Few people outside Scandinavia know what the Vätternrundan is, but to us here in Sweden it's the cycling event of the year. Forget about those pathetic things they stage in Italy and France. They may be long and hard and have lots of spectators, but nobody actually participates in them (well, so few that it's practically nobody). "Rundan" ("The Round" - "There Is Only One, You Know") accepts a maximum of 16000 (sixteen thousand) entries and 13000 typically show up to start. Of those, 10000+ finish the 300 km ride which circumnavigates the lake Vättern (Sweden's second-largest) with start and finish in Motala.

You have people of all ages and all degrees of training. Some have participated in this event every year for a decade. Others are there for the first time. Some are in excellent physical shape. Others are not.

It's not a race. There's no winner, except yourself. You get to know how long you took to complete the ride, but nobody sorts the list so you never know how the others did. You race yourself and possibly your buddies. The first time, the challenge is to prove that you can complete a ride like this. After that you just want to improve your time.

It's open to all ages and both sexes, though men tend to dominate. The statistics are roughly 1:10 (1426 vs. 13761 of the entrants who had registred by May).

This year, three lunatics showed up on recumbents. They were Richard Freytag from Washington DC, Charles Clinton from Seattle WA and yours truly, Torsten Lif from Stockholm, Sweden. We'd toured together from Norway on our 'bents and had staged our tour so that we'd arrived at Motala a day before the Rundan. (I've written a separate article about the touring part.) We were all in pretty good shape (obviously since we'd made it there, riding 1100 km in 13 days). I was suffering from what I've since had diagnosed as a ruptured meniscus, but it only hurt when walking and didn't impede my cycling other than through a side-effect of an anti-inflammatory medicine I was taking which acted as a diuretic...

The way the start of the Rundan works is that you're sent off in groups of 50 at a time, by starting numbers. You get your number when you send in your entry form. Some people go to great lengths to get "good" numbers by calculating the best date to send in their entries. Our time (0:56 AM) wasn't one of the most popular, since it meant that we had to ride two hours in darkness, but it worked out well for us.

The entire starting procedure was very smooth. Cyclists gathered in front of a cordoned-off area and every two minutes a group would take off. As soon as they'd gone, the people waiting behind them moved forward to prepare for their start and those outside whose starting numbers were about to come up went in past the officials who checked that you had a helmet and that you were street legal, i.e. complying with the Swedish road ordnance's regulations about lights and reflectors.

The start was paced by a motorcycle which rode ahead of us at a low speed through the city of Motala until we hit the road at the city limits. That's the last Richard and I saw of Charles until we got back next day. As soon as the motorcycle let us go, he took off and vanished in the dark. That guy can move!

Richard and I rode together, taking it easy and (mostly) avoiding the temptation to get sucked into some paceline that passed us. During those hours until dawn we must have been passed by several thousand cyclists. I'll get back to this shortly.

Riding in the dark was interesting. In the beginning we rode through wooded areas and didn't see far ahead but after about an hour we got into farmlands and could see the taillights ahead of us like a string of red pearls winding off towards the horizon. Around 3 AM the sun started making itself seen well enough that we could turn our lights off. After a while we arrived at the first depot, Hästholmen (43 km).

Quick snack of bread and blueberry soup (is this excellent carbo fuel unknown outside Scandinavia?), then we went on. We recognized several groups of people passing us as having passed us before. Apparently, they were stopping longer at the depots than we were. There was water on the road and it had obviously rained earlier but we were spared that. The ride past the depot at Gyllene Uttern (85 km) on to Jönköping (115 km) at the southern end of the lake went uneventfully.

At Jönköping we got fed more "substantial" food in the guise of a plate of hot dogs on mashed potato. Plus the bread and blueberry soup again.

Pulling out of Jönköping, I noticed that my front derailleur was acting strangely. A quick examination showed that the cable was breaking and was down to just two strands! I managed to keep it from breaking further (which would have left me stuck in the "granny" chainring) until the next depot. Fortunately, this was the section with the hills leading up to Fagerhult (144 km) so I did most of my riding in the smallest chainring and didn't need to shift much.

At this point, I got separated from Richard because I was stopping frequently to remove outer clothes and fiddle with the bike. I caught up with him at the depot but he was getting cold and didn't fancy waiting for me while I first queued to get a new derailleur cable and then fixed the derailleur and ate. So he took off. I followed not too far behind but didn't see him again until the next depot, Hjo (182 km).

By now I'd had the differences between upright and recumbent bicycles clearly shown to me. On the downhills I'd solo ride faster than some pacelines. On the flats I'd keep up with them. On the climbs they'd drop me. This was a clear pattern. Note that I'm not talking about individual upright riders here. Whenever I saw a single person on an upright, I was passing him/her. But very few do a ride like that alone. Virtually everybody would find some group of others and latch on to them, "sucking wheel". I too could do this. Occasionally I'd sneak up behind some cluster of uprighters and have a few easy minutes behind them. Unfortunately, their tempo and mine didn't match. As soon as we got to a hill I'd lose them. Uphills they'd pull ahead of me. Downhills I'd either have to brake to not pass them, or I'd sweep past the lot of them with very little effort. (We're not talking about the "big guys" here, just ordinary cyclists in shape comparable to my own. You find all sorts in a ride like this.)

At Hjo I met up with Richard again and after "lunch" of Lasagna and more carbo we rode together. It was nice to ride with somebody who had the sime kind of pace as myself. Unfortunately, two don't make much of a paceline. As we pulled into the next depot, Karlsborg (216 km) it had started to rain.

Richard and I stayed together in the rain and skipped the depot at Boviken (238 km) but at the next one, Åviken (258 km) I had to stop and change some of my wet clothes. I had dry socks and gloves together with a sweater in my pack and the cold was getting to me so I made a pit stop while Richard went on. Dry socks in wet shoes wouldn't have helped much but with plastic bags over the socks it worked fine. A half-hour later I'd refuelled and got myself back on the road and I skipped the last depot (Medevi, 282 km) and rode on to the finish at Motala in a total time of 16 hours and 54 minutes.

16.54, you say? That's not very good, is it? No. Most of my upright friends aim for much lower times than that and if you want to talk about it with pride you should try to stay down in the single-digit hours. But they also ride virtually the entire event in some kind of paceline or other group, which I've already explained didn't work out very well for us. Richard, by the way, finished a half-hour ahead of me and Charles stormed the finish line at 12.00'01 (that single second bugs him since he'd paced himself for 12 hours).

So what's the verdict? Well, it depends on how you look at it. A rider like Charles could probably have aspired to go under 10 hours if he'd gone on an upright (except that he couldn't since he suffers from CTS and aero bars aren't allowed on the Rundan). For my personal part, I doubt that I could have completed it at all on an upright. If I had, it would probably have been at the expense of lots of pain in my backside and several weeks before any sensation returned to my right hand, that nerve-pinch being the chief reason why I got a recumbent. So it's not like the head-firsters had anything to "fear" from us 'bentists. But what's not yet been resolved is how a paceline of 10+ recumbents would have fared (faired :-). The aerodynamic advantage of the recumbent position alone is not all that great and it's not as big as what you get by drafting. But even an LWB 'bent like mine could comfortably draft others (uprights and recumbent) and the subjective relief I got from that was as great as any I've experienced on my old upright.

Any recumbent riders out there who'd like to try it another year? It's not that hard if you're in reasonable shape and with a comfortable seat it doesn't matter if you don't ride as fast as the uprighters because when you finish you'll still be the one who stays on your bike to rest while they hop around trying to get circulation back into their gluteus maximus. :-) Maybe some day we can get that recumbent paceline rolling!