We were somewhere in the middle of the “Pig Swim,” a one-mileish swim during the ÖTILLÖ Swimrun World Championship, when I stopped swimming and sat up. Trista, swimming directly behind me, immediately bumped into me and popped up beside me with a completely puzzled look on her face.
Not exactly the obvious place to stop and admire the scenery.
But that was precisely why I stopped.
The Pig Swim gets its name from a Swedish expression for a job or task that is difficult enough that you simply have to roll up your sleeves, dig in and get it done. This swim has earned the name over the years, and on this particular day it was, as Trista would later describe it, “piggier than usual.” When the lead teams came through earlier in the race, the water had been wavy and choppy, but by the time we arrived the wind had built considerably. The swells were high, whitecaps were rolling across the water and every few seconds another wave seemed to slap us in the face.
As we sat there bobbing up and down in the Baltic, I looked at Trista and said, “Take it in.”
She laughed, one of those big Trista laughs, looked around at the ridiculous conditions and said, “I love it. I want to do these things in life with you.”
“Will you do life with me?” I asked.
We kissed right there in the middle of the Pig Swim, with waves crashing over us and probably a number of other teams wondering why these two idiots had stopped in one of the hardest swims of the day.
That moment probably sums up our World Championship better than anything else I could write. It was hard, ridiculous and beautiful all at the same time, and somehow we were having fun right in the middle of it. That is pretty much how Trista and I approach a lot of things. We do stupid things. Long things, hard things and adventures that probably make more sense to us than they do to other people. We have also found that we tend to enjoy them even more when we are surrounded by other like-minded stupid people.
ÖTILLÖ Worlds seemed like the perfect place for another one of our adventures.
We had both raced the World Championship before, but never together. In 2022, we crossed the archipelago with different partners and had very different experiences. I do not think either of us looked at this year’s race as an opportunity to recreate what we had done before. This was going to be something completely different. We were not chasing previous times or comparing this team to another team. We simply wanted to experience the archipelago together, race to the best of our ability on the day and have a great adventure while doing it.
For all the big adventures Trista and I have shared, we had never actually raced together. I had been trying to convince her to race with me for a very long time, and she had finally agreed. So, after years of talking about it, Team Purple Monsters was happening.
We arrived in Sweden several days before Worlds, partly to acclimate and partly because we were hosting two training sessions for other athletes racing on Monday. On Thursday, we took a group out to Utö, where the World Championship finishes, and covered the final five islands of the course. The idea was to give everyone a chance to feel the water temperature, experience the terrain, practice transitions and get some firsthand knowledge of what they would encounter late in the race.
On Friday, we hosted another swimrun in Sickla, which was far more convenient for athletes staying in Stockholm. We did multiple laps of a small loop that allowed for lots of transition practice while allowing athletes to do as little or as much as they wanted. We then piled into a local pizza place afterward for good food and a chance to chat with everyone.
Those days leading into Worlds are always one of my favorite parts of the experience. Athletes begin arriving from everywhere, the conversations become almost entirely about swimrun and for a few days normal life slowly disappears. By Sunday we had traveled out to Djurönäset, checked into the host hotel and attended the race briefing. At that point you are completely inside the swimrun bubble, surrounded by people who think spending an entire day running across islands and swimming through cold seas sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
These are our people.
Team USA at Djurönäset
Everyone has their vices, and one of ours happens to be Monster Energy drinks, specifically the purple sugar-free ones. Yes, I know they are terrible for you. Yes, I know they are probably full of things I should not be consuming. We like them anyway, which is why “Purple Monsters” seemed like the obvious team name.
I also happen to enjoy one first thing in the morning before a race. The caffeine tends to get things moving, and I mean that in more than one way. This became important on race morning when I discovered that someone had cleaned out the common refrigerator overnight and removed not only our Monsters, but also the overnight oats we had prepared for breakfast.
I was not pleased and neither was Trista.
I compensated at breakfast with several cups of coffee, hoping to accomplish one very specific pre-race objective, but nothing happened. By 4:15 a.m. we were boarding the ferry to Sandhamn with a collection of sleepy and anxious racers, and I tried again on the boat. Still nothing. At Sandhamn, I ran off the ferry for another attempt before the race start. Again, nothing.
Eventually I accepted that my body had apparently made its decision for me, and we headed toward the start line.
After the controlled run from the start to the beach, we entered the longest swim of the day. Another team spent part of it swimming all over Trista until she finally sat up and let them go, but otherwise it was a good first swim. When we climbed out of the water and onto the rocks at the other side, I looked over at her and she was smiling.
That smile told me a lot. I knew right then that we were going to have a good day.
As we worked our way around the first island, we started passing teams on the technical terrain. Both of us are comfortable moving over rocks, roots and rough ground, and I remember telling her, “This is where we can bank some time.” It was not about attacking the race early or forcing a pace. It was simply about recognizing the sections where we could use our strengths and move efficiently without costing ourselves later.
That became the rhythm of the day. We talked constantly, discussed what was coming next, adjusted things as we went and ran hard when it made sense. On the technical terrain, we moved well. When one of us needed to back off, we backed off. We ate, drank, swam, ran, solved little problems and laughed a lot. At times we were clearly racing, and at other times it felt like we were simply exploring the archipelago together.
We frolicked and adventured. Marcus and Trista style.
There were also a lot of bodily functions.
I peed more during this race than I can remember peeing during any other race, which I suppose means I did an exceptional job of hydrating beforehand. For those unfamiliar with swimrun, completely removing a wetsuit every time nature calls is not exactly practical, so I would stop for a moment, go down on one knee and let it rip down the leg of my suit.
At one point I was kneeling in a grassy area doing exactly that while Trista stood nearby. A group of three teams came upon us and Trista used it as an opportunity to be the jokester. She knew what it may look like from a distance. Me kneeling. Her standing over me. She excitedly started jumping up and down yelling, “YES!” Her plan worked, the group thought I was proposing to her and they started cheering.
“I WILL!” she continued.
The cheering got louder and more excited as they got closer.
Then she pointed at me and explained that I was actually just peeing.
I waved at everyone Forrest Gump style while the entire group laughed. At the time, neither of us had any idea that there would be a much more legitimate version of that moment later in the day.
Eventually, my failure to take care of business before the race caught up with me. I had to poop, and I had to poop badly.
I knew the Kymmendö aid station had decent bathrooms because my previous partner, Lars, had taken advantage of them when we raced together. We were only a few islands away, so I convinced myself I could hold it until then. As long as I was moving, everything seemed reasonably under control, so my solution was to keep moving and, naturally, to start moving faster. A few times Trista asked me to ease the pace.
“But I have to poo!” I would answer.
The stronger the urge became, the faster I wanted to run, which only made the conversation more ridiculous. Eventually Trista talked some sense into me and convinced me that sprinting several islands while desperately trying not to shit myself probably was not our best race strategy.
She helped me get the top of my wetsuit down to my waist and I headed into the woods looking for somewhere suitable. I quickly found what looked like the perfect setup, a fallen log sitting over a small depression in the ground. I pulled my suit the rest of the way down, sat on the log and shifted my weight onto it.
The log immediately collapsed.
I went backward, bare-assed, into the loamy hole underneath it with my wetsuit wrapped around my ankles. Getting back up was nearly impossible, especially considering the original problem had not gone away. I finally managed to scramble upright, found another log and discovered that one was rotten too. The third one finally held.
Afterward I looked around for something to clean myself with and realized that I was surrounded almost entirely by evergreen trees. With very few options available, I reluctantly removed my neoprene ARK Halo from my head and made a sacrifice. RIP Halo.
Once I was dressed and back on the trail, Trista and I continued toward Kymmendö. We eventually reached the aid station, ate everything we could get our hands on and even had our friend Daniel get a video of us playing on the swings. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, we were technically still competing in a World Championship.
Then came Ornö.
Anyone who has raced Worlds understands why Ornö has such a reputation. By the time you reach it, you have already been moving for hours, you are tired, hungry and starting to feel everything that came before. Then, after spending much of the day moving over beautiful technical trails, rocks and islands, you suddenly have a lot of pavement to run.
Most swimrunners hate pavement. We are no exception.
Trista eventually needed a bathroom stop of her own, and after what I had just gone through, I was certainly not going to argue. It was much better to take a few minutes and be comfortable than spend the next several miles fighting another problem.
By the time we reached Ornö church, the 6 p.m. cutoff still looked very manageable, even with the time we had lost earlier, but we also knew we needed to keep moving with purpose.
A few weeks before Worlds, Trista rolled her ankle badly and had been patiently nursing it back to health. The week leading into the race looked promising, but on the pavement across Ornö it started bothering her again. We decided to tether up and I pulled while we ran. Instead of thinking about the entire island, we broke it into smaller pieces. We would run for a while, take a very short walk when needed, then start running again.
There were periods when Trista became very quiet. I know her well enough to recognize what that means. She was hurting and she was digging deep.
I think that is one of the things people sometimes misunderstand about racing as a team. Helping a partner does not mean dragging someone through a race. It means figuring out how the two of you can keep moving forward together. At different points in a long race, one person may be stronger than the other. Sometimes you pull. Sometimes you adjust the pace. Sometimes you talk constantly, and sometimes you recognize that your partner simply needs to put her head down and work through something.
Trista was hurting, but she kept finding ways to move forward, and we kept solving whatever was in front of us. By the time we finally hit the single-track trail, we were both more than ready to leave that damn gravel road behind.
When we finally reached the end of Ornö with time to spare, both of us felt a huge sense of relief. Then we looked across the next swim and realized the conditions had become even worse than what we had encountered during the Pig Swim. A volunteer warned us that a powerful current was ripping across the channel and advised us to aim aggressively to the right.
We jumped in and started swimming at roughly a 45-degree angle against the flow.
About halfway across, I noticed something off to our left. A huge rainbow stretched across the sky above the archipelago.
So once again, I stopped swimming.
I sat up and pointed it out to Trista. She saw it and screamed. For a few seconds we just floated there, in the middle of another hard swim, looking at it before putting our faces back in the water and continuing toward the next island.
Those moments became some of my favorite parts of the entire race. No matter how difficult things became, we kept remembering to look around. It is easy during Worlds to become completely consumed with pace, cutoffs, nutrition, transitions and whatever hurts at that particular moment. Sometimes you have to remind yourself where you are.
We were in the Stockholm Archipelago, racing one of the coolest events in the world, and we were doing it together.
Take it in.
The final five islands are probably my favorite section of the entire course. Most of them are technical, with huge expanses of lava rock that you have to pick your way across while still trying to move quickly. Then there is Långbäling, which feels completely different, with flowing trail through evergreen forest and blueberry bushes. It is lush, beautiful and simply fun to run.
Only a few days earlier, we had been on those same islands showing other athletes what they would encounter late in the race. Now every one of them represented another step toward our own finish.
Eventually we reached the final swim. Like so many of the swims that day, it was hard, choppy and full of current, but this time we knew exactly what was waiting on the other side.
We climbed out onto Utö.
“We did it!” Trista said.
“We’re here!” I answered.
We were not technically finished yet, but at that point we knew we were going to be.
As we made our way toward the finish, we talked, laughed and started planning the most important remaining piece of race strategy, our finish-line antics. Trista and Amy are normally known for doing something ridiculous when they finish together, so there was a certain standard to maintain. We eventually settled on a piggyback ride.
At the bottom of the final hill, we saw friends waiting and cheering for us. After spending the entire day moving across the archipelago, seeing those familiar faces was incredible. We paused for a moment and I removed my swim buoy so it would not interfere with the planned piggyback maneuver.
Then we started climbing. We ran all the way up that fucking hill.
Trista and I have shared a lot of stupid adventures over the years. Long ones, crazy ones and more than a few that probably made other people question our judgment. But before this, we had never raced together.
This one immediately went near the top of the list.
We had hard moments, but we also laughed through an awful lot of them. We figured things out as they happened, used each other’s strengths and helped one another when help was needed. We crossed technical terrain, fought wind and current, managed a bad ankle and survived two particularly unfortunate bathroom incidents that cost me a perfectly good ARK Halo and Trista a wetsuit sleeve.
But what I will probably remember most are the moments when we stopped.
Stopping in the middle of a difficult swim to look at a rainbow. Stopping long enough to laugh at something stupid. Pausing on the occasional rock bald above the water just to take in the view. And stopping in the middle of the Pig Swim, with whitecaps breaking around us, simply because the whole scene was too good not to appreciate.
That was when Trista told me she wanted to keep doing these kinds of things in life with me, and I asked her if she would do life with me.
It was not something I had planned to say that morning. It was not rehearsed, and despite the jokes that preceded and followed, it certainly was not a fake proposal. It was just a moment that happened in exactly the kind of place where moments like that seem to happen for us, somewhere in the middle of doing something difficult and ridiculous together.
I had wanted Trista to race with me for a long time, and I am incredibly happy she finally did. Not because of a finishing time or where we placed, and not because of how this race compared with either of our previous trips across the archipelago.
I am happy because this one was ours.
We got to combine a sport we both love with the way we already tend to approach life. Find an adventure, surround ourselves with good people, expect that something will probably go wrong, solve problems as they come and remember to enjoy where we are along the way.
We do stupid things.
I hope we keep doing them together for a very long time.
I love you, girl. Let’s keep doing all the crazy shit.
For keeps.
Speedy Lizard 