Paul Rosenquist

Monday morning I jumped on the train with a huge bag with trainingclothing and my bike. At 9:00 Lassi picked me upp att Uppsala station for our roadtrip to Oslo.

A week of training with the Norwegian rowing team to be followed by the Nordic Championships at Årungen rowing stadium. Årungen is the national rowing coarse about 30km from Oslo. Surrounded by hilly farmlands and forests. The rowing federation has a huge chalet that houses rowers selected for the national team.

5 hours later with non stop Metallica’s St Anger spinning we arrived. Rigged our boats that arrived here directly from Linz and went out for a row. Olaf camps out att Årungen when he needs to get some serious training done. The next morning we had a tough interval training waiting. Two doubles four singles lined up ploughing up and down the track. Great stuff! Unfortunately I was not rowing well and didn’t feel strong. After trainging Olaf showed us around on a 45 minute bike ride through the countryside. Thank god some of the girls had a lunch waiting when we got in again. However the bike ride did me good. I took a nap and a few hours later it was back to work for a 18km row. Really nice to be laying beside an other boat with more or less similar speed during this….time flies.
After that Olaf wanted us in the car witing 10 minutes so we would make the ferry that would take us over to Horten. One does not argue with this farmer, so we ran through the shower and raced to the ferry. We were invited to a dinner at Olaf’s parents wich was nice. Also got to meet his little daughter…impressive.

At the otherside of the corn field from Olaf’s parents house lays Tufte gård. They had just totally renovated the farm house and I had to say…it was ready for MTV cribs! In the garden lay a perfectly tuned beach volley arena so, 10minutes after dinner it was time for a few hours of beach volley…surreal in the middle of the fores at a farm.
What a gang…check out the sunburns.. so sexy
The sand was actually from a beach volley worldcup…and it directly made me feel I was back on the beach in Scheveningen…and yep…my beach volley still sucks.

Today Lassi and I trained together as Olaf had a day of and did his duty as a fireman. Great weather and fun training. It went better than yesterday and the 16 250mtr pieces we did were tough but ok.



Lassie making sure I’n nott sneaking a metre in fron of hime before the start of a piece

Start of a piece…
Two more days of training and than a tough weekend with races. There seems to be 23 singles so plenty to do!

Ok, we just got internet here so I will update more often!

C ya!