Kategori: Uncategorized

It’s been a while now since I updated the website. I once again want to thank all my sponsors and the people around me for all the support during 2017. I’m really grateful to have you guys backing me up and making it possible for me to perform the very best that I can. My hope for 2018 is that my racing will improve even more and that we will have a good and fun year with lots of riding to look forward to .

Recently I have been spending a lot of time in the gym and on the indoor bike and due to my tight workout schedule the website have been pushed back a bit. This winter I have been given a complete program from Idrottsgruppen Dalarna and I have been following it strictly now for almost two months. I have been focusing on max strength in the gym and the progress so far has been really good. Soon I will enter a period where my focus will be on Explosive reps instead and stamina. Besides spending time in the gym I’ve been riding a lot in Hofors indoor bmx park to maintain my basic bike skills, something I enjoy very much.

View this post on Instagram

It's time to get tricky 😅🤷‍♂️ #idrottsgruppendalarna #ppcykel #hoforsxpark #offseason #tricky

A post shared by Tim Hedman (@timhedman) on Dec 12, 2017 at 1:46pm PST

Beside from the training I am trying to plan my upcoming race season and negotiate with sponsors.

For more freqently updates you can check my instagram account: timhedman

View this post on Instagram

Well this is me trying to illustrate my best shitface 😅 #babygotback #idrottsgruppendalarna

A post shared by Tim Hedman (@timhedman) on Jan 1, 2018 at 8:42am PST

Hopefully the next update will be some sponsor updates! 🙂

We arrived on Friday morning and it was open practice the whole day, the track we competed on the next day was “Maggan”. It was a pretty flat track with lots of tight turns so you had to pedal a lot out of the turns. I was unsure if I would use my enduro bike instead of the downhill bike, but after some timed runs with both bikes I decided to go with the downhill bike because I’m more used to it.

We had great weather all Friday and then we woke up to rain on Saturday, the track got really slippery at some sections with a thin layer of mud that was laying on top of a hard packed track. In this competition they have a different system than what I am used to. Instead of having a seeding run and a final run you have two competition runs but only the best run counts, so even if you crash in your second run you can fall back on your first run if it was a better one. Anyway I had a really good first run until I came to a tight switchback turn in the end and I drifted out of the track. I still got down in first place with a 6 seconds lead and a time of 1:53:06. For my second run I had a decent run where I backed off a bit in the turn where I crashed, I improved my time by two seconds and won the competition by 5 seconds. The Vallåsen crew did a great job hosting the event and managed to create a competition in a simple way that makes it easier for beginners to try out and get started racing.

Cheers for a good time! P.S thanks for podium coffee.

Same as last year I went to Spicak to race the European Downhill Cup. This year they had made some changes to make the track faster by adding some more jumps and drops, the most technical parts was still there though. On Friday’s training the tracks stayed fresh all day out and I felt like I had a good speed.  On Saturday the track started to get beaten up and in the end of the training it was really dusty and loose. In my qualification run I made it down with some mistakes in the tricky sections but in overall it was a pretty good run.  3:13 was my time and it was enough to get a 18^th place. I was so happy that I finally made it into the European Super Final. I made my preparations for another day in the dust, but I woke up on Sunday to rain. I switched wheels to the mud tires and went out for a slippery training session. Most of the track was still good but the most technical parts were really slippery and hard to get through due to all the roots. I made some changes in my line choices and I was ready for the finals. In the end of the training session it had dried up a lot so I decided to switch back to dry tires and went for one run. I decided to go with the dry tires if it would not rain any more.  But the weather looked unstable and just one hour before my race run the sky opened up and it started to rain really bad. I switched back once again and went up for my final run.
In my final run I had a bad upper part with some slips that made me lose a lot of speed, I made up for that in the middle part where I felt really good and fast. In the lower part I landed a bit short on a drop that made my back rim bent a bit so it started to leak air from the tire. I almost crashed in the last woods section because I barely had any air in my back wheel. I fought myself into the goal area and got a time of 3:23 and ended up at 23th place. This is still my best result in the European cup so I am really happy with it, it was a bummer I got a puncture but that´s racing. I am steadily moving up in the results and I am really happy to fulfill one of my goals for this season.

For now I’m in Austria for some more time on the bike before we start to drive home to Sweden again, but there is still one more stop to do. I recently found on Facebook that Vallåsen is having a downhill competition this weekend for the South Swedish downhill Cup so that will be the last stop before heading home.

La Thuile was an amazing place to ride my enduro bike, we arrived on Friday night since the training was to start on Saturday according to the schedule. Apparently the tracks were open for training on Friday, which I wasn’t aware of, it was too bad I missed out on one day’s training. Well, I had really fun on Saturday’s training and I managed to do all stages one time and one extra run on the first stage. On Sunday it was race time and my main focus was to try to keep it smooth through all of the tracks. Stage one felt really good, I passed almost ten people on the way down though. Since this was my first enduro race abroad I had no rakning and therefor started way back in line. They start us riders with a 20 second interval and the track was almost eleven minutes long and it was really technical. On the second stage I had written in my notes from the day before that I could go much faster on the upper part of the track, obviously that did not work out because I got a flat at the end of the upper part. By then I knew the race was over in general but I decided to make the best of the situation and I still rode the last two stages as planned, focused but with a smile on my face 🙂
Here is the full result of the competition and some pictures from Linn Hollanti.
SS1: 34th 10:53
SS2: 324th 30:32 (puncture, would probably been 6:40 something)
SS3: 42th 10:16
SS4: 47th 10:17

My final result was 299th place but it would have been around 35th if I hadn´t had a puncture.

The race in Brandnertal turned out to be a mudrace this year as well. I had time to walk the track on Thursday night and it looked really good. On Fridays training I felt confident on the track and I had really fun all the way down. The track was really muddy but I felt like I knew where I could ride fast without taking too many risks. Saturday’s training was the opposite, the surface of the roots had been torn away and they were even more slippery. I struggled all day with riding the track, I crashed 4 times during training and one of them was really hard.  For the qualification run I had to take some painkillers to get through because my back hurt. During the quali-run I made one really big mistake, both of my feet slipped of my pedals just before a big drop so I did not have the speed to pull of the drop and had to take the chicken run around. This cost me about almost 10 seconds, otherwise the run was pretty good. I was surprised to see that I ended up 5^th place with the time 3:25:3.

Picture from the quali-run

I woke up on raceday with a sore back and swollen wrist. The crash from the day before was really bad, but it wasn’t going to stop me from racing. I taped the wrist to stabilize it and I took some more painkillers for my back. This day the track was even more slippery, the recent days it had rained only in the morning so the mud stayed pretty thick but this day it rained the whole day through so it got thin and heavy rolled. I had 3 decent training runs in the morning, and I was ready for the final-run. Due to all the rain, the track got slower than before. For example, my finalrun was only 0.3 seconds faster than my quali-run, and as I mentioned earlier I did a very big mistake in my quali-run – thats how much slower Sundays track really was. Despite all of this I was pretty satisfied with my final-run and with my 5^th placement.

This is how I looked after one run on Sundays training

After the weekend in Brandnertal we went to Portes Du Soleil for some training-days before the boys flew home. Instead I got accompanied by my girlfriend. We decided to take a few days for touristing in Toscana, Italy, and now we are on our way to Pila for some more training. This weekend it’s race time again, this time it’s the Super Enduro/ Italian Enduro series in La Thuile. It´s going to be really fun to try out an enduro race abroad.