Winter in Stockholm

Well I've been living in Stockholm for about 2 months now, and I have just started running again after I injured my calf at Smålandskavlen. I have pretty much been living as a full-time athlete, training twice every day, and only working a small amount, mostly drawing a couple of maps for IFK Lidingö and one for a British club. I have been going to the physio every week, doing plenty of gym work, and cycling loads. I have done some aquajogging for the first time, with Fredrik Löwegren, the new IFK Lidingö elite men's coach.

There hasn't really been any snow yet, and last week it was beautiful and sunny (although about -2 degrees). Now it is a littlw bit colder and more overcast.

Club winter training has now started in earnest, with indoor track intervals on a Tuesday, circuits on a Wednesday, night-o on Thursday, tech training most Saturdays and a long run on Sunday. We also have dance classes on a Monday night and hopefully will be playing some football/bandy too.

Saturday I went for a long run on a map with Emil Lauri and Petter Haraldson. Sunday I cycled to a forest and did a nice training session -

Last week was the Stockholm Film Festival, so I took advantage of the fact that I had plenty of spare time and went to see quite a few films.

Here is the training I did today.

A few weeks ago we had the GB squad Inaugaural weekend, a celebration of 2007 and looking forward to 2008. I couldn't do any running with the other guys in the Peak District, but I went out on the bike for some long rides each day. I won the prize for 'Most Improved Orienteer', and Tessa won the junior equivalent, which was nice.

The next few weeks I'm just going to get back into running, continue training hard and finish off a couple of maps. We have a weekend away in the middle of December, and then I am going back to UK for a couple of weeks over Christmas.

In terms of living in Sweden, I have had quite a protracted battle to get a personnumber, sign up for Swedish lessons, register for Social Security, get an ID card, get a bank account etc... and I am glad to say that I think I have almost sorted everything out now.

I am writing on my Attackpoint training log every day.