.
Valhalla, I am coming.
Kevin Richardson
April 5th
