THE GROUP RIDE LIVES!
RIDING IN SWEDEN, WHERE GOING OUT WITH MATES IS STILL ALLOWED
In some magical way, the gravel trend managed to find a way to explode here in Sweden too
“If you were to ride 10,000 kilometres of gravel roads every year in Sweden, it would take over three decades before you had to ride the same road twice,” my guide Anton Persson, from event organizer Abloc, assures me as we roll onto the 93 kilometre route of its recently held Gravel Challenge Bauerskogen event, just outside the city of Jönköping in southern Sweden. With a population density 12 times lower than the UK, and forestry having been a key part of the entire economy, this extensive use of a simpler road construction such as gravel is unsurprising.
But despite this wealth of gravel, where you are often in more danger of crashing into a badger than a car, it could never be taken for granted that the Swedish cycling community would start seeing the gravel in their backyard as ‘epic’. There was a history of mixed feelings about this very material, that any hype would have to cut through before the actual ‘epicness’ would be experienced – and before people would start calling their cyclocross bikes gravel bikes.
On the one hand there were the road riders for whom gravel has almost been a thing of fear. The reason being that truckload after truckload of a particularly nasty type of gravel is strewn across urban areas during winter – it’s almost a weaponised form of crushed rock. As if it was the result of a secret conspiracy with tyre manufacturers who want to up their sales of delicate road tyres.
Mountain bike marathon riders on the other hand – the second largest group of cyclists in Sweden – have been riding these gravel roads for many years. To this group, however, gravel is yawn-inducing, a necessary evil to take you from one stretch of singletrack to the next.
Despite all this, in some magical way, the gravel trend managed to find a way to explode here in Sweden. And in an instant, we went from being a country where it often felt like we were imitating the sport we saw on Eurosport at the Tour de France, to a land filled to the brim with pure cycling treasure. So, gravel events have exploded... even if the pandemic has largely brought it to a halt again. The one that got away
One of very few events that actually took place this spring was the one whose route we are riding today, which Anton and his colleagues at Abloc hosted at the end of March. Gravel Challenge Bauerskogen took place in a way that is an illustrative example of the Swedish coronavirus strategy: fewer participants than intended,
smaller groups, coffee outside instead of cramming a bunch of people into a café - but let the show go on. Sort of.
While most cycling events have been postponed here, people still train together and can go on group rides. We are encouraged, but not dictated, to maintain social distancing when possible, especially to protect elderly people and high-risk groups. But lockdown appears to have been deemed an unsustainable solution, when nothing short of the much-discussed herd immunity (a term new to us all) can truly stop the spread. A wise strategy or not, only time (and statistics) will tell.
The 93 kilometres of riding that await us during today’s route is a mix of smooth and lesssmooth gravel, that is tied together by narrow and undulating paved sections that wind their way through the landscape. We start at the hostelry and conference centre BauerGården, which just like Abloc’s gravel event is named after the artist John Bauer, who famously spent a lot of time out in the deep forests common to the area. It was there he was inspired to illustrate the Swedish fairytale book AmongGnomesand Trolls at the beginning of the 20th century.
It does not take long for me to start thinking that this ride might turn out to be a little tougher than I had envisioned when Anton told me about the length of the ride. The road suddenly seems to
The road suddenly goes in a direction more or less unheard of where I live – up!
go in a direction more or less unheard of where I live, two hours south of here near the city of Växjö – up! My bike has gearing tuned for those endless flat and dense spruce forests back home, where you can usually hear farther than you can see. But 46-28t as my easiest gear does not quite seem appropriate up here, and I enviously glance over at Anton’s well-chosen gear setup.
“Only 1500 metres left of climbing”, he says enthusiastically. “It’s going to be a great day!”
Excuse me? We officially do not have ‘climbs’ in Sweden, and my usual rides of the same length back home would have less than a third of this elevation. But when we later exit the forest and get out into the open agricultural landscape closer to lake Vättern, it will be obvious that we are in a region far hillier than most in this country. Most of the hills are rather short though, so I manage to grind myself up by waking up some lesser-used, fast-twitch fibres and tempting them to get to work with some refined breakfast.
After going up, one inevitably must go down, and soon we hit the first gravel descent. At first it seems like Anton’s brakes are not working, despite them being God’s hydraulic gift to mankind. But I soon realise that he, unlike me, simply chooses not to use them, while I trail behind unaccustomed to the idea of my gravel bike pointing downwards. I guess my ancient mechanical discs force me to overcompensate
“Even by international standards this must be considered a climb: two kilometres of gravel through fields of oak that let us gain 140 meters of elevation in one go”