What is Storuman Gravel XL?

Stor­uman Gravel XL is an ultra dis­tance gravel event over a 450 km (280 miles) long course through forests and moun­tains in the mu­nic­i­pal­ity of Stor­uman and Hemavan-​Tärnaby (in Swedish La­p­land), with or with­out an overnight stay halfway. The course runs on mostly gravel roads of vary­ing qual­ity (83%), with short con­nect­ing seg­ments on as­phalt scat­tered in-​between (17%).

The XL event is sep­a­rate from the con­ven­tional Stor­uman Gravel event. It takes place on the same week­end, but has its own start time and place and its own rules. All in­for­ma­tion about this event is on this page.

All par­tic­i­pants are self-​supported and join as in­di­vid­u­als, but you can choose to ride to­gether if you like. The course is avail­able on file and shows the rec­om­mended short­est route be­tween the course’s check­points that must be passed in given order. Halfway through you find your­self in Hem­avan and can spend the night there (ho­tels exist), if you want to split the event into two days (2 × 220 km / 140 miles).

The event is a light­weight arrange­ment with­out course mark­ings and de­pots, and uses pub­lic and pri­vate roads open to traf­fic as usual. There is no ser­vice on the course and the par­tic­i­pant is self-​responsible for safety and trans­port, for ex­am­ple if quit­ting. It’s not a for­mal com­pe­ti­tion and doesn’t fol­low the for­mat of any sports or­ga­ni­za­tion, but is a chal­lenge for those who want to test their strength over a re­ally long cy­cling dis­tance in a re­laxed con­text. Race tim­ing and live track­ing is in­cluded, but there are nei­ther prices nor place­ments awarded.

Quick info:

• Event name: Stor­uman Gravel XL.
• Course: 450 km, 5600 m el­e­va­tion gain, 83% gravel, 17% as­phalt.
• Date: August 2-3, 2025.
• Signup: only in ad­vance on­line through the signup page.
• Start: Storhälla, Stor­uman, Swe­den, Sat­ur­day 06:00, reg­is­tra­tion from 05:15.
• Fin­ish: Ut­sik­ten, Stor­uman, Swe­den, no later than Sun­day 22:00 (that is max time is 40h).
• For­mat: self-​supported par­tic­i­pants (pack­ing is re­quired), un­marked course, nav­i­ga­tion with nav­i­ga­tor, op­tional overnight stay halfway, tracker de­vices with live­track, own re­spon­si­bil­ity for safety and trans­port.
• Classes: men, women and tandem-​bike.
• Race tim­ing: total time and per stage.

The event or­ga­nizer is Lus­pho­l­mens Ar­ran­görs­för­e­ning.

Contents

Com­pared to most gravel events, there is an un­usual amount to read here. The pur­pose is to make it ac­ces­si­ble to be­gin­ners and an­swer all sorts of ques­tions, but also ex­pe­ri­enced rid­ers should look through the page to know how to do the event and what equip­ment is re­quired.

• Rules — the event for­mat and its rules.
• The course — de­scrip­tion of the course in text, di­a­grams and maps.
• Join — join the event!
• Re­sults — new and old re­sults from the event.
• Equip­ment and pack­ing — the equip­ment and pack­ing re­quired to par­tic­i­pate.
• Be­fore, dur­ing and after — things to con­sider be­fore, dur­ing and after the event.
• Nav­i­ga­tion — files for nav­i­ga­tion and how to con­fig­ure your nav­i­ga­tion de­vice cor­rectly.

To mit­i­gate the in­for­ma­tion over­load, we have col­lected tips and cu­riosi­ties last, if you are not in­ter­ested, you can skip this:

• More about nav­i­ga­tion — less im­por­tant but po­ten­tially in­ter­est­ing about nav­i­ga­tion.
• How tough is the time limit? — some cal­cu­la­tion ex­am­ples of how fast you need to ride.
• Tips about equip­ment and pack­ing — also in­cludes nu­tri­tion and water ac­cess.

Rules

Like many other ultra-​distance events, Stor­uman Gravel XL has own rules to be able to offer a con­cept tai­lored to the con­di­tions for this par­tic­u­lar place. The rules are de­signed to make it pos­si­ble to com­plete the event in sev­eral ways:

Rövattsliden, 208 km into the course. Norra Storfjället in the back­ground.

• The whole event in one go, or
• the event split into two stages, where you have the chance to re­plen­ish dur­ing the overnight stay, and
• ride solo or to­gether, where for ex­am­ple an ex­pe­ri­enced cy­clist rides to­gether with a less ex­pe­ri­enced.

To make it sim­ple the class di­vi­sion is how­ever basic: men, women and tandem-​bike. You there­fore don’t need to spec­ify in ad­vance how you in­tended to do your event, and in the re­sults list af­ter­wards both total time and stage times are shown for each par­tic­i­pant sep­a­rately.

(Note: if you choose to ride to­gether in a pair you still sign up each on your own, the tan­dem class is for tan­dem bikes, two peo­ple on one bike. It's un­usual with tan­dem par­tic­i­pants, but we like tan­dem bikes so of course we have a class for it and hope each year that some­one ac­tu­ally signs up for it.)

Even if it’s not a for­mal com­pe­ti­tion, some par­tic­i­pants focus on mak­ing a good re­sult and want well-​defined rules so the per­for­mance be­comes com­pa­ra­ble, while oth­ers who only aim at com­plet­ing the event may find the rules a bit un­nec­es­sar­ily de­tailed, but we need to con­sider both in­ter­ests. At the core it’s still sim­ple: fol­low the course and record your route using your nav­i­ga­tor, don’t lit­ter, and pack the bike to be self-​supported.

The rules are as fol­lows:

Overnighters may restock without restrictions

When you are out rid­ing on the course, you may only use reg­u­lar com­mer­cial ser­vices. If you don’t stay overnight, it counts as rid­ing the whole time, so then for the en­tire event you are lim­ited to the com­mer­cial ser­vices that exist if you want to stock up on food and other things.

The end of the climb at Geth­obben on the way to Nipen, 364 km into the course.

If you in­stead stay overnight, you can how­ever con­sider the event as being two in­de­pen­dent stages, one after the other, and you can pre­pare for the sec­ond stage with­out re­stric­tion, just like be­fore the start of the event. You can there­fore, if you want, ship food and equip­ment to your ac­com­mo­da­tion in Hem­avan (or send via post), to sup­ple­ment or re­place the com­mer­cial ser­vices.

This re­lief can of course be used to save a few hun­dred grams of pack­ing on the bike, or to add a change of clothes for more com­fort. It’s how­ever mainly there so that those who hap­pen to have ac­com­mo­da­tion in or around Hem­avan can use it and what’s there fully with­out risk­ing break­ing any rules. It’s also in­tended to make the event more ac­ces­si­ble and con­ve­nient for those will­ing and able to use this re­lief.

If you in­tend to spend the night but don’t have the abil­ity to solve the lo­gis­tics your­self, you have to make do with the com­mer­cial ser­vices avail­able on site. The gro­cery store in Hem­avan is well stocked, so what you miss out are mainly change of clothes and other con­ve­niences. If you feel that it’s un­fair, we rec­om­mend that you in­stead go for com­plet­ing the event in one go, as it then will be equal for every­one.

Nor­mally, the overnight stay is made in the gap in­side Hem­avan be­tween the two of­fi­cial stages, for ex­am­ple at Hem­avans Fjällcenter. If you make your stay out­side the gap, you ei­ther have to get back to the start of the stage after your overnight stay, or the re­sult­ing time for the stage you spent the night on will suf­fer.

It’s al­lowed to get a ride to and from your ac­com­mo­da­tion for the overnight stay. When get­ting a ride from and to the course, you must be dropped off at the same place where you were picked up, so the en­tire course is cy­cled. If you in con­nec­tion to the overnight stay get a ride from and back to the gap be­tween the stages, it’s a bit re­laxed how­ever, for ex­am­ple if you are picked up at the gro­cery store and dropped off at the bath house the next day, it’s okay.

Helpers on standby

On the public road towards Brattåker, about 64 km into the course. The parts of the course that are on public roads are often well-compacted, smooth and fast-rolling in the wheel tracks.

Sev­eral of the par­tic­i­pants travel to the event by car to­gether with friends or fam­ily, and the course, be­cause it’s curled next to a paved coun­try road, is per­fect for helpers in cars to be out on the course and cheer on and help. It con­tributes to safety and morale, so we don’t want to pre­vent it, but at the same time un­re­stricted per­sonal sup­port would mean that the event would be much dif­fer­ent, and un­fair to the par­tic­i­pants who come to the event alone, who are sev­eral as well. There­fore, the rules put re­stric­tions on what helpers are al­lowed to do out on the course.

The principle is simple: helpers (car-borne or not) may only move in and help in case of problems, they may not be used as a tactical advantage. In other words, if every­thing goes nor­mally with­out mishaps, it shouldn’t make any dif­fer­ence if you had ac­cess to helpers or not, other than pos­si­bly a boost in morale.

It’s al­lowed for the helpers to be out on the course and cheer here and there and con­vey in­for­ma­tion about the sit­u­a­tion on the course, as long as they oth­er­wise re­main pas­sive. The car should not fol­low the cy­clist closely through­out the course like a sup­port car, but rather drive to suit­able lo­ca­tions and wait until the cy­clist passes.

Keep in mind that not the en­tire course is dri­vable by car, and some parts, al­though dri­vable, are un­suit­able for dri­ving. You should stick to the some­what big­ger roads. (It’s worth not­ing that it’s not pos­si­ble to drive all the way to Björk, that is the fin­ish for stage 1.)

Of course, we want every­one to pack their bike with the same mar­gins as you have if you don’t have the op­por­tu­nity to be picked up by a car, so don’t be tempted to re­duce the pack­ing, for ex­am­ple skip the rain jacket, just be­cause you know a helper can come to the res­cue.

We also want to en­cour­age helpers out on the course to cheer on all par­tic­i­pants, not just their own cy­clist, and if you as a helper find your­self in a sit­u­a­tion where you can help an­other par­tic­i­pant who is hav­ing a prob­lem, we would love for you to do so.

Pleasant stops

Along the “crux”" at Dajkanberg 85 km into the course, an off-road track instead of road. This type of track is found in two places along the course, but only 1 km long each.

Some of the par­tic­i­pants usu­ally have some kind of con­nec­tion lo­cally, and maybe have a friend who lives or has a cabin along the course who wants to offer a cof­fee break. Maybe some­one who is in­ter­ested in the event has made some­thing sim­i­lar to a depot and of­fers passers-​by cof­fee and buns.

Al­though tak­ing part in some­thing like this is tech­ni­cally sup­port and would break the self-​supported rule, we allow it as an ex­cep­tion in the rules, be­cause we want the par­tic­i­pants to be al­lowed to have a good time along the course. The im­por­tant thing is not to use this ex­cep­tion as a tac­tic to save time.

It’s even okay, for ex­am­ple, to plan a full din­ner at a friend’s house who lives down the road, but if you do this type of larger “per­sonal sup­port” then it should also be matched with stay­ing for a longer time, for ex­am­ple a good hour, so that it be­comes ap­par­ent that the stop doesn’t re­sult in a time sav­ing by being able to take less food on the bike.

It’s by na­ture of course a bit fuzzy where the line is be­tween a “pleas­ant stop” and per­for­mance en­hanc­ing per­sonal sup­port. If you aim to get around as quickly as pos­si­ble, we there­fore rec­om­mend that you avoid this type of stop, es­pe­cially if it’s are arranged just for your­self.

Interaction with the locals

It has hap­pened that par­tic­i­pants who have had prob­lems have knocked on the door of res­i­dents along the course and asked for a place under roof to rest. It’s not di­rectly against the rules, but of course it can be prob­lem­atic if this hap­pens fre­quently. We don’t want to be known lo­cally as an event that cre­ates a mess and bur­dens res­i­dents in the area, and in the long run it can lead to prob­lems with our per­mits. There­fore, we ask every­one to be well pre­pared to be fully self-​supported out on the course.

There are now also three places for safety stops along the course, see sep­a­rate sec­tion on safety shel­ters, so even if you get into trou­ble de­spite all your prepa­ra­tions, you should not have to in­volve res­i­dents along the course.

Race timing

The fol­low­ing three time re­sults are recorded:

• Total time from start at Storhälla to fin­ish at Ut­sik­ten in Stor­uman.
• Stage 1: time from start at Storhälla to Björk top restau­rant in Hem­avan.
• Stage 2: time from the exit of Hem­avan to the fin­ish in Stor­uman.

At Bränthobben, the highest point on the passage over Silverberget 109 km into the course. View to the west with Norra Gardfjället in the background.

The main goal is to make it around the en­tire course be­fore the max­i­mum time of 40 hours ex­pires. Within that, each par­tic­i­pant can choose whether they want to ride fast, and if so ei­ther try to get as short a total time as pos­si­ble, or use the op­por­tu­nity to sleep over in Hem­avan and in­stead focus on fast stage times. The sum of stage 1+2 is also pre­sented in the re­sults list, which thus ex­cludes the gap in Hem­avan and any overnight stay that was made there.

You could thus say it’s two races in one. One that is 450 km long, and one di­vided into two 220 km long day stages. You don’t reg­is­ter in ad­vance how you in­tend to do it, so you can change your mind dur­ing the course of the event. Stor­uman Gravel XL is not a for­mal race and we do not say which of the times is more pres­ti­gious, in­stead we want you to adapt your plan to what suits you best.

The race tim­ing works as fol­lows: for the start at Storhälla it’s the time of the start that ap­plies, so if you ar­rive late you lose time. For the stage 1 fin­ish, start stage 2, and total fin­ish in Stor­uman, we do an analy­sis of the recorded track af­ter­wards and de­ter­mine as pre­cisely as pos­si­ble when the par­tic­i­pant crosses a pre­de­ter­mined vir­tual line on the course. The time can be fur­ther rounded and grouped to­gether if there are sev­eral who cross the fin­ish line to­gether. Fi­nally, the time is pub­lished rounded (up­wards) to the near­est minute.

For race tim­ing with vir­tual lines to work well and give pre­cise re­sults you need to pass them at speed (for those fa­mil­iar with Strava: just like Strava seg­ments). For the stage fin­ishes, it’s im­por­tant to get all the way up the fin­ish­ing climbs and prop­erly into the flat park­ing lot at the top be­fore stop­ping to relax. For the start of stage 2, it’s im­por­tant to start rid­ing a fair bit be­fore the start­ing point and have a fly­ing start past.

Each par­tic­i­pant is given a track­ing de­vice for live­track, and the time is pri­mar­ily cal­cu­lated from that record­ing. How­ever, the track­ing de­vices can­not be guar­an­teed to be 100% re­li­able, so you as a par­tic­i­pant is re­spon­si­ble to record your route with your nav­i­ga­tor, and if nec­es­sary, the track is re­quested after the fin­ish so that the time can be de­rived from that.

The course

The basis of the event is the course. Had it not been pos­si­ble to find a nice course lay­out, there wouldn’t be an event.

The course is de­signed with the aim of achiev­ing as good and var­ied gravel cy­cling as the area can offer. Near Stor­uman there is roads deep in the for­est and among low moun­tains, with grad­u­ally higher moun­tains the closer you get to Hem­avan. Lots of wilder­ness, nice views, small vil­lages and lonely farms here and there. The char­ac­ter of the course changes, there are both easy flat and tough hilly sec­tions, both fairly smooth well-​maintained gravel roads and bumpier rarely used forestry roads.

83% of the course con­sists of gravel roads with low or ex­tremely low traf­fic, of vary­ing char­ac­ter and sur­face qual­ity. As it’s not pos­si­ble near the moun­tains and larger vil­lages to com­pletely avoid as­phalt, there are some shorter con­nect­ing seg­ments on that sur­face. A total of 11% of the course is on paved minor roads, and 6% on paved coun­try roads (E12 / E45), of which the longest sec­tion is 10.5 km (be­tween Gardik­fors / Fors­mark and Ajau­re­forsen). Most of the paved road sec­tions run close to the moun­tains so there’s scenic sur­round­ings and less traf­fic than typ­i­cal for a coun­try road.

The course di­a­gram below with el­e­va­tion pro­file is pos­si­ble to zoom and pan. The map in the back­ground is moved along with the pro­file au­to­mat­i­cally. The map is schematic, but both the course track and the el­e­va­tion pro­file is fully de­tailed.

The course con­tains ap­prox­i­mately 125 me­ters of el­e­va­tion gain per 10 km, which can be said to be hilly with­out being ex­treme. For com­par­i­son, Vätternrundan con­tains 43 me­ters per 10 km. To those that has tried our Stor­uman Gravel 116 km course, we can say that the sur­face and pro­file are sim­i­lar to that, so the XL course is about as tough as rid­ing the 116 km course four laps.

In two places, at Da­jkan­berg and Grannäs, there is a shorter “crux” (about 1 km each), where there’s off-​road track rather than proper road. They are ride­able, though over­grown and / or bumpy so you can’t ride at much speed.

For being a gravel course, it can in parts be ex­pe­ri­enced as some­what tech­ni­cal. This is due to oc­ca­sional steep slopes both up­hill and down­hill, where es­pe­cially the down­hill slopes can be shaky due to ero­sion. Dur­ing the day it’s not a prob­lem to man­age, but those who in­tend to ride through the night need a very strong head­light to be able to ride at speed. Some of the roads are also more over­grown than you might be used to from other events. There is a wide span be­tween the smoothest and the rough­est gravel roads along the course.

The course ap­par­ently doesn’t fol­low the short­est route be­tween Stor­uman and Hem­avan, and es­pe­cially to­wards the end there is much back and forth over the moun­tains with a lot of climb­ing. With more than 300 km in the legs it can feel tough that the course doesn’t go straighter, even though the gravel rid­ing is ac­tu­ally very nice in that area. We have strived to offer nice views, but also that the course should be tough and de­ci­sive, and to­wards the end that will be felt. The fact that the course is con­vo­luted over a smaller area also makes it safer, since con­sid­er­ing its length it’s still rel­a­tively quick and easy to reach dif­fer­ent places by car.

Tech­ni­cally, the course is de­fined as pass­ing a num­ber of check­points in the cor­rect order, which is the tra­di­tional way of con­struct­ing un­marked long courses since the time be­fore satel­lite nav­i­ga­tors. How­ever, the check­points are vir­tual, nei­ther marked or manned and can be in the mid­dle of nowhere. The idea is to pre-​load the route into your nav­i­ga­tor, and then you are guided by that around the course, so there’s no el­e­ment of man­ual nav­i­ga­tion as long as the nav­i­ga­tor is work­ing.

If you are cu­ri­ous to see ex­actly where the check­points are po­si­tioned, they are marked in the map below (which you can zoom and pan). How­ever, if you just fol­low the pre-​loaded track you don’t need to know where they are.

Join

The reg­is­tra­tion is made in the same place as for the reg­u­lar event, on the signup page.

This event takes place on the same week­end as our con­ven­tional Stor­uman Gravel event (with course lengths be­tween 30 and 116 km), so if it suits, you can bring a bunch of cy­cling friends with you and there will be a course length that suits any de­sire and abil­ity.

Equipment and packing

You will need the fol­low­ing equip­ment and pack­ing:

• Bike:
  • Rec­om­mended tire width 40 mm or more. Slicks or nar­rower than 35 mm is not rec­om­mended.
  • Aer­o­bars for ultra dis­tance is al­lowed.
  • Re­flec­tors (or cor­re­spond­ing re­flec­tive tape) and basic lights are re­quired. A tail light with day­light func­tion is rec­om­mended also dur­ing the day when rid­ing on coun­try roads.
  • If you in­tend to ride through the night you will need an extra bright head­light (1000+ lu­mens), to be able to ride safely at speed on rough roads.
  • E‑bikes are not al­lowed.
• Elec­tron­ics:
  • Bike com­puter or equiv­a­lent de­vice with the abil­ity to guide the cy­clist along a pre-​loaded course. Used for record­ing the route and nav­i­ga­tion around the course. Correct settings in the navigator is more important in this event than many other due to the course complexity. See sep­a­rate sec­tion about nav­i­ga­tion.
  • Mo­bile phone. Please check your op­er­a­tor’s cov­er­age map in ad­vance. If you have an ex­otic mo­bile sub­scrip­tion, it may be ad­vis­able to get a pre­paid card with bet­ter cov­er­age. Roam­ing will work too.
  • Bat­tery bank ca­pac­ity to be able to use the nav­i­ga­tor and mo­bile phone through­out the event.
  • If you are cy­cling to­gether, it’s enough for one per­son in the group to have a nav­i­ga­tor, but we rec­om­mend that every­one has one. Every­one must have a phone (in case some­one quits, etc.).
• Food/en­ergy:
  • Water bot­tles, min­i­mum ca­pac­ity for 1 liter, prefer­ably more in hot weather. There are good op­por­tu­ni­ties to re­fill from streams and lakes here and there.
  • Food/en­ergy of pre­ferred type to get around. If you plan to stay the night in Hem­avan, see de­tails of what is avail­able and adapt.
  • Elec­trolyte sup­ple­ment. Due to the length of the event, salt de­fi­ciency due to sweat­ing is com­mon.
• Mis­cel­la­neous:
  • Bike hel­met.
  • First aid kit. There are many good ready-​made kits made for bik­ing or hik­ing, they are com­pact and weigh 150 – 300 grams.
  • Bike re­pair equip­ment: at min­i­mum gear to fix nu­mer­ous punc­tures and a mini tool to tighten screws.
  • Ad­just cloth­ing ac­cord­ing to weather, and have mar­gin for the weather be­com­ing worse and colder than the fore­cast shows.
  • Abil­ity to pay for food, ac­com­mo­da­tion, bus ticket etc.
  • Rec­om­mended: if you don’t know the area, it’s nice to have a paper map as a backup if the elec­tron­ics fail. It may also come in handy when to find al­ter­na­tive routes back if you need to quit the event.
  • Rec­om­mended: SOS alarm’s 112 app.
  • Rec­om­mended: an of­fline map as a mo­bile app (com­ple­ments a paper map), such as Map­App Topo.

If you want some ex­am­ples and ideas of how the equip­ment and pack­ing may look, there is a sep­a­rate bonus sec­tion: Tips about equip­ment and pack­ing.

Before, during and after

Information email

Well in ad­vance of the start (prob­a­bly a few weeks), we will send out an in­for­ma­tion email to all reg­is­tered par­tic­i­pants, to the ad­dress you chose when you reg­is­tered. Prob­a­bly there will be no new im­por­tant in­for­ma­tion there, but it’s good if you check your email from time to time.

Accomodation

In Stor­uman we rec­om­mend Stor­uman’s Camp­ing as ac­com­mo­da­tion, and there you get also a full 30% dis­count as a par­tic­i­pant in Stor­uman Gravel (XL or any of the reg­u­lar events). Reg­is­ter for the event first, and then book via email and write there that you will par­tic­i­pate, then you will get the dis­count.

About 174 km into the course, near Rönnbäck.

In Hem­avan we rec­om­mend Hem­avans Fjällcenter. If you plan to split the event over two days, you should book in ad­vance. If you have planned to com­plete the event in one go but get prob­lems and need to sleep over, you can book on site, and there is a phone num­ber to call if you ar­rive out­side of nor­mal re­cep­tion hours. How­ever, the stand-​by staff can­not re­ceive pay­ment for the room, so it must be done on­line or you have to wait until re­cep­tion opens in the morn­ing.

The cen­tre of­fers both hotel and hos­tel stan­dard. If you need a self-​catering kitchen, choose the hos­tel op­tion, and re­mem­ber to add bed linen to your book­ing. There is a restau­rant con­nected to the hotel, but check when book­ing whether the open­ing hours suit your needs.

If you want to take your bike into your room that is fine, but of course it must be rea­son­ably clean. A water hose is avail­able at the water sta­tion within the premises, see the map for Hem­avans Fjällcenter & Camp­ing. There is also a water hose at the gas sta­tion.

There are also more ac­com­mo­da­tion op­tions and Stor­uman’s of­fi­cial vis­i­tor guide is a good source in­for­ma­tion for ac­com­mo­da­tion and food in Stor­uman, and Hemavan-​Tärnaby’s of­fi­cial vis­i­tor guide the same for Hem­avan. Note that sum­mer is off-​season for Hem­avan so there are fewer al­ter­na­tives than dur­ing win­ter.

Start

The start is held in the large long nar­row car park (200 × 15 me­ters) at Storhälla multi-​arena in­side Stor­uman. Pretty un­sexy place, but prac­ti­cal and safe from traf­fic if there would be some­what large amount of par­tic­i­pants, hence the choice. The course starts in di­rect con­nec­tion to the cy­cle­way to­wards Stensele. The nav­i­ga­tion file start (0 km) and first check­point is a lit­tle fur­ther down the cy­cle­way, marked with “track start” in the pic­ture, but the start line will be in the park­ing lot.

If you want to park a car for a long time near the start we rec­om­mend the gravel sur­face (not the as­phalt) on the south side of IT4U’s of­fice build­ing (Blå Vägen 210). Should you just park tem­porar­ily for the start there will be plenty of space in Storhälla’s park­ing lot.

The event doesn’t use num­ber tags, but you reg­is­ter at the start so we know who is ac­tu­ally par­tic­i­pat­ing. In con­nec­tion with that, you are also given a tracker de­vice which means you will be vis­i­ble on a pub­lic web map live through­out the event. If the fin­ish is manned when you reach it, you can leave the tracker de­vice there, oth­er­wise you can leave it in the de­posit box at the en­trance to IT4U’s of­fice.

Reg­is­tra­tion and as­sign­ment of tracker de­vices is done from 05:15 there at Storhälla’s park­ing lot. The start time is at 06:00 and all par­tic­i­pants start si­mul­ta­ne­ously.

There are no toi­lets or chang­ing room in the area, so come ready to start. Make sure your nav­i­ga­tion de­vice has the ap­pro­pri­ate set­tings and has the course pre-​loaded, oth­er­wise it can be stress­ful to get every­thing ready just be­fore the start.

Following the course

The course is com­pletely with­out course mark­ings, so you must be fully guided by your own nav­i­ga­tor pre-​loaded with the course. For­mally, the course con­sists of a num­ber check­points that must be passed in the cor­rect order, while you may choose any path you like be­tween them. How­ever, the rec­om­mended route con­sists of the near­est/best route be­tween the check­points so there’s noth­ing to be gained from de­vi­at­ing from it, un­less one has some er­rand, such as cy­cling to a place to stay the night.

Nipen, 366 km into the course.

If you in­tend to de­vi­ate from the rec­om­mended route, study the map in ad­vance so you know where the check­points are and plan the route ac­cord­ingly. If you in­tend to fol­low the rec­om­mended route all the way (as al­most all do), you don’t have to worry about where the check­points are.

Since well-​functioning nav­i­ga­tion is a very im­por­tant part to have a good ex­pe­ri­ence out on the course, we have a ded­i­cated sec­tion about nav­i­ga­tion, where you also find our of­fi­cial nav­i­ga­tion files for down­load.

Don’t for­get to record the route! To en­sure that you get a re­sult, you must have a recorded route, as the tracker de­vices are not 100% re­li­able. It’s fine to split up the record­ing, for ex­am­ple stop it at a meal break and start a new one when you con­tinue.

Not all bike com­put­ers can record the en­tire dis­tance on one charge, so you may need to bring a power bank for it.

In the un­likely event that an ob­sta­cle ap­pears that you can­not get around, call us or­ga­niz­ers and we will help find an al­ter­na­tive route. Of course, you don’t need to call if you can find an al­ter­na­tive route your­self that still passes the check­points in order.

Gates

One of nor­mally three low­ered boom bar­ri­ers along the course (be pre­pared for more!), here at Sil­ver­ber­get 108 km in.

At a few places along the course, there are gates that are nor­mally closed. There are two gates at Sil­ver­ber­get, and one on the climb up to Björk. Many more open gates will be passed, so you have to be pre­pared that any of them can be tem­porar­ily closed. At the gates (they are in the form of boom bar­ri­ers), you can sim­ply get off the bike and walk around.

The event has the con­sent of all the af­fected pri­vate road own­ers and landown­ers, and a road gate doesn’t au­to­mat­i­cally mean that bi­cy­cles are banned ei­ther, so you don’t have to feel like a crook when you by­pass one.

(At the time of writ­ing, the bar­rier on the road up to Björk has in­cor­rectly a ve­hi­cle pro­hib­ited sign, it should ac­tu­ally be motor traf­fic pro­hib­ited. As a cy­clist, you can ig­nore it.)

Water

You will need to fill up on water now and then. The area along the course is sparsely pop­u­lated and there are no larger agri­cul­ture or in­dus­tries so you can see it as na­ture and make use of the old rule about water in na­ture here up north: if it flows and is clear, it’s drink­able, and to that you can add clear sur­face water from the lakes.

There are plenty of streams and lakes to fill up on water from. For you that want to plan in a bit more de­tail there is more in­for­ma­tion in the bonus sec­tion water ac­cess.

Riding at night

On the way to the fin­ish at Ut­sik­ten Stor­uman, close to mid­night under dense cloud cover. The photo il­lus­trates how dark it can get for a few hours dur­ing the night.

The event is held in late sum­mer, the days are still long this far up the globe, but the sun is below the hori­zon be­tween about 22:00 and 04:00, and 00:00 - 02:00 it’s ba­si­cally pitch black, es­pe­cially if there’s cloud cover.

If you split the event into two days, you will prob­a­bly avoid rid­ing in the dark. You still have to bring a light for safety, but the front light doesn’t need to be pow­er­ful, that is it’s suf­fi­cient to make you vis­i­ble to other road users, but not strong enough to ride fast on bumpy gravel roads.

If you however plan to ride through all or part of the night, you need a very powerful headlight (1000+ lumens). The later part of the course con­tains quite a lot of fast down­hill on less main­tained roads, which es­pe­cially if it has been a rainy sum­mer can be rough. It be­comes dif­fi­cult and risky to ride these if you don’t have good light­ing so you can clearly see the road sur­face at speed. Try it dur­ing train­ing, you may need a stronger light than you think. To make it through the night, the bright­est mode should last for two hours, and a fur­ther two hours at some­what lower power.

All in one go or spend the night?

We give every­one the op­por­tu­nity to ride the course all in one go, and you don’t have to reg­is­ter in ad­vance how you in­tend to do it. Orig­i­nally, this op­por­tu­nity was in­tended to at­tract par­tic­i­pants with a very high ca­pac­ity to ride fast, and/or ex­pe­ri­enced ultra cy­clists ac­cus­tomed to long days and tough con­di­tions. How­ever, we know from ex­pe­ri­ence that even reg­u­lar par­tic­i­pants can choose to aim for this, and per­haps em­bark on this type of chal­lenge for the first time. We have noth­ing against that, but ask that you think it through care­fully and be pre­pared for the fact that it might not go as planned.

The course con­tains 17% as­phalt, of which 6% coun­try road, like here Blå Vägen after Gard­vik, 163 km into the course.

• Be prop­erly pre­pared for rid­ing in dark­ness at speed on poor sur­faces.
• It be­comes even more im­por­tant to pack clothes and equip­ment for un­ex­pect­edly rough weather. It’s rec­om­mended to have a bivy bag or equiv­a­lent with you.
• It’s com­mon that those who ride all in one go still need to sleep for a cou­ple of hours, and then you need suit­able equip­ment to be able to do so. The open cabin Port­bros­tu­gan 320 km in can be a suit­able place to snooze for a few hours.
• It’s de­sir­able (but not a re­quire­ment) to be able to call a helper who can come to the res­cue by car in the mid­dle of the night if the chal­lenge proves too tough. The or­ga­nizer evac­u­ates if some­one is in­jured or in dan­ger, but the car is re­served for only ex­treme sit­u­a­tions.

The start time on the first day is the same for all par­tic­i­pants to pro­vide more of a race-​like feel and to in­crease the chance of find­ing some­one equally strong to ride to­gether with, and it’s early in the morn­ing to give every­one the chance to make it to Hem­avan be­fore the gro­cery store closes and dark­ness falls. If you be­long to the cat­e­gory of par­tic­i­pants who ride re­ally fast but still want to spend the night halfway, there will thus be a lot of wait­ing be­fore bed­time in Hem­avan. So you ei­ther have to try to enjoy hours of calm and rest, or in­stead change strat­egy and make the event all in one go.

Bad weather

Few cy­clists like rain. If we look at our pre­vi­ous or­ga­nized events, the weather is good about 80% of the time, and when it is bad, it is rarely re­ally bad all the time. Even if the weather is more often nice, it can of course be bad, and as a par­tic­i­pant you need to be pre­pared for that, and you should have tested your equip­ment in poor weather dur­ing train­ing.

The roads of course be­comes softer and rolls worse in wet weather, but most hold up de­cently. The ex­cep­tion are the cruxes with of­froad tracks where some sec­tions can be­come so muddy that you have to walk, but it’s only 2 km of 450.

Due to the low num­ber of par­tic­i­pants and the fact that most peo­ple need a long time in ad­vance to pre­pare for this type of event, it is par­tic­u­larly im­por­tant that those who sign up for this are se­ri­ous. It is sim­ply dif­fi­cult to find re­place­ments for late dropouts. If you are very sen­si­tive to the weather, you should there­fore not sign up for this event.

Livetrack

Au­di­ence and friends back home may want to see where the par­tic­i­pants are out on the course dur­ing the event, and for that we have live­track. Even as a par­tic­i­pant, it can be in­ter­est­ing to take out your mo­bile phone and check the live­track web­site to see where the oth­ers are.

Tracker de­vice (weight about 150 grams) which is loaned at reg­is­tra­tion and must be brought around the course.

We use a mo­bile phone app for this pur­pose in our shorter events, but it’s not rea­son­able for such a long event as this is, as mo­bile phones are not re­li­able enough (back­ground track­ing + bat­tery op­ti­miza­tion = trou­ble) and the track­ing func­tion con­sumes way too much power to be up and run­ning for a cou­ple of days. There­fore we in­stead have ded­i­cated tracker de­vices that we dis­trib­ute at the start.

The tracker de­vices trans­mit via the mo­bile net­work (4G), and since there is radio shadow here and there, the marker in the map can be stuck for a while some­times, but be pa­tient, it will (al­most al­ways) re­cover. How­ever, 100% re­li­a­bil­ity can­not be guar­an­teed.

The live map is the one em­bed­ded higher up on this page, and the di­rect link is https://xlt.it4u.net/sumgvlxl (there is also an easy-​to-remember short link lead­ing to the same des­ti­na­tion: xlt.it4u.net/xl). The live map is ac­ces­si­ble and ac­tive all year and shows the course with its check­points, but only when the event is on there’s some­one to fol­low in the map.

Accommodation and food in Hemavan

If you want to spend the night in Hem­avan, we as said rec­om­mend Hem­avans Fjällcenter, see the gen­eral Ac­com­mo­da­tion sec­tion for de­tails.

Stor­berg, 94 km into the course.

Open­ing hours for restau­rants and the gro­cery store in Hem­avan can change at short no­tice, so be sure to check the days be­fore. Likely there are one or two restau­rants that are open until 19:00, and the gro­cery store (ICA Nära Fjällboden) is prob­a­bly open until 21:00. The gro­cery store is rel­a­tively large and well-​stocked thanks to the bor­der trade, pretty much every­thing a hun­gry cy­clist could pos­si­bly want is there, ex­cept tech­ni­cal sup­ple­ments like gels.

Those who ride the race in one go must only use permanent commercial services, and the grocery store in Hemavan is then the obvious stop. It’s lo­cated di­rectly next to the course in the Bay­hill Cen­ter.

If, on the other hand, you stay overnight (at least 5 hours of con­tin­u­ous rest), you can recharge be­tween the stages with­out re­stric­tion, so you can have pre-​placed food, but with 15 hours from the start until the gro­cery store closes, most peo­ple can count on get­ting there in time and can choose to buy food in place in­stead. For res­i­dents at the Fjällcenter hos­tel, there is a self-​catering kitchen that you can use to pre­pare food, so you don’t have to bring your own cook­ing gear if you don’t want to. For the hotel al­ter­na­tive there is a restau­rant, but be sure to check that the open­ing hours suits you.

In­side Hem­avan, the only check­point on the course is to make sure you have made your way up to Björk’s top restau­rant. The top restau­rant usu­ally has nei­ther suit­able food nor open­ing hours for this event, the fin­ish for the first stage being there is of course for its great lo­ca­tion.

Finishing

The final fin­ish is at Ut­sik­ten in Stor­uman. Since the fin­ish­ing of par­tic­i­pants are spread out over a very long time it’s not guar­an­teed for us or­ga­niz­ers to have a per­son there all the time, so you can’t ex­pect pomp and cir­cum­stance, but at least you will get a nice view.

The tracker de­vice should of course be re­turned. If we are there at the fin­ish, we can pick it up there, oth­er­wise there is a de­posit box by the en­trance door to the IT4U of­fice build­ing (Blå Vägen 210, near the start) where you leave it. If you for­get to re­turn it, you can post it to us af­ter­wards at the fol­low­ing ad­dress: “Lus­pho­l­mens Ar­ran­görs­för­e­ning, c/o IT4U Swe­den AB, Blå Vägen 210, SE 923 31 Stor­uman, SWE­DEN”.

If you have fin­ished the event in time and if you want, you can buy a Fin­isher T-​shirt marked with the year of the event. We share the link to the web­shop via email af­ter­wards, where there are dif­fer­ent types, col­ors and sizes to choose from. They are sold with­out profit.

Nor­mally we cal­cu­late the times for the re­sults list from the tracker de­vice record­ing, and do so soon after the fin­ish. How­ever, these track­ers are nei­ther com­pletely re­li­able nor ac­cu­rate, and if we can­not de­rive a re­sult with good qual­ity, we will con­tact you and ask for your own record­ing from your nav­i­ga­tor (in GPX, TCX or FIT for­mat). If you didn’t have a tracker de­vice at all (for ex­am­ple ar­rived late to the start), then of course you al­ways have to send in a track, but even among those who had a tracker de­vice it might fail and then we need the par­tic­i­pant’s own record­ing.

In order for a GPX file to be used for race tim­ing, it must con­tain time­stamps, and if you only share an ac­tiv­ity on Strava for ex­am­ple, the GPX file you down­load as a vis­i­tor will not con­tain any. So to share the file with us, you first need to log in your­self and down­load the GPX, TCX or FIT file lo­cally to your com­puter, and at­tach it in an email to us.

Keep in mind that it can be dangerous to drive a car directly after a hard effort like this when you can be de­hy­drated, be at risk of get­ting mus­cle cramps and be tired in gen­eral. Just as Vätternrundan, we strongly rec­om­mend that you rest for at least six hours after reach­ing the fin­ish line be­fore dri­ving a car. It’s against Swedish law to drive a car when tired.

Quitting the event

Map of the course with bus stops marked (green dots), and red dots show the places where it’s furthest from the nearest stop and how far it is.

We don’t have any officials on the course, so if you quit you are fully responsible yourself for getting home. The event is meant to be an ad­ven­ture to test your lim­its, so we don’t mind if you take a chance and make an at­tempt al­though you think there is a big risk that you won’t be able to fin­ish, as long as you have en­sured that you can get home.

If you quit, you must text, email or call us so we be­come aware of it. We pre­fer tex­ting.

If you get to the fin­ish of stage 1 but then feel that it’s time to quit, you will of course get a re­sult for the com­pleted stage, so not all is lost.

If you have to quit and can­not be picked up by a friend, you need to get to a bus stop on the E12 and go by bus back. Bus stops are avail­able in Hem­avan, Tärnaby and Slussfors, and the bus passes 2 - 5 times a day (see time ta­bles). This means that there may be a long dis­tance to the near­est bus stop (up to 43 km, see pic­ture) and long wait­ing time at them.

The bus shel­ter at Slussfors school, 317 km into the course. Also easy to reach halfway on the first stage.

Port­bros­tu­gan, open cabin at Port­bron (near Slussfors and Umnäs), suit­able for a pleas­ant break or emer­gency overnight stay under cover. 320 km into the course, also easy to reach from the halfway point of the first stage.

Fire­place and benches in­side Port­bros­tu­gan.

Port­bron, 320 km into the course. Port­bros­tu­gan among the trees on the head­land in the back­ground.

If you want to bring your bike on the bus, it’s only al­lowed on buses with cargo space (it may hap­pen that in­di­vid­ual bus dri­vers are more flex­i­ble, but noth­ing we can promise). At the time of writ­ing, it’s about half of the de­par­tures that have that.

There is a taxi com­pany in the area, Slussfors Taxi. The com­pany is very small and avail­abil­ity in terms of gen­eral taxi op­er­a­tions varies, but you can al­ways try call­ing. Keep in mind that a taxi jour­ney with the dis­tances in­volved can cost sev­eral thou­sand SEK.

Hope­fully you won’t have to quit due to a com­plete break­down, so you can at least ride back home slow and steady. Then it’s a good thing to have a map so you can see where it’s pos­si­ble to make a short cut, and there are many op­por­tu­ni­ties for that.

Along the E12 there are only 144 km be­tween Hem­avan and Stor­uman, so if you feel on the sec­ond day that you can’t han­dle an­other whole day, maybe you still can man­age to ride back along the E12. As a road bike route, it’s ac­tu­ally rather nice. If you reach halfway on day 2, that is to Grannäs, and there feel that you want out, there’s only 46 km to Stor­uman if you pick the clos­est route, and 105 km with lots of el­e­va­tion if you fol­low the course to the fin­ish.

We as or­ga­niz­ers have a car on standby for evac­u­a­tion, but it is re­served for (non-​urgent) in­jured par­tic­i­pants to be taken to the emer­gency room in Tärnaby or Stor­uman, for ex­am­ple if you have crashed and bro­ken your col­lar­bone. For ur­gent emer­gen­cies, it’s 112 that ap­plies, of course.

If the bike breaks down and you don’t man­age to fix it, and you don’t have a helper in a car who can come and pick you up, then it will po­ten­tially be sev­eral hours of walk­ing to the near­est bus stop. It is trou­ble­some and bor­ing but not dan­ger­ous, and there­fore the evac­u­a­tion car should not be called. If you are wor­ried about this sce­nario, you should try to talk to other par­tic­i­pants be­fore the start who have helpers out on the course who might be able to come to the res­cue.

The rea­son we as or­ga­niz­ers do not pro­vide a taxi ser­vice for the par­tic­i­pants quit­ting the event is not only the dif­fi­culty of find­ing of­fi­cials who are pre­pared to pro­vide them­selves and their car on call for 40 hours, but also be­cause we be­lieve that the risk of being stranded makes par­tic­i­pants more se­ri­ous about the chal­lenge, and pre­pare bet­ter.

Safety

All par­tic­i­pants must be aware that they are out on a per­sonal bike ride, and must be re­spon­si­ble for their own safety just as if on an own pri­vate long ride. Be aware that the mo­bile phone cov­er­age on cer­tain parts of the course is lim­ited. On the gravel roads used by the course there is very lit­tle traf­fic, along some sec­tions no cars pass at all. The course runs for the most part in very sparsely pop­u­lated areas. In other words, you need to be pre­pared to han­dle rough sit­u­a­tions by your­self.

Älsoliden, view over Umnässjön to­wards the moun­tains in the west, 324 km into the course.

If you have a re­laxed at­ti­tude to­wards your own safety, then keep in mind that it’s also about avoid­ing to be­come a bur­den on other par­tic­i­pants, the or­ga­nizer and in the worst case emer­gency op­er­a­tions. Dur­ing an event, the risk in­creases that an ac­ci­dent oc­curs, sim­ply be­cause there are more peo­ple out si­mul­ta­ne­ously. The the­ory of prob­a­blil­ity tells us that if the ac­ci­dent risk per per­son is 1% and there are 50 par­tic­i­pants, there is a 39% risk that at least one has an ac­ci­dent. There­fore, we ask each par­tic­i­pant to re­duce their own risk to need ex­ter­nal help as much as pos­si­ble.

Being stranded on the course is not nor­mally dan­ger­ous, but the risk of con­se­quen­tial prob­lems such as hy­pother­mia in­creases. You must there­fore be able to re­pair your bike in the field your­self, or arrange for your own pick-​up (or re­pair as­sis­tance).

In the event of an emer­gency, you of course call 112. Keep a first aid kit in your pack and think through how to use it, for ex­am­ple you may need to stop a bleed­ing while wait­ing for an am­bu­lance.

In the case of non-​urgent in­juries that are nev­er­the­less so se­ri­ous that you can­not con­tinue rid­ing (for ex­am­ple a bro­ken col­lar­bone), you should in the first place arrange your own trans­port to the near­est emer­gency de­part­ment, which is avail­able around the clock at the small hos­pi­tals in Tärnaby and Stor­uman (out on the course, it will be at most 65 km to the near­est hos­pi­tal).

To­wards Mårkan, 100 km into the course.

If you don’t have the pos­si­bil­ity to arrange your own trans­port, you may call the or­gan­iser’s evac­u­a­tion car. We only have one car and there­fore it’s im­por­tant that it’s only used when it’s re­ally needed.

As a par­tic­i­pant, you are obliged to stop and help if some­one needs emer­gency as­sis­tance due to in­jury or ill­ness. Pay at­ten­tion to if a per­son who crashed acts con­fused, it could be due to a con­cus­sion which can de­velop into a se­ri­ous con­di­tion. An am­bu­lance is ap­pro­pri­ate in that case. Of course we want to avoid that the emer­gency op­er­a­tions are bur­dened with triv­i­al­i­ties, but worse is if you hes­i­tate to call for help when it is ap­pro­pri­ate. If you are un­sure what to do after an in­jury, call 1177 for ad­vice. The or­ga­nizer does not have any med­ical ex­per­tise.

Safety shelters

In three places there are safety shel­ters, in­tended for emer­gen­cies only:

• Boksjö bygdegård, nearby Boksjön, 275 km into the course.
• Port­bros­tu­gan, nearby Slussfors and Umnäs, 134 and 320 km into the course.
• Jippmokks kapell, in­side Grannäs, 345 km into the course.

These places are marked in the live map.

Port­bros­tu­gan is al­ways open and can also be used for a ca­sual rest. The other two re­quires that you make a phone call to a per­son which then has to come and open the shel­ter, and should thus only be used in emer­gen­cies, for ex­am­ple if you get into rough wheather you can­not han­dle. In nor­mal cases it is ex­pected that the shel­ters stay un­used, and we only pro­vide these as a safety mea­sure.

Insurance

There is a basic Swedish in­sur­ance against ac­ci­dents in­cluded in the fee (see the Swedish text). Par­tic­i­pants from other coun­tries might need or want a travel in­sur­ance in ad­di­tion to this. We have no spe­cific ad­vice to give as we don’t have knowl­edge about mar­kets abroad, so you have to find out on your own which in­sur­ance you might want to travel to and par­tic­i­pate in this event.

Navigation

The event is not in­tended to be an ori­en­teer­ing chal­lenge, in­stead you have a nav­i­ga­tion de­vice, typ­i­cally in the form of a bike com­puter, in which you have pre-​loaded the course. You are then guided by the nav­i­ga­tor through­out the course and need not worry about find­ing your way.

Turn onto the crux be­hind Da­jkan­berg 84 km into the course, easy to miss if you don’t have the right nav­i­ga­tor set­tings.

Due to the complexity of the course, the race places higher demands than most other races on the navigation file and the navigator settings. If you ac­tu­ally fol­low the ad­vice given here it will work fine.

Most of the junc­tions where you have to make a turn are plain and ob­vi­ous, but there are also a hand­ful of places where you sud­denly have to turn off a larger road onto a semi-​overgrown road or path, and there are a few oddly shaped cross­ings that can be a bit dif­fi­cult to in­ter­pret. In these sit­u­a­tions, we know from ex­pe­ri­ence that those who only have a GPS watch on their arm and/or lack a back­ground map can take the wrong turn or miss a turn.

The most important thing is that the navigator gives a clear signal if you end up off course, so that if you hap­pen to take a wrong turn or miss a turn, you can find your way back to the course again. If you have that and can ac­cept a few oc­ca­sional nav­i­ga­tion mis­takes, a sim­pler nav­i­ga­tor will do.

For the best ex­pe­ri­ence free from nav­i­ga­tion er­rors, you should have a bike com­puter mounted on the han­dle­bars (there are mounts for some GPS watches as well) with ac­cess to a back­ground map that you ei­ther show all the time or switch to be­fore cross­ings. In ad­di­tion, one should use our nav­i­ga­tion file with our hand-​crafted no­ti­fi­ca­tions and set up the com­puter as we rec­om­mend in this sec­tion.

Files for navigation

Of­fi­cial TCX file trans­ferred to a Garmin Edge 530 and in­spected in the de­vice. If the trans­fer worked cor­rectly, the no­ti­fi­ca­tions for all turns around the track should ap­pear in the map, here “Left 300m” and “Turn Left”.

Sim­pler nav­i­ga­tors, here rep­re­sented by the Garmin Edge 130, lack a back­ground map and only show the nav­i­ga­tion file track on a blank back­ground. This is the min­i­mum level re­quired. A back­ground map will how­ever re­duce the risk of mis­takes at sin­gle cross­ings with dif­fi­cult to in­ter­pret shape.

Our nav­i­ga­tion files in TCX for­mat con­tain a con­tigu­ous track for the course and no­ti­fi­ca­tions be­fore turns. A some­what old-​fashioned for­mat, but it’s ro­bust and sup­ported by most nav­i­ga­tors, old and new.

We don’t pro­vide the course through Strava or any other on­line plat­form be­cause we think the auto-​generated turn no­ti­fi­ca­tions they make are not good enough.

At least Garmin nav­i­ga­tors have a fairly low limit on how many no­ti­fi­ca­tions (mes­sages be­fore turns, etc.) a file with a course can have. Orig­i­nally it may have been lim­ited by the the ac­tual hard­ware mem­ory, but today it’s an ar­ti­fi­cial lim­i­ta­tion which Garmin uses to dif­fer­en­ti­ate its prod­ucts.

To deal with these lim­i­ta­tions we offer sev­eral dif­fer­ent files so you can choose a split file or slimmed down ver­sion if your nav­i­ga­tor has a smaller ca­pac­ity.

The files for stage 1 end at Björk, and the files for stage 2 of course starts at the start of the stage 2, so the gap in­be­tween (in­side Hem­avan) is miss­ing, but if you don’t sleep overnight there it must still be rid­den as it’s in­cluded in the total.

The split day stage files are not split ex­actly in the mid­dle in terms of dis­tance, but in a place that means there won’t be more than 50 no­ti­fi­ca­tions per file.

To our knowl­edge, Garmin has three ca­pac­ity lev­els: max 50 no­ti­fi­ca­tions (some watches), max 100 no­ti­fi­ca­tions (ex­am­ple: Edge 130), and max 200 no­ti­fi­ca­tions (ex­am­ple: Edge 530 and up, and some watches). These lev­els have been around for a long time and thus also ap­plies to older mod­els. Other makes may have other lev­els, and Garmin has been seen chang­ing the ca­pac­ity in some of their prod­ucts through firmware up­dates.

The num­ber of track points a course can con­tain is also lim­ited, but ac­cord­ing to our knowl­edge it’s at 10000 points or more for most nav­i­ga­tors so there shouldn’t be a prob­lem.

It’s usu­ally not doc­u­mented what ca­pac­ity level one’s nav­i­ga­tor has, so the best way is to try with the file you want to use, and only change if it com­plains about the ca­pac­ity being ex­ceeded.

Files with com­plete set of no­ti­fi­ca­tions, in­clud­ing extra turn warn­ings, and high res­o­lu­tion el­e­va­tion data:

Files with turn no­ti­fi­ca­tions but with­out extra warn­ing ahead of them, as well as slightly lower res­o­lu­tion on the el­e­va­tion data and the course track (but still good):

Stor­berg, 94 km into the course.

If you have a bike com­puter with a low ca­pac­ity, we rec­om­mend that you rather use two-​part stage files, that is four files for the full course, than the lean files. But, maybe you pre­fer a less ver­bose no­ti­fi­ca­tion or want avoid hav­ing to change files dur­ing the course of the event, and then the lean files fit bet­ter. If you ac­tu­ally keep track of when the next “course point” (no­ti­fi­ca­tion) comes by look­ing at the screen from time to time, the extra warn­ings ahead of the turns aren’t nec­es­sary.

Many will split the event into two days, and also have a bike com­puter with suf­fi­cient ca­pac­ity to han­dle 100 – 200 no­ti­fi­ca­tions, and then the day stage files with full no­ti­fi­ca­tion is the nat­ural choice.

If you are used to nav­i­gat­ing long courses and want to build your own nav­i­ga­tion file you can do that by im­port­ing our clean GPX files (stage 1, stage 2) to a plat­form of your lik­ing, but for most it’s best to use our TCX files with­out mod­i­fi­ca­tion.

If you build your own nav­i­ga­tion file or do an au­to­matic im­port via an on­line plat­form, be aware that it may be con­fused by the off-​road sec­tions or sec­tions along roads it may lack in its map, or think that the coun­try road is un­suit­able for cy­cling, and could then alter the route with­out no­tice. So if you make your own file, com­pare it with our map to en­sure that you re­ally will fol­low the of­fi­cial course.

Notifications

Tra­di­tion­ally, the TCX for­mat lim­its the no­ti­fi­ca­tions to only 10 char­ac­ters, so the ones we use are in­deed short, but on the other hand easy to read.

With Garmin and course points ac­ti­vated, you get this extra screen au­to­mat­i­cally, whether you want it or not, which shows the up­com­ing no­ti­fi­ca­tions / course points. Whether you ac­tu­ally use it or not is a mat­ter of taste.

No­ti­fi­ca­tions in­cluded in all files, even the lean ones:

• “Turn Left” and “Turn Right”, an­nounced at the in­ter­sec­tion.
• “Keep Left” and “Keep right”, clar­i­fy­ing no­ti­fi­ca­tions where you should con­tinue on the same road, but it is not com­pletely ob­vi­ous which way that is. For ex­am­ple, am­bi­gu­i­ties can arise when a side road joins in a curve and then these no­ti­fi­ca­tions are used. They come about 50 me­ters be­fore the in­ter­sec­tion. In the lean files some of these are re­moved, but the most im­por­tant re­main.
• “Crux 300m”, a crux (dif­fi­culty) starts in 300 me­ters, that is a pas­sage that can be dif­fi­cult to ride. There are only two such cruxes and both are about 1 km off-​road tracks which are a lit­tle bumpy and over­grown. The en­trance can be a bit hard to see be­cause of the veg­e­ta­tion, so you have to be extra at­ten­tive, and this is mainly why the no­ti­fi­ca­tion ex­ists.
• “Gate 200m”, a gate or sim­i­lar ob­sta­cle in 200 me­ters. These are found where there is a gate that is nor­mally closed so you have to get off the bike and walk past, but of course you have to be pre­pared that closed gates might ap­pear in other places too.

Sup­ple­men­tary no­ti­fi­ca­tions only found in the files with extra warn­ings be­fore turns:

• “Left 200m” and “Right 200m”, comes as a warn­ing be­fore “Turn Left” and “Turn Right” 200 me­ters be­fore the in­ter­sec­tion. In a few cases these no­ti­fi­ca­tions also ap­pear be­fore “Keep Left” and “Keep Right”, but mostly not.
• Extra no­ti­fi­ca­tions be­fore turns with 700 - 2100 me­ters dis­tance are present in a few cases where the turn oc­curs in a high speed down­hill sec­tion. The no­ti­fi­ca­tion will then ap­pear around the start of the down­hill sec­tion, that is when the speed is lower.
• “2 x Turns” means that there will be two turns in a row that are so close to each other that there is no time to mak­ing an ad­vance warn­ing for each turn, so you need be extra at­ten­tive. Comes about 200 me­ters be­fore the first turn.

To work well in prac­tice with the lim­i­ta­tions in pre­ci­sion and the delay you can ex­pect from a typ­i­cal nav­i­ga­tor, the no­ti­fi­ca­tion points in the file are about 50 me­ters be­fore the ac­tual po­si­tions.

(If you are cu­ri­ous and want to look at the TCX files in ad­vance on your com­puter to see ex­actly where all the no­ti­fi­ca­tions are you can use the free soft­ware GPXSee. Be aware that you need to turn off "Elim­i­nate GPS Out­liers" in the set­tings, oth­er­wise some data points are fil­tered out.)

Navigator settings

In order for you to have a good navigation experience, you must load our TCX file with notifications and elevation data intact, and enable the display of the TCX file’s “Course Points” . For most bike com­put­ers, it’s these things you need to con­sider:

• Choose file(s) that do not ex­ceed the bike com­puter’s ca­pac­ity in terms of num­ber of no­ti­fi­ca­tions (course points) and track points.
• Load the track into the bike com­puter via cable di­rectly from the com­puter, and not via Garmin Con­nect or any other plat­form (Strava, RWGPS etc).
• Ac­ti­vate “Course Points”, as the turn no­ti­fi­ca­tions are stored as course points.

For those of you who are Garmin users, there is a bonus sec­tion: tips for Garmin nav­i­ga­tors show­ing how to prop­erly set up a Garmin de­vice for this event.

A final word of cau­tion — if the nav­i­ga­tor de­vice com­plains about the track not match­ing its map or it starts sug­gest­ing to change the route so it matches the map, it can end in a faulty route which does not fol­low the course. You must en­sure that the nav­i­ga­tor’s own au­to­matic rout­ing, if it has such a fea­ture, is dis­abled or at least doesn’t dis­turb or change the course.

More about navigation

Here fol­lows a few less im­por­tant but pos­si­bly in­ter­est­ing sec­tions about nav­i­ga­tion with our TCX files and TCX files in gen­eral.

Elevation data and timestamps

The el­e­va­tion data in our files is of very high qual­ity, so func­tions in the bike com­puter that re­quire that will work well. Here Garmin ClimbPro show­ing the climb in Hem­avan up to Björk, 223 km into the course.

Our TCX files con­tain el­e­va­tion data of good qual­ity, much bet­ter than what Garmin, Strava and other pop­u­lar plat­forms offer. This means that you can trust that the el­e­va­tion pro­file in the bike com­puter (if it has such a fea­ture), and fea­tures like Garmin’s ClimbPro works well if you want to use that. This how­ever re­quires that you trans­fer the file in such a way that the el­e­va­tion data is pre­served.

TCX files are in their basic form a record­ing of a train­ing ses­sion or a race, and there­fore they also have baked-​in time­stamps. The time­stamps can be used by the bike com­puter to im­prove its guess on how long it will take to ar­rive to the next no­ti­fi­ca­tion (course point). Garmin bike com­put­ers also have the func­tion “Vir­tual Part­ner” which is sim­ply a vir­tual cy­clist to com­pare with, which moves ac­cord­ing to the time­stamps em­bed­ded in the TCX file.

Our TCX files are made for nav­i­ga­tion and are not record­ings of real bike rides, but in­stead de­signed from ac­cu­rate map ma­te­r­ial. The em­bed­ded time­stamps are then made with a math­e­mat­i­cal model of a cy­clist rid­ing a bike at 21.5 km/h on flat ground, slower up­hill and faster down­hill. It takes this vir­tual cy­clist 12 – 13 hours to ride a day stage. So if you for ex­am­ple plan to com­plete a day stage in 12 hours and gets passed by the vir­tual part­ner, you are be­hind sched­ule.

Problems with modern navigation workflows

Today’s nav­i­ga­tor de­vices / bike com­put­ers have many ad­vanced func­tions, but un­for­tu­nately it can still be a bit dif­fi­cult get­ting them to be­have in a good way with a pre-​loaded long course on small roads. Using TCX files as we do here is cer­tainly old fash­ioned, but is still the only way which works re­li­ably and pre­dictably over sev­eral dif­fer­ent nav­i­ga­tors, old and new and from dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ers. One have to live with that there will be sim­ple text mes­sages to in­di­cate turns rather than graphic ar­rows in the map image.

When using a typ­i­cal bike com­puter with­out con­fig­ur­ing any­thing spe­cial and im­port­ing the course the usual way via Garmin Con­nect or other pop­u­lar on­line plat­form, like Strava or Ride with GPS, it will not work very well:

• All turn no­ti­fi­ca­tions that is em­bed­ded in the file are re­moved and re­placed with au­to­mat­i­cally gen­er­ated, which on gravel roads in the north of Swe­den means that it misses cer­tain turns, gives no­ti­fi­ca­tions where there is no turn, and can give con­fus­ing no­ti­fi­ca­tions such as sug­gest­ing a U-​turn along a plain stretch of curvy road.
• All el­e­va­tion data con­tained in the file is re­placed with the plat­form’s own el­e­va­tion model which has such poor res­o­lu­tion in the north of Swe­den that it often says it’s down­hill when it’s up­hill and vice versa, so any func­tion in the bike com­puter that re­lates to the el­e­va­tion pro­file be­comes un­us­able.

Of course, you will still man­age to get around the course if you em­ploy the usual ways to im­port the course (via Strava, Garmin Con­nect etc), but the no­ti­fi­ca­tions you get, or the lack thereof, may cause some ir­ri­ta­tion when you are out on the course.

Tips for Garmin navigators

You can read Garmin’s own in­struc­tions how to man­u­ally load a TCX file via cable if you don’t know how al­ready.

For those who choose to use the TCX files the way we rec­om­mend fol­lows here suit­able set­tings for a Garmin Edge 530 (other mod­els have sim­i­lar set­tings):

• Important: load the file via cable so that the no­ti­fi­ca­tions (and the el­e­va­tion data) is kept in­tact.
• Important: turn off auto-generated turn notifications be­cause they are of low qual­ity and con­flict with what is em­bed­ded in the TCX file, and can also af­fect the de­vice’s power con­sump­tion and sta­bil­ity neg­a­tively.
  • Menu → Nav­i­ga­tion → Courses → Course Op­tions → Turn Guid­ance [OFF]
• Important: verify that the “course points” feature is active for the course (after the course has been trans­ferred to the de­vice).
  • Menu → Nav­i­ga­tion → Courses → [SumGvl XL Day1/Day2] → Set­tings → Course Points [ON]
  • To be sure, you can se­lect “Map” in the same menu to dis­play a map and there ver­ify that there are small icons with turn no­ti­fi­ca­tions here and there in the course. If there is, the course was most likely trans­ferred cor­rectly to the de­vice. If they are miss­ing, the method of trans­fer have not kept the “course points” of the orig­i­nal file.
• Nor­mally you turn off ClimbPro in this part of the world be­cause Garmin’s el­e­va­tion model is far too poor for it to work at all. How­ever, when you have loaded our files via cable, the el­e­va­tion data is good so ClimbPro will work well. It’s still a some­what in­tru­sive fea­ture that takes over the en­tire screen when on a climb, and on at least some Garmin mod­els the turn no­ti­fi­ca­tions are de­layed if ClimbPro has just started, mean­ing there is a risk to miss turns. Choose for your­self if you want it on or off, if un­sure, turn off.
  • Menu → Set­tings → Ac­tiv­ity Pro­files → [Gravel] → Climb Pro [ON/OFF].
• Con­fig­ure a data screen suit­able for view­ing TCX files’ “course points”: Menu → Set­tings → Ac­tiv­ity Pro­files → [Gravel] → Data Screens → Add New → Data Screen.
  • Nav­i­ga­tion → Course Pt. Dis­tance — same as "Dis­tance to Next", that is shows dis­tance left to the next course point, but in ad­di­tion to that a small icon is also dis­played which shows the type of course point, such as a right arrow for a right turn.
  • Sev­eral other fields may be of in­ter­est, such as es­ti­mated time to next point, el­e­va­tion to next point and more, choose ac­cord­ing to taste. How­ever, the main field is “Course Pt. Dis­tance”.
• If you often show the map screen, feel free to choose “Course Pt. Dis­tance” as a vis­i­ble data field on it.
• It may be use­ful to have the de­vice’s bat­tery per­cent­age vis­i­ble in a data field, so you can see how much is left until you need to charge.
• It’s (un­for­tu­nately) not pos­si­ble to switch off the “Vir­tual Part­ner” fea­ture on the 530 unit. The vir­tual part­ner will ride ac­cord­ing to the time­stamps found in the TCX file, and they are set to com­plete a day stage in 12 – 13 hours. If you get passed by it, you prob­a­bly need to speed up a lit­tle.
• When course points are ac­tive, you au­to­mat­i­cally get one extra screen (no need to con­fig­ure) that shows the next three course points.

Re­gard­ing map in the nav­i­ga­tor, you should have one that is re­cent and based on Open­Street­Map. Garmin’s own Cycle Map is that, so as long as you have up­dated re­cently you have a great map. We ac­tively con­tribute to Open­Street­Map along the course, and usu­ally add more de­tail each year, thus it’s nice to have a map which is as re­cent as pos­si­ble.

How tough is the time limit?

You have from 06:00 on Sat­ur­day until 22:00 on Sun­day to get from start to fin­ish, that is 40 hours. Many par­tic­i­pants will want to get an overnight stay and sev­eral breaks in that time though.

Let’s as­sume that you stay overnight and start at 06:00 also on day two, then you have 16 hours be­fore the clock strikes 22:00. Most will want a proper lunch break and other breaks when rid­ing for so long, so maybe a total of three hours stand­ing still, then we have 13 hours left to ride. Both day stages are quite sim­i­lar in terms of dis­tance and el­e­va­tion gain, so let’s cal­cu­late the total — in 26 hours of ac­tive rid­ing you should cover 450 kilo­me­ters. Then you have to ride at 17.4 km/h on av­er­age.

Gardik­fors­dammen, 153 km into the course.

For a fit am­a­teur 17.4 km/h doesn’t sound like much, and it’s not, even on gravel. How­ever, the course is not with­out hills, and you lose more time up­hill than you re­gain down­hill. To com­pen­sate to some ex­tent, most peo­ple push a bit harder up­hill, so let’s say you pro­duce 35% more power for up to 20 min­utes straight when it’s up­hill. If we apply that model to the en­tire course with all hills, we come to the con­clu­sion that you need to main­tain at least 21.5 km/h on a flat gravel road (as­sum­ing no wind), then the av­er­age over the en­tire course will end up at ex­actly 17.4 km/h. In order to last the whole course and to be able to push a lit­tle extra on the up­hills as the model ex­pects, those 21.5 km/h must be at a com­fort­able speed that feels like you can keep al­most for­ever.

If you want to have more time to com­plete the ride, it can be achieved by mak­ing a shorter overnight stay, or no overnight stay at all and in­stead just take shorter rests here and there all the way around the course.

A few sum­ma­rized time ex­am­ples cal­cu­lated ac­cord­ing to the model de­scribed above:

• Rid­ing 06:00 – 14:00 with half hour pause → 7½ hours ac­tive cy­cling per day → 30,2 km/h on av­er­age → 32,7 km/h on the flats.
• Rid­ing 06:00 – 16:00 with one hour pause → 9 hours ac­tive cy­cling per day → 25,2 km/h on av­er­age → 28,3 km/h on the flats.
• Rid­ing 06:00 – 18:00 with one hour pause → 11 hours ac­tive cy­cling per day → 20,6 km/h on av­er­age → 24,4 km/h on the flats.
• Rid­ing 06:00 – 20:00 with one hour pause → 13 hours ac­tive cy­cling per day → 17,4 km/h on av­er­age → 21,5 km/h on the flats.
• Rid­ing 06:00 – 22:00 with one hour pause → 15 hours ac­tive cy­cling per day → 15,1 km/h on av­er­age → 19,4 km/h on the flats.
• Rid­ing all in one go with 8 hours rest in total → 32 hours ac­tive cy­cling → 14,2 km/h on av­er­age → 18,5 km/h on the flats.

So over­all, you can say that from an am­a­teur’s per­spec­tive the time limit is quite tough. There are two rea­sons for that, we as or­ga­niz­ers want the event to have a sporty feel, and we also want to com­plete it in a week­end.

The down­side is that it’s a bit un­wel­com­ing to slower cy­clists or those who want to take it very easy. At nor­mal bike pack­ing pace with camp­ing equip­ment brought on the bike, this course would prob­a­bly take five days rather than two to com­plete. How­ever, there is noth­ing that pre­vents you from ig­nor­ing the time limit, and if you fail to make the limit but still com­plete the course, your time will be pub­lished, al­though it doesn’t count as a com­pleted event.

Keep in mind that al­though the av­er­age speed in these cal­cu­la­tions can seem easy in re­la­tion to a four-​hour train­ing ses­sion, a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge in this type of event is to keep the body going for a long time and man­age to re­plen­ish with nu­tri­tion con­tin­u­ously. What feels like an easy pace the first four hours can be hard to keep eight hours in, es­pe­cially if you get prob­lems with your nu­tri­tional in­take.

Tips about equipment and packing

If you have not done this type of event be­fore, it can be a chal­lenge to pack the bike with every­thing you need. This sec­tion is in­tended to give some tips and in­spi­ra­tion for how the equip­ment and pack­ing can look.

Ex­am­ple of bike equipped for Stor­uman Gravel XL. Sad­dle pack, long top tube pack, half frame pack, 750 + 500 ml water bot­tles in bot­tle cage with side entry. Re­flec­tors via re­flec­tive tape on the frame, rear light mounted on the seat­stay. Bike com­puter/nav­i­ga­tor in out­front mount (pic­ture taken at Kroksjön 127 km into the course).

Swedish law ac­tu­ally re­quires re­flec­tors and lights on the bike only if you ride in the dark, so rac­ing bikes often lack that. How­ever, in ultra-​distance cy­cling, re­flec­tors and lights is stan­dard equip­ment, be­cause even if you don’t in­tend to ride through the night you can run into de­lays and end up in the dark any­way. If you are a bike geek and think cheap plas­tic re­flec­tors are ugly and heavy, re­flec­tive tape can be used.

When it comes to bike bags to bring a bit more gear than usual there is nowa­days a plethora to choose from, thanks to the rise of the bikepack­ing cul­ture.

Al­most every­one chooses some type of large sad­dle pack, which is good for pack­ing bulky items such as clothes, and the size can be ad­justed by the pro­trud­ing part being rolled up like a dry­bag. It often ob­scures the rear light, so you may have to mount the light on the bag or a seat­stay in­stead.

Gravel roads can be trans­formed by weather and their main­te­nance cycle. Here is an ex­am­ple of a piece of road 21 km into the course which at the time of the photo had just re­ceived a new wear layer in the form of coarser gravel. Nor­mally this is the coars­est gravel to be en­coun­tered along the course.

To ac­cess things while rid­ing, usu­ally carb-​filled snacks, most peo­ple also choose some kind of top tube pack. For extra pack­ing space, you can add a frame pack under the top tube as well. These are good for fast cy­cling as they don’t add sig­nif­i­cant drag, but as they are nar­row you can’t pack bulky items in them.

If you want you can bring full camp­ing equip­ment in­clud­ing tent and sleep­ing bag on the bike, but as the time limit is quite tough it means that it will be a rather stress­ful bikepack­ing trip. There­fore we ex­pect that most par­tic­i­pants will not carry full camp­ing gear, but rather use the avail­able ac­co­mo­da­tion op­tions in Hem­avan.

If you haven’t par­tic­i­pated in this type of event be­fore, you may be sur­prised over the amount of car­bo­hy­drates that you need to trans­port on the bike. Also con­sider that the amount of cloth­ing needed can vary quite a lot and change with short no­tice de­pend­ing on the weather fore­cast. Plan your pack­ing and test pack well in ad­vance so you re­ally know you have the space you need.

A typ­i­cal pack­ing for the event weighs 3 – 4 kg, so most peo­ple will need more than just a sad­dle pack. The bike pic­tured above has a sad­dle pack, a long top tube pack and a half frame pack. It is test-​packed for the event and il­lus­trates well how a bike could look on the start­ing line.

Other pop­u­lar packs used in this event is hy­dra­tion back­packs (which also may have som pack­ing space) and han­dle­bar packs.

Nutrition

Be­hind Sil­ver­ber­get, 109 km into the course. This 3 km long pas­sage is be­hind road bar­ri­ers and can thus not be reached by car.

An ultra-​distance event can some­times jok­ingly be called an eat­ing con­test with some cy­cling in be­tween. It al­ludes to the fact that when the body works for such a long time, a cen­tral part of the per­for­mance be­comes how well one suc­ceeds in fill­ing up with new en­ergy dur­ing the course of the event.

If you are used to par­tic­i­pat­ing in this type of event, you al­ready have a de­vel­oped nu­tri­tional strat­egy (which can be highly per­sonal), and can skip this sec­tion. The text is pri­mar­ily aimed at those who have not par­tic­i­pated in such a long event be­fore, when the cen­tral role of nu­tri­tional in­take may come as a sur­prise.

For being an ultra-​distance event Stor­uman Gravel XL is short, so you are not faced with as tough a chal­lenge when it comes to nu­tri­tion as an event that goes on for many days. On the other hand, the short time limit re­quires you to be ac­tive for a large part of the day, which makes the nu­tri­tional in­take a chal­lenge still. In ad­di­tion, the pos­si­bil­ity to use shops and restau­rants is lim­ited, but there is a gro­cery store in Hem­avan which is (nor­mally) open 9-21, and a few restau­rants that nor­mally close at 19:00.

If you in­tend to stock up in the gro­cery store, you can­not be too picky about which spe­cific prod­ucts that should be avail­able. You must be able to adapt to the range the store has. In ad­di­tion, you have to think through the case that you do not make it in time, if you for ex­am­ple are un­lucky with bike break­downs. Also keep in mind that fin­ish­ing back in Stor­uman may take place out­side the local busi­nesses’ open­ing hours, so make sure to pre­pare with ac­cess to food for re­cov­ery im­me­di­ately after fin­ish­ing.

How many calo­ries do you burn dur­ing the event? For a typ­i­cal rider, the ef­fort will con­sist of ap­prox­i­mately 2 × 12 hours of cy­cling at a fairly leisurely pace with up to 12 hours of rest be­tween stages. A per­son who weighs 75 kg then burns about 600 kcal per hour cy­cling (and about 75 kcal/h at rest). It will thus be 600 × 12 = 7200 kcal cy­cling per day stage. It’s im­pos­si­ble for the body to ab­sorb the cor­re­spond­ing amount of nu­tri­tion while cy­cling, so one is on a lower in­take and the rest of the en­ergy comes from the body’s re­serves.

On the way out from the vil­lage Jokks­jaure 264 km into the course. The moun­tain Joks­gae­jsie rises up in the back­ground and cov­ers the higher Ryfjället be­hind.

A gen­eral rec­om­men­da­tion is to try to take in 30 – 60 grams (120 – 240 kcal) of car­bo­hy­drates per hour dur­ing cy­cling, if you have an iron stom­ach even more. More than 60 grams re­quires tech­ni­cal sup­ple­ments such as gels and sports drinks with two dif­fer­ent car­bo­hy­drate forms to max­i­mize ab­sorp­tion. As long as the body can ab­sorb the carbs, more is bet­ter, you can han­dle higher in­ten­sity for longer and re­cover faster af­ter­wards. The trend has thus gone to­wards ever greater carb in­take and today the elite can eat 90 – 120 grams, but they work at very high power out­put and in­ten­sity. If a recre­ational cy­clist at­tempts that level of con­sump­tion, a large part of the carbs will likely re­main in the stom­ach and in­testines in­stead of being ab­sorbed by the body, and cause stom­ach prob­lems a bit into the ride. As a be­gin­ner and recre­ational cy­clist, it’s more re­al­is­tic to stick to 30 - 60 grams. Since one works at a lower in­ten­sity and than the elite, the deficit will not nec­es­sar­ily be greater.

With lower in­ten­sity out on the course, the mar­gins in­crease. It’s eas­ier for the body to con­tinue work de­spite a deficit, that is use the body’s fat re­serves, and there is also less risk of stom­ach trou­bles when you eat while rid­ing. Any­one who in­tends to ride the en­tire course in one go near the top of their abil­ity will need to have good knowl­edge of which nu­tri­tional strat­egy is best for their body. Those who split the event into two days and take it bit more easy don’t need to be quite as con­cerned about op­ti­miz­ing their nu­tri­tional in­take. It also works bet­ter to mix in slower forms of en­ergy such as fat and pro­tein, so you can vary your diet more and eat a larger pro­por­tion of reg­u­lar food.

If you want a sporty nu­tri­tional plan, you have to focus more on main­tain­ing a steady sup­ply of car­bo­hy­drates through­out. Among recre­ational cy­clists, it’s com­mon that the rec­om­mended base level of 30 - 60 grams is still sig­nif­i­cantly higher than one is used to. You can fin­ish the event even with a low in­take, but if you are look­ing for a quick time, many will ben­e­fit from eat­ing more than usual.

At the top of a tough climb in the curve to­wards Storskog, 286 km into the course.

Gels are per­haps the most prac­ti­cal car­bo­hy­drate sup­ple­ment and the eas­i­est to dose. How­ever, due to the water con­tent, they can take up quite a lot of space in the pack­ing. Sports drinks (in pow­der form) is most ef­fi­cient in terms of space and weight, but as it’s linked to water it can be a bit trick­ier to man­age. Some can con­sume only gels and/or sports drinks for a whole day, but far from all. You can have prob­lems with your ap­petite if you don’t mix it up with other things. Gels and sports drinks are also ex­pen­sive for what they are (mal­todex­trin + fruc­tose + salt + fla­vor­ings), so if you use a lot it may be worth mak­ing your own. There are recipes to be found on­line for those in­ter­ested.

Re­gard­less of which strat­egy you choose, it’s im­por­tant to test your nu­tri­tion plan dur­ing train­ing so you know how the body will react. It may not be prac­ti­cal to carry out 12-​hour ses­sions dur­ing train­ing, but an oc­ca­sional 6-​8-hour ses­sion should give a pretty good feel for whether the plan will work.

Water access

Re­fill­ing of water bot­tles next to the road, prob­a­bly at an un­named smaller stream below Sleaber­get about 240 km into the course. There are plenty of streams to fill up water from. The larger ones that run under bridges are eas­i­est to spot in ad­vance, but often a bit tricky to get down to. Semi-​small streams that flow through larger road cul­verts are usu­ally the eas­i­est to use.

How much water you drink de­pends to a large ex­tent on how much you sweat, of course. On a cool day, as lit­tle as 300 ml per hour may be enough for some, and on a hot day, some may need more than one liter per hour (then you should also re­in­force with elec­trolyte sup­ple­ments). For this course, one liter of water on the bike is nor­mally enough. If the weather is hot or you are one of those who sweat a bit more, you may want 1.5 liters or more.

With a liter on the bike and half a liter con­sump­tion per hour, you need to fill up every two hours, or ap­prox­i­mately every 40 km. If you study the map, you will find plenty of small streams that cross under the road. The small­est go in cul­verts and some­times they are so small that they don’t flow, but more often the prob­lem is that you don’t see them from the road.

To make it sim­ple and re­li­able, let’s just count the ob­vi­ous water sources — streams big enough that the road has a bridge with rail­ings or at least clearly vis­i­ble from the bike, and lakes in places where the water’s edge is right next to the road and it’s easy to get down to it. For most of the course there is less than 20 km be­tween such places. How­ever, there are some sec­tions where the water is a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult to reach:

• 90 – 134 km (44 km) from Harrvikbäcken to Holmträskbäcken. You can ac­cess lake Skansnässjön at Sjöberg around 115 km by cy­cling down to the beach where boats are kept.
• 157 – 194 km (37 km) from Stensjöån to Stor-​Björkvattnet’s shore. Only minor streams, dif­fi­cult to see from the road.
• 299 – 328 km (29 km) from Girjesån at the out­let of Nedre Boksjön to the shore of Spar­manse­let. You ride near water in many places, but it’s usu­ally dif­fi­cult to get to the water’s edge.
• 366 – 403 km (37 km) from Nipen to Harrbäcken. No ob­vi­ous major stream to re­fill from, but you pass close to lake Volvosjön at 378 km.

It can thus be wise to top up the bot­tles even if you have plenty water left when you get to the last water source be­fore one of these sec­tions, but it’s not ab­solutely nec­es­sary, it will work out any­way. To get down to the water’s edge, you often have to go down a steep slope and/or walk on boul­ders, so choose cy­cling shoes with good grip.

In­side Hem­avan you can stop at Hem­avans Fjällcenter and re­fill at the water sta­tion, see the map for Hem­avans Fjällcenter & Camp­ing.