Welcome to episode forty-nine of the Low Tide Boyz - A Swimrun Podcast!

In this week’s episode, we have a long-time friend of the show who we were lucky enough to meet in Catalina: Helen Wikmar. She was a previous guest way back on Episode 9 of the podcast and then again on our ÖTILLÖ Engadin Course Preview episode. It was great to have her back on the show to talk about her story and how she’s perpetually building community in her hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden. 

More on this later in the show.

Adventure Time!

With COVID restrictions about to be reinstituted in Northern California, we are a bit worried that state parks will be officially “closed.” Chris has come up with a rough map for the first test exploration at Lake Sonoma and hopefully, we will be able to get out there and see what happens.

Shoutouts

This week we’re shouting out Joseph Dickinson. He’s been a listener of the show for a while and he’s always been great about giving us feedback which we really appreciate. We hope to see you out a race in 2021.

This Week in Swimrun (Powered by Raceid.com)

We didn’t hear about any new events taking place this past week other than another cold day at the Hellas Frostbite Swimrun. It doesn’t look like it was any warmer this week.

In other news, if you’re interested in checking out Finland and score some ÖTILLÖ merit points in the process, the Folkhälsan Swimrun just opened registration (on Raceid.com) for next year’s event to be held on September 18, 2021. The race looks dope with three distances available and team and solo categories for those interested in that sort of thing.

Our friends Fanny and Desirée’s Champions Christmas Challenge is on its second week. The social media photo theme for this week is animals so post up your workout pics in your best leopard print tights, bunny ears, butterfly wings, or whatever to have a chance to win some awesome prizes.

Updates

Our latest episode of Gear Talk where we chat with the ladies from The Swimrun Labs about the essentials for cold open water swimming is out now! We recommend checking it out while sipping on some hot tea or cocoa.

No other big updates this week, just a programming alert. We will be taking a week off from the show (we mean it this time!) the last week in December and will be back with our normal schedule programming in 2021. We may throw in some bonus content that week but that’s TBD.

This Week’s Interview

It was great to get to chat with Helen Wikmar to hear her story. For those who don’t know who she is, Helen is a mother of 3, Head of Operations at Ark Sports, and just happens to be a bad ass Swimrunner and one of the sport’s best ambassadors. She’s also super cool so there’s that.

In this interview we chatted with her about her athletic origin story after starting a family, how she met and teamed up with her racing partner Isabella Hedberg, and how she builds community wherever she goes. This was a fun one and we think that you will enjoy this conversation.

You can (and should) follow Helen on Instagram.

That’s it for this week’s show. If you are enjoying the Löw Tide Böyz, please be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast player and leave us a five-star review. You can find us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Podcast. You can also follow our meme page on Instagram. Email us at [email protected] with any feedback and/or suggestions. Finally, you can support us on Patreon…if you feel so inclined.