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Alexander Tanti: Michael, fantastic to have you as part of the series. We met a few years ago during an inspirational talk that you gave at the triathlon show in London. I think it was 2017 or 2018, and you made a huge impact and impression. It was fantastic to touch base again at the Ultra Swim 33.3 in Montenegro, and I think you have incredible knowledge and learnings to share with the community of organizers. So why don’t you start by giving me a little bit of your background? What led you to start organizing swimrun events?

Michael Lemmel: Thank you very much. And I feel honored to be part of this. Hopefully, I won’t leave you disappointed! I think it goes back a long way. Mats, my partner, and I used to take part in adventure racing together. We started in 1995 and raced until 2008, and towards the end of our adventure racing career, we started looking for something that could become our legacy. So we started looking at getting a big Adventure Race Across the whole Arctic Circle from the Norwegian Coast to the Swedish Coast.

Alexander Tanti: Okay.

Michael Lemmel: At the same time, we were also involved in a few TV Productions in Sweden. One day, I met somebody while I picked up my car from the garage where it was fixed, and the owner of that garage actually came up to me and said, “You’re that guy who did the TV show that was just recently on Swedish TV”. And I said, yes, I am, and he said I have some friends who have made a bet, and they did this crazy adventure thing in the archipelago outside of Stockholm. (There are 30,000 Islands in the archipelago outside of Stockholm).

He asked me if I could make something commercial out of it. I wasn’t really interested. But since he had just fixed my car, I asked him, out of courtesy, what it was, and he said they ran and swam from the island of Utö to the island of Sandhamn. Wow, it’s like, my God, that’s a big distance. He said yeah, absolutely, 70/80km, something like that. I wondered if it was even possible, and he said yeah, they did it. They’ve done it twice, and I said It sounds pretty wild. I then asked him if he could help arrange a meeting with them, and so a couple of weeks later, Mats and I met them and we had a discussion. They actually told us that they had made a bet, and the bet was that the last pair to finish had to pay for drinks for a full night in the bar and the hotel.

The first year, they did it and finished on the island of Sandhamn, a small island near the outer archipelago where there’s a big sailing community. The hotel was completely booked out due to a sailing event, so they couldn’t consummate their bet, but they managed to complete it the year after. Apparently, that was the end of it for them, and when I met them with Mats, my partner, a year and a half later, they no longer had anything more to do with it. We looked at maps, and we said that this sounds really interesting. Let’s try it. So we scrapped our plan to make this Adventure Race along the whole Arctic Circle and thought it sounded so unique to try to run on the islands and swim between the islands and make the distance. So let’s really see if we can make something out of that.

For us, it was a way of moving through nature. From adventure racing, you learn that you don’t have any obstacles. You just find a way to move past them. It was just finding a way of getting into flow and moving through nature in a seamless manner. We didn’t think of it as swimming or running. It was just a way of moving.

We met those guys in the early summer of 2006. We went to the island of Sandhamn and just started running and swimming to see where we ended up. I certainly was not a swimmer, nor was Mats or any of the others. We just like to move in nature. And we managed to go, I think, almost three-quarters of the distance by the end of the day, and we said, yeah, let’s try to do this.

We also decided that we would call the event ÖTILLÖ, which means Island to Island. The purpose of that name was to describe literally what we were doing. We also had a discussion about the potential difficulty in using that name as we planned to eventually try to attract international participants (ÖTILLÖ is not the easiest name to pronounce). We rationalised it by using Häagen-Dazs as a reference because an ad agency invented the name to symbolize Scandinavia, i.e. pureness, cleanliness and so on, and we said we would utilize the same concept. Also, if you have difficulty pronouncing something or remembering how something is pronounced, it tends to stick in your brain, too. So, from the beginning, it was our plan to keep it that way. And we also decided that we would put the event on as soon as possible after the summer, in September. It was too dangerous to have people running and swimming, especially swimming, during the summer when there’s a lot of boating in the archipelago. So we agreed to do it while the water was still manageable, but when there was less traffic in the water. We went with the first Sunday in September, which is now changed to the first Monday, but that was our original plan, and the first year, we had nine teams of two.

The reason why we had teams of pairs was not only because of the safety issue. It was also the fact that when you do something together with somebody else, you become dependent on that person and that person becomes dependent on you. And the experience becomes much more than a race. It becomes an emotional experience because you create this bond with somebody else, and the whole experience becomes so much more than just time and position placing. It was an integral part of the event, and I think one of the reasons why it really took off was because you experienced this together with somebody else.

Alexander Tanti: I get the feeling that there may be a personal story behind the importance of doing it in pairs. You did mention that you have a background in adventure racing. Did you have any experiences during any of those events where you felt that doing it with somebody else amplified the experience?

Michael Lemmel: I mean, I think I’d done close to 70 Adventure Races by that time, and in adventure racing, you race as a team. And you’re completely dependent on that team. And in the team, there has to be somebody from the opposite sex as well. After six years of living in that world, it was the only way for us, and I still think that it really makes everything so much bigger. I know that there are a lot of achievements that we would not have completed if we had been on our own. It would have been much easier to quit. Because of that bond, it really is one plus one becomes three. You become stronger both physically and mentally as a team, and the bond that we create with everyone we race with will never go away. That’s not just the bond you create with your pair, but also with the people we raced against. We all experience the same hardship and share that hardship physically and mentally for several days.

Alexander Tanti: One common denominator that I’ve noticed among some of the world’s best organizers who create unforgettable experiences for their participants is that they have a very strong “Why”. This is usually completely unrelated to the commercial aspect of the business. What is yours?

Michael Lemmel: You’re right, and I think that “why” is so important because if you can’t say what it is then maybe you should start thinking. Creating and organising endurance races, or races of any kind, and trying to create a commercial platform that you can then grow takes a lot of time, and I don’t think you can measure that time with money. So you have to have a serious “why” for doing it. For both Mats and I, the big “Why” from the beginning was to make something possible for people that they would not ordinarily be able to do on their own.

We created a race course (the ÖTILLÖ original race course, which is where the World Championship Finals are now held), which is 75km throughout the Stockholm archipelago, with a little over 60km of difficult trail running and 10km of swimming between the islands. It’s something that most people would not do without it being organized with some sort of a safety net. And we always said that we wanted to make people experience something outside of their regular life. We all live in this little box, and when you step out of that box, then a lot of really interesting things start to happen both on a personal level but also in terms of your mind expanding, I would say. So that was our big why.

From the beginning, we also wanted people to understand and feel the same thing that we emotionally felt when you just flow seamlessly through nature. It took a couple of years before the participants realised that they should just run and swim and not run to the water’s edge, take the gear off, put it on something, pull it across and then start running again. In the beginning, people wanted to keep their feet and shoes dry, and then after a while, all of a sudden, people realised that the only way that you could manage this race was if you just ran and got into the water and started swimming and then you just kept on going. That’s how Swimrun evolved in the beginning.

2012 was the first year when there were other races in Sweden that were similar, so I mean for many years it was just us out there, and it wasn’t anything but just one, as people called it, a crazy race.

Alexander Tanti: So I’m correct in saying that you didn’t dictate or tell people, “You should do it this way”. Was it organically developed by the participants?

Michael Lemmel: After the second year, we were like, why are people not just running and swimming? And I think we started talking to people about it, and some people started, and then it evolved, and it’s really cool to see how something evolves from something quite weird. I mean, in the first year, we didn’t have any rules. It was just you have to get from this place to that. We had one rule, that everybody had to wear a life jacket. So people wore a life jacket under some sort of a wetsuit, a thin life jacket. And that’s because we had no swimming background, and then people had boogie boards that they were towing, and it was just so strange, and the first year the winning team actually came out of the hotel just before the start with two inflated air mattresses. And we’re like, f***. We never thought about that. That first rule was so that the race did not evolve into something where a bunch of people just laid on air mattresses and paddled down the archipelago. We wanted people in the water, and then we just limited that to a point where only a pull buoy was used to keep your feet up because the weight of the shoes screwed up your horizontal position in the water. So, the pull buoy made you swim more horizontally.

But it was really cool to experience the evolution of the event over time. In the beginning, we had one or two or three teams that managed to finish. And then all of a sudden, 30–40 teams managed to finish, and it was like, we just stepped up. And since then, there have been all these series of steps of evolution. I think we were quite savvy from the beginning of building a communication plan, sticking to a set of very strong values and maintaining a consistency of communication across all channels. When we started was just before the digital social world came, and then it was first Facebook and then Instagram and so on as that evolved. This created new ways of reaching new people, and we’ve always been pretty good at communicating and sticking to a story from the very beginning.

Alexander Tanti: You do have some background in marketing if I’m not mistaken?

Michael Lemmel: Self-taught, I would say, as when we started adventure racing in 1995, we quickly realized that to generate sponsorship income, we had to do something more than try to promise results or media exposure because that was something that we couldn’t always deliver. So we started building activities for the companies that we worked with, and that then became marketing campaigns, and It evolved into a way of generating income. We became a sports marketing business that was small but quite successful. Very early on, we talked very much about emotional marketing. We wanted to connect people’s feelings with brands, and that’s precisely what we did. We created a link between your emotions and your experience.

Alexander Tanti: Yeah, and I suspect that this may have played a huge role in the success of the series. I speak to a lot of organizers who feel that by just putting on a good event and relying on word of mouth, maybe the odd Facebook ad here and there a few months before the event, is enough in terms of marketing. But from your experience, what would you advise organizers looking to incorporate marketing principles in communicating or advertising their events? Is there a specific recipe that you have found that works or at least touches people in a certain way?

Michael Lemmel: I think every event has a story, and I think you need to understand what that story is, and then you need to storytell along those lines. And I think you need to do it ALL.THE.TIME.

And I think that a lot of people don’t realize that their best asset is the actual participant, and every participant has a story of why they are there. I think those stories become really interesting when you go below the layer of race bib, distance and result. I think what becomes interesting are the stories behind it. And if you can then connect people emotionally with your brand or with your race, then you start building a community. And that community is your best marketing tool because if you have 10 people speaking about your event who have participated in the event, it gives you a lot more credibility than if you, as the organizer are the only ones speaking about the event.

Also, from the beginning, we decided that we would have great photographers at the event who made the images available to the racers for free. That has been a huge success with people being able to communicate with great images, especially images that we felt explain what the event was so that really made it easier for us to reach out to new audiences.

Alexander Tanti: I think that’s a great learning and insight not just for race organization, I think it’s a great learning for any business, and to be honest is something that I will look to apply more often and with more intent. But, going back to the first race in 2006, was having just nine teams of two intentional or was that the most people that you could convince to join?

Michael Lemmel: The second year was actually more interesting because we had eight teams signed up the Night Before the Race. The race was on a Sunday, and then on Saturday, we went into the bar at Utö. So it was Saturday night, and people were happy, and we went up to a bunch of people and said, please, can you come to the start tomorrow? We’ll provide you with a wetsuit. because we just wanted people to start, and that meant that we had 13 teams in year two on the start line. So it looked like the event actually was growing.

In the beginning, we did whatever we could to get it going. Mats and I did some events for a big Swedish international company, and part of it was in the US where we got in contact with some Navy Seals and we asked them if they could provide a team for the event, so we had a team that came for our year three. But then they also came in year 4 and year 5. That created a lot of media hype in Sweden, with US Navy Seals coming. It was interesting in the beginning. We had quite a few Swedish military teams that participated, so there was just sort of juxtapositioning, and we managed to get that going quite well, and it also gave us an international spread. That was great.

Alexander Tanti: Yeah, but I guess something must have happened in that first event in 2006 that gave you the conviction that you’re onto something here because, from the sounds of it, it was a bit of a struggle and took a few years to grow the event substantially. What gave you the conviction and confidence to keep going?

Michael Lemmel: I think in life, hardly anything takes off from the start. We had a strong vision for where this could go, and we were already convinced from successful test events in the beginning of the summer. We were like, wow, if somebody gets to experience this, they will love it and they will talk about it, and it will spread.

I think we had quite a big sponsor for the first couple of years, and after the second year when again only two teams finished they said that we have to do something so that more people get to finish and it’s not just our friends who come to the event. And so we decided that on the biggest island where you need to cover a distance of 21km, we said that we’ll put in bikes there. So we rented regular, four-speed bikes that we put there for people to use, and the fact that we added bikes attracted more people. In the beginning, almost no one finished, so people were like “Why should we spend the money to go to a race that nobody finishes?”. The fact that we added bikes made more people come in year three. And a lot more people finished. Then year four, we had 70 teams that showed up.

The majority of them finished. At the end of that race, we also realized that we hadn’t rented enough bikes. So we had to transport bikes back up on the course, and we just managed to do it in time so that nobody was affected by it. That was a real tipping point for us. Up to that point, we were losing money, quite a lot of money, so we said, okay, we have to triple the entry fee. Then, we also have to remove the bikes because it’s not sustainable for us to rent hundreds of bikes and transport them up and down the course and across islands.

Alexander Tanti: Were the bikes used for runners who wanted to just get through the course quicker? I

Michael Lemmel: That particular section was 21k, so we said okay, you can ride your bike here instead of running.

Alexander Tanti: Okay.

Michael Lemmel: We actually added a bike section instead of a run section. And I think it attracted some triathletes, and a new crowd came to the races. But then, in year five, we decided, as I said, to remove the bikes and we tripled the entry fee, and we said, okay, this will be interesting. Will anyone enter? We sold out at one hundred teams within minutes of opening registration.

Alexander Tanti: What?

Michael Lemmel: And we’re like, my God something just happened. Maybe they didn’t realize that we removed the bike. Then at the start, we’re like, okay how many teams will finish now since there are no bikes but I think it was like 80% of the teams actually finished.

I think part of it was also about self-belief and conviction because they looked at the results list from the year before, and they said if that person can finish, then I can finish and they didn’t even realise that that person had finished on a bike.

So, it’s interesting how the human brain works. And after year five the whole thing just exploded, it went off.

Alexander Tanti: But what’s interesting is that you still hadn’t offered a shorter version. Your average organizer would say okay, we’ll remove the bikes, but we’ll offer a shorter version. Why did you stick to your guns? What was the thinking behind that?

Michael Lemmel: We felt that the challenge of the race was part of why people wanted to come. It was known as one of the hardest endurance races in the world, and I think that was the main attraction. Being able to say I’ve done that. People were still new to this sort of activity of running and swimming because it wasn’t swimrun yet. it was just one race. And so the vast majority of hardcore endurance athletes in the world had not accomplished anything like that before.

I think it was in 2012 when we had 700 teams that wanted to participate, and we only had 120 spots available. So that year we decided that we would start another race in the spring on the island of Utö as sort of a qualifier but also to make it possible for those who didn’t get a spot to participate in an event. Then it was like 2014 when we went to Switzerland, and we did the same. So that’s when we started growing the series by having an event in Switzerland and one in Sweden.

Then we went to the UK, and we went to Germany and Croatia and everywhere.

Alexander Tanti: Let’s say there was an organiser who has a popular local race with a unique format that they would like to replicate abroad. When is the point where you feel okay, now it makes sense to try and go international. And what were the original challenges that you faced doing that?

Michael Lemmel: Our idea in 2013 was that we wanted to show that you could do a swimrun anywhere because by then, we planned on trying to establish this as a sport. We said we’ve got to do something with this. We wanted to show that you could do a swimrun anywhere where there was a body of water and trails. So we said okay, in Sweden, we have islands and open ocean or the Baltic or whatever. Then we looked at Switzerland being sort of the exact opposite, where you had mountains and lakes. So you ran to the lakes and swam. Very different to running on the islands and swimming between the islands.

We also felt that people running in wetsuits in the mountains with glaciers behind would create images that really stand out because people would say, “What is that?”. And we knew that if we could do something that would create a question mark in people’s minds, then you’re on to something. Starting those conversations was our first way of getting people to try to participate.

The biggest challenge in going international was that we were quite well-established in Sweden, and we had Swedish sponsors. But for them to increase their financial commitment to events that were outside of Sweden, where they didn’t have a market, was hard to justify. And even though we argued that a lot of the PR and communication would still be in Sweden, it was still the fact that they were paying us money for events outside of Sweden. The biggest challenge for us was to expand our network and all the contacts that we had in the Swedish business community, to try to lift that up to an international level, and that’s what came in contact with our future Swiss Partners Tridem. In the beginning, we approached them to see if they could help us sell sponsorships internationally, and they said they were not interested in that, but that they were interested in investing in the sport, so we started a joint venture together.

So that’s how we came to work with Tridem in Switzerland, who now are the ones managing ÖTILLÖ after Mats and I left.

Alexander Tanti: Got it. I guess growing a race series is hard enough from a business and commercial perspective, but trying to simultaneously grow, educate and advertise a brand new sport type must have been even more challenging. How did you go about trying to grow the concept of a new sport type? Did you just rely on organic growth and participants spreading the word, or did you take some more intentional action trying to promote a new sport?

Michael Lemmel: I mean, we realized by 2012 how many people really loved the original race, and the way we had achieved that was by sharing the experience of moving seamlessly through nature and time in such an analogue and basic fashion of just running and swimming. There’s no need for any expensive gear, and you can travel anywhere in the world with hand luggage just to go swimrunning. So it was a fantastic way to experience nature and also a way to connect with other people because you did it with somebody else and through training you’ve met other people. We realized that this was really a growing community and a growing movement.

We felt that, okay, if we wanted our own series to be successful, we also had to build the sport of swimrun and communicate the sport of swimrun to get people to understand and participate and be active in the sport. We saw a participant’s journey in a new sport as a pyramid with levels of progressive challenges and complexity. Using this analogy, you enter at the bottom of the pyramid and then you move up from practising an activity to then finding a local event and then, evolving through the pyramid to races. What we had was more on the top end of the pyramid before adding shorter distances so that we could be available for a lot more people and one could grow within our brand as well.

The beginning for us was at the time when the digital media was really open. I mean, the algorithms were really open, and we got big growth through digital communication. We were good at creating live webcasts from the world championship, which had a massive spread, and we were quite early with YouTube. We were also early with Facebook.

At the same time, a lot of the analogue media, such as newspapers and TV channels and so on, were looking for something new, and my sister Josephine was working with us on PR; she’s a PR Pro. She just chased people everywhere in the world, trying to get them to write articles and do news activities because we did a lot of filming. We had so much media and film material available for people to share. So I think from the beginning, we really built the library of stories.

Alexander Tanti: And from the sounds of it, you didn’t compromise on the budget if it meant getting great image, video and media quality.

Michael Lemmel: Yeah, I mean, if you ask a lot of my former colleagues, they probably think we spent too much money on media, but I think that that was very instrumental in our success. And then, of course, you have to adapt to times because the digital platforms were quickly evolving. Unfortunately, a lot of the analogue or print media was getting less relevant and the desire or the need for that type of material was not as important. I think with the growth of digital channels, a lot of people are just using their phones to create media. And I think if you do it properly you can do it really well, but again, it has to be something that has meaning and purpose so that you emotionally connect with whatever is being shown; it’s not just volume.

It has to be quality.

Alexander Tanti: And I think there’s going to be people who will say, “Yeah, you were lucky because, at the time, digital marketing was only just picking up, and it was much cheaper at the time to run social media ads. You had cheaper organic reach so you had it easy”. But I guess at any point in time, at any period that we’re going through, there’s always something new that people can use to gain an edge. Right now, you have AI and the ability to scale content creation activity much faster than ever before, without even needing a full team. The big learning here is to be open to newly available technologies and be fast in using them because, in a few years from now, everybody’s gonna be using it, and it will no longer provide an edge, but rather it will be the industry standard.

Michael Lemmel: Recently, I’ve played a lot with there’s several AI-based video translation tools that are absolutely incredible where you can actually get your own voice to follow your mouth, but in a completely different language. And I mean, if you then look at tailoring films for different markets that are in the language of that market with your voice without somebody else doing the voiceovers, I think there is so much to do. Also, use tools that are relatively cheap and leverage facial recognition so that you can build images and films for each participant. We still live in this world where people want to show what they’re doing, and I mean even myself, if I have a fantastic experience, I want to talk about it. And the easiest way to do that is through digital media. It takes just two seconds to share that experience, and the tools are there to make it easy for participants to do that.

On the other hand, there’s also a lot to be said about going completely dark, too. And what I mean by that is that where you have a product that is so strong, and you can just build it within a community. Where people are wondering what’s going on, and again you create those question marks we talked about earlier. Then people become curious, and curiosity is a good thing.

In the end, I think that your first question is what it all comes down to. As organizers and event providers, we really need to think about our “why”. Then you can create something that has meaning for somebody, and I don’t think we can be everything for everybody. I think we need to be something for somebody.

Alexander Tanti: Absolutely. I’d also like to ask if what you created completely surpassed any initial visions or dreams that you had about this sport?. Was it all by design or was it something that you built on gradually and then just took a life of its own?

Michael Lemmel: Dreams evolve I think, and ours evolved and expanded. For example, now you look at the growth of swimrun in the world, and you say, ”I think it can go in so many different directions”. There are already some expedition-style races that are multi-day, and you have really short races and the dream now would be to see swimrun in the Olympics one day. I mean, that would be really cool. But I also realized that it would not be swimrun in the form that we started it. it wouldn’t be enough to make it to the Olympics. It would have to be more like a Super League Triathlon format. What these guys did is so cool, to transform an outdoor sport into an arena sport. You could argue that that was good timing with Covid and everything like that, but it was still conceptualized and thought of.

For us, it was all about the experience that you as a racer had. I mean we designed the race courses based on the experience of the racer. Everything that we did was based on the experience of the racer down to the giveaways or whatever so that the racer would go, wow, because that would then attract sponsors and so we took the perspective of the racer. That was the most important for us.

Alexander Tanti: When did you feel that, ok, it’s now time to go? It feels like you left when the sport is having incredible momentum. The prospect of the Olympics, international celebrities starting to show up at the events etc. I found it remarkably interesting that you let go at this time.

Michael Lemmel: By that time we had different owners in the company, and with that come different visions of the future, and I think we ended up in a situation where I didn’t believe in the way forward. I needed to stay very true to my own compass and my own feelings, especially as I also felt that I was at the forefront of everything that we did, so I had to really stand for what we did.

I felt that it was the right time to leave to not end up in that conflicted position because I don’t know, I’m a person driven by emotion and passion, and that has been more important to me than the whole financial side. I think the worst thing that could happen is being in a place where you don’t want to be and being there for too long, where you don’t have that fire anymore.

Alexander Tanti: I get it. I think many times, people have been doing something for so long that they start feeling fearful about letting go and what might come next. It’s very inspirational to see you stick to your values and stand up for what’s true for you and not contradict your own self. And if that means moving on, then it means moving on.

Michael Lemmel: 17 years is a long time, and I finally started realizing emotionally that I was going down that road. It was interesting because I felt that I was very much ÖTILLÖ and then I realized that no, I’m Michael and I work with ÖTILLÖ. I wasn’t it, and It was really good for me to make that separation. It’s like when you have your own kids, and you realize that your kids have to grow up on their own and take responsibility for themselves, and the time comes for them to move out. So, I moved out.

Alexander Tanti: Unfortunately, we’ve run out of time. This conversation has been incredibly insightful, and there are so many gems that I am very excited to share with the community. I just finally wanted to ask you what you are now up to. What’s next for Michael Lemmel?

Michael Lemmel: I’m in the process of creating a hiking trail! I’m commissioned to build a physical and digital infrastructure and get a hiking trail going throughout the whole Stockholm archipelago. It’s 270 kilometers. The project will be finished by the end of October 2024, which is basically a very short time to really create everything, but the good part about that is that I’m spending a lot of time walking around in nature. This helps your mind process quite a lot, and it helps you be in the moment, it gives me a lot of perspective on what I’ve done over the last 17 years and a few thoughts about what I want to do in the future. I can’t say that I’ve landed on what I want to do. For now, I’d like to continue being involved in activities where you create an impression in somebody’s emotions. I really enjoy opening up new dimensions

Alexander Tanti: Thanks so much for your time Michael!