Mats Skott, Co-Founder Ötillö

Welcome to episode sixteen of the Low Tide Boyz, a Swimrun Podcast!

On this week’s show we have Mats Skott, co-founder of Ötillö. NBD!

Real talk: if you would have asked us when we started this show in January that we’d be interviewing anyone at Ötillö, let alone one of the founders, we would have lol’d. Yet, here we are! More on our most journalistic interview later in the show.

We’re still under a shelter at home order in California and trying to balance work, family and training. We’ve been at it for over a month at this point and we’re cautiously optimistic that we’ll be able to jump back in the pool soon. As usual, we encourage everyone to listen to the medical and science experts about best practices and hopefully we will be past this and back to racing soon. Until then, stay safe everyone!

For shout outs this week we wanted to let everyone know about Riding Easy Records. Based in Hermosa Beach California, this independent record label that focuses on metal and hard rock were cool enough to let us use one of their songs for our intro and outro music. While their music might not be for everyone’s taste, we think that we can all agree that this is a great time to support local businesses and we thank the crew over there for letting us one of their tracks for the show.

Now for this week’s interview. We are lucky to have Mats Skott, co-founder of Ötillö and basically the co-pioneer with Michael Lemmel of a new worldwide sport.

Mats was born and raised in Stockholm, Sweden. His sports growing up were Cross-country skiing and orienteering on a national level. In 1995, he started racing in Adventure Races around the world until 2008. His best results being a second place finish in the World Championship 2004.

In, 2006 Michael Lemmel and Mats started Ötillö. Neither of them were swimmers but when they heard about the idea from the “original four” and how to move in nature they loved it and they were tasked with organizing the first Swimrun race and named it ÖTILLÖ which means “island to island” in Swedish.

We chatted with Mats about his athletic roots and how he eventually discovered adventure racing in 1995. These races are between 300-1000 kilometers long and you race with a mixed gender team of 4 or 5 people and moving as a team through nature non-stop to the finish line. These races includes running, hiking, kayaking, mountain biking, horseback riding and rock climbing. To make it even better, a team would get the map to follow only 2 days before the race start and teams would only have a general idea of what disciplines to train leading up to the event. These events could be 4-6 days long.

We, of course, asked Mats about his version of the origin story of Ötillö and how Michael told him about the crazy bet and the “race” that took 2 days for the Original 4. (Now the race champions finish the race in around 8 hours.) Both Michael and Mats fell in love with the idea of how to move in nature. We also chatted about the first year of Ötillö and how their background in Adventure Racing really informed how they set up the race and shared some war stories about the early years and how they weren’t afraid to make changes to help grow the sport.

Mats is really happy and proud how the sport has grown and folks are finding a way to move in nature. There was also a tactical decision to have the name “swimrun” which was invented by Erika Rosenbaum be free (read: not trademark) so that the sport could grow freely. This decision turned out to be the best way to make it a worldwide sport and show a new way to move through nature.

We also chatted with Mats about his view of how the inaugural Ötillö Catalina went in their view. He was super happy with the race to say the least. It was great to put on a race in Two Harbors because it made the race feel like personal while having everything be as professional as possible. Mats favorite part is really about designing a great course that takes advantage of the challenges that nature gives you to make a unique race experience. Mats background in orienteering helps inform his ability to make the courses amazing. They may make some changes to course for the 2020 edition. Those changes will be announced soon!

Fast forward to the current state of affairs in the world. Mats talked about how Ötillö has worked hard with their team to figure how to move forward with COVID-19 and the stress of trying to make good decisions so that Ötillö can survive this period and be able to put on races once we are passed this pandemic. Listeners can read Ötillö’s updated event policies and new 2020 race schedule here. Some of the major changes to the 2020 race schedule are Isle of Scilly and 1000 Lakes events had to be cancelled. Mats is planning (and hoping) that these events returns in 2021. The major adjustment for teams that are trying to qualify for the 2020 Ötillö World Championship race is that the World Series race Engadin in Switzerland (which was postponed for three weeks to July 25-26) will now have 24 qualifying slots for the championship race.

In closing, we chatted about hoping that folks can get out to train for swimrun and enjoy nature again and then hopefully race in the future. Mats, for his part, is using this time to try to improve their existing events in every way that they can to move the sport forward once we are part the pandemic.

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. You can find us on Apple Podcast, Spotify and Google Podcast. You can also follow our meme page on Instagram and on Twitter. Email us at lowtideboyz@gmail.com with any feedback, suggestions and/or meme suggestions. Finally, you can also support us on Patreon…if you feel so inclined.