Somewhere near Fort Collins, a 25-year veteran of triathlons and bike races spent an October Sunday running in a wetsuit, swimming in trail shoes, and fishing a plastic paddle out of a bush. Then he sat down and pulled cactus spines out of his backside. He had, by his own account, a brilliant time.
The occasion was the ÖtillÖ Swimrun at Horsetooth Reservoir on October 4 — the latest stop for a race format that started in Sweden and is now quietly building a following in the US. If you haven't heard of swimrun, picture a triathlon with the bike deleted and the swim and run legs chopped into alternating chunks along a point-to-point course. The sprint version in Colorado packed five swims and six runs into about 12 miles of lake and trail; the writer finished in just under three hours without ever actually sprinting.
The twist that makes swimrun different: you carry everything with you the whole way. Shoes stay on for the swims, the wetsuit stays on for the runs, and your pull buoy and hand paddles ride along too — ideally strapped to your waist rather than bouncing off your rear end or disappearing into shrubbery, as this first-timer discovered. Even experienced racers spend the day managing gear built for the wrong activity, which is half the comedy.
ÖtillÖ — Swedish for "island to island" — is the sport's flagship brand, and its world championship near Stockholm remains a monster: 38 miles of running and 5.7 miles of swimming, raced in teams of two, often taking more than ten hours. Americans don't need to fly to Europe anymore. In 2023, ÖtillÖ bought the US Odyssey series, co-founded by Lars Finanger and the late Jeffrey Cole, who launched the first American race off Maine's coast in 2015. The former Odyssey events now include races on Orcas Island in Washington, in Cedarville, Michigan, in Austin, Texas, and on California's Catalina Island, with some pulling more than 400 participants. Longer World Series races award qualifying points for Stockholm; shorter sprints exist purely for newcomers, with solo categories and a start-line atmosphere compared to a boozy bike parade.
Why should a traveller care? Because this is an endurance event you can genuinely show up to without a season of obsessive training. The prevailing advice from the race's co-founder was simply to have fun, and the writer's biggest takeaway was that imperfection is baked in — you will swallow water, drop things, stumble into a pricklypear. It's adventure racing with the self-seriousness stripped out, set in places worth a trip in their own right, from a Colorado reservoir to the Maine coast to an island off Stockholm. If your holidays have drifted toward a triathlon-shaped rut, swimrun might be the reset.
Credit: Outside Online
