The courses

There are four courses to choose from, 30, 50, 70 or 116 km (the ultra dis­tance 450 km has its own event, see Stor­uman Gravel XL). All par­tic­i­pants start at the same time re­gard­less of the cho­sen course and until shortly after the first depot (at 20 km) all fol­low the same route. There, the longer courses turn left.

The max­i­mum time is the same for all courses, 6½ hours, which means that the longer the dis­tance you ride, the higher the av­er­age speed you need to keep. At 116 km you can­not be lazy, but on all the other courses there is plenty of time for both lunch and cof­fee breaks if you wish.

Maps, course pro­file and files for GPS nav­i­ga­tion for each course is found fur­ther down the page.

Course characteristics

Stor­uman Gravel came about when we started think­ing on our train­ing rides that “it’s so nice to ride here that some­one should re­ally or­ga­nize a cy­cling event right here”. The courses are thus cen­tral to why this event ex­ists at all and we think they offer a high stan­dard in terms of gravel cy­cling, and do that with a very unique char­ac­ter.

They are made specif­i­cally for the “new” genre of gravel cy­cling, that is long-​distance cy­cling on gravel roads. The qual­ity of the road sur­faces varies, but there’s real road along the full route, so they are pri­mar­ily for bikes with­out sus­pen­sion. Of course, it is pos­si­ble to use an MTB any­way, and many do, but you don’t have the ad­van­tage over a gravel bike.

The courses go largely in a moun­tain­ous area and are hilly with an av­er­age of 100–130 me­ters el­e­va­tion gain per 10 km (Stifa 10–13). You will thus no­tice that it’s hilly, but the moun­tains here have round soft shapes so it won’t be ex­treme, the steep­est climbs will be 10-12% and the re­ally steep parts are not too long. There are also some flat sec­tions, so once the hills come, you will find quite long con­tin­u­ous sec­tions both up and down, which few gravel events can offer. The course pro­files give the elite a lit­tle some­thing to work with, but with­out com­pletely crack­ing down on the recre­ational rid­ers. We think the courses offer a good bal­ance — it’s tough, but still fun.

All the climb­ing you make, you get in re­turn in nice flow­ing down­hills, so no mat­ter what your ca­pac­ity is, you get plenty of fast and easy rid­ing too at reg­u­lar in­ter­vals. In some down­hill sec­tions you can get up to very high speed if you go for it (60+ km/h), but as long as you take it easy and use your brakes, the courses don’t con­tain any tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties.

There aren’t many vil­lages in the area so you do get an an ex­pe­ri­ence of wilder­ness, and it’s very lit­tle traf­fic (but not zero, al­ways be pre­pared for a car to ap­pear). There are no stop signs, but we have a num­ber of our own give way signs where you might have to stop. The roads them­selves lack of­fi­cial road signs.

A slightly longer as­phalt sec­tion (just over 7 km) ap­pears 8 km into the courses, but the rest is gravel (ex­cept half a kilo­me­ter last bit to­wards the cross­roads to En­samheten). That 7 km as­phalt sec­tion is longer than we wanted and the only place we feel we have been forced to com­pro­mise a bit to make the event work lo­gis­ti­cally. Seen to the whole, one can how­ever see this sec­tion as a pleas­ant change where one can find a rhythm on a smooth fast sur­face be­fore it's time to ride gravel in the moun­tains.

Expected time to finish

The pur­pose of hav­ing many dif­fer­ent courses is that it should exist a rea­son­ably tough chal­lenge for every­one. Cy­clists who haven’t done that many events be­fore often choose an un­nec­es­sary short dis­tance, how­ever. One can cer­tainly have a good rea­son to pick the 30 km course, but most can han­dle at least 50.

It can be bet­ter think in terms of time in­stead of dis­tance, then it may seem more rea­son­able. Below is a table show­ing ex­pected time to fin­ish de­pend­ing on how fast you ride:

As you see in the table, if you can with­stand a long time in the sad­dle, you can choose whichever course you want, with one ex­cep­tion: the 116 km course re­quires that you man­age an av­er­age speed of al­most 18 km/h to com­plete the max­i­mum time of 6:30. If you are a be­gin­ner and want to cycle far, we there­fore rec­om­mend that you choose 70 km in­stead.

Video from the courses

Below is a video recorded in June 2020 where we ride one lap on the 70 km course. It shares dis­tances with the other two courses so you also see what they look like. At the time for the video there were no signs or de­pots out of course. Since we recorded the video we have added the 116 km course, but in large parts it shares the same route as the 70 km.

We en­cour­age you to watch the video so you are pre­pared for the var­i­ous road sur­faces and other chal­lenges of the course.

Strava is a very pop­u­lar so­cial train­ing app, es­pe­cially among cy­clists. Its seg­ment func­tion is some­times used by smaller events for tim­ing and re­sult list with place­ments, and has there­fore caused con­tro­versy in the cy­cling fed­er­a­tion as it goes against the idea of a non-​competitive event. How­ever, no one can stop cy­clists from mak­ing seg­ments, and there were al­ready some seg­ments in the area be­fore Stor­uman Gravel ex­isted, and more ap­peared after the first edi­tion. These were not made by us.

To re­duce the risk of some­one being tempted to make dan­ger­ous seg­ments along the courses, going through tricky in­ter­sec­tions or risky down­hills, we have now cho­sen to set a good ex­am­ple and made a num­ber of seg­ments where it’s safe to ride as fast as you can.

One of these is Rullmyrsklättringen, which cov­ers the tough slope along Rullmyrsvägen from Kungavägen up the moun­tain. From our per­spec­tive the seg­ments are in­tended as light en­ter­tain­ment and a train­ing tool for those who ride in the area the rest of the year.

GPS navigation

The courses are sign­posted, so it’s not nec­es­sary to have the course in a GPS-​equipped bike com­puter, but if you hap­pen to have one, it can be nice to have the course pre-​loaded. Links to each course can be found in the in­for­ma­tion boxes fur­ther down the page.

Some bike com­put­ers can show the track’s el­e­va­tion pro­file, so you for ex­am­ple can see how long and steep an up­com­ing climb ahead is. For it to work well, the el­e­va­tion data in the pre-​loaded course needs to be rea­son­ably ac­cu­rate. This is un­for­tu­nately rare be­cause good el­e­va­tion data is ex­pen­sive and there­fore not avail­able on the com­mon plat­forms used to cre­ate bike routes.

How­ever, our “hand­made” GPX files con­tain el­e­va­tion data of quite good qual­ity. The courses have been mea­sured mul­ti­ple times with baro­met­ric al­time­ters and the re­sult­ing data has then been smoothed and an­chored to a num­ber of known fix points. The ac­cu­racy is ap­prox­i­mately ±3 me­ters.

If you want to use the el­e­va­tion data stored in the GPX file, you may need to use a spe­cial method to load the course. With Garmin de­vices, it doesn’t work (at the time of writ­ing) to im­port via Garmin Con­nect, as it al­ways re­places the file’s el­e­va­tion with data from its own data­base with low data qual­ity. You must in­stead up­load the file di­rectly (the method below ap­plies to Garmin Edge):

1. Start the GPS and delete old Stor­uman Gravel courses if you have it from pre­vi­ous years (we in­tro­duced good el­e­va­tion data for the 2023 edi­tion).
2. Turn off the GPS and con­nect to a com­puter via a USB cable. The GPS should then ap­pear as a USB mem­ory stick.
3. Copy the GPX file to the “Garmin/New­Files” di­rec­tory on the GPS.
4. Dis­con­nect the GPS from the USB cable and turn it on. The course with in­tact el­e­va­tion data is now avail­able in the nav­i­ga­tion menu.

If you in­stead choose to load the course via Strava or other plat­form that we link to, the qual­ity of the el­e­va­tion data will likely be poor, but the shape of the course is ex­actly the same, of course.