Nopesport

picture courtesy of 25manna website

Kalevan Rasti win the 2005 25 manna. IT was a close fought battle with the leaders changing regularly during the race but Kalevan Rasti always stayed in with the leading pack. They jumped back and fourth from the lead but stayed at the front when it mattered, on the last leg!

A relay. With 25 people. All ages, male and female, 1 team, one race. 25-manna is the original big team relay, a format emulated by the Scottish 11-person and the 15-staffetten in Oslo.

Now, if 25 people ran back to back it would take a while to get through the whole race. Like a full day. And that would be quite tiresome. So the ingenious structure of the race is to have four people running at once from each team.

So 25-manna day goes a bit like this:
9AM, mass start one runner for each team.
9:45, leg one hands over to one person, to run leg 2.
10:30, leg 2 hands over to four people. Each time one of them finish they hand over to another person on the next leg until at about
1PM, first of the 7th legs finish. however the 23rd leg cannot start until all four 7th legs finish. The tactics come into minimising the 'dead time' between the first and last 7th leg finishing. Then there are a further three legs to the finish, at around 2:47!

A few brits, both those domiciled in Scandinavaia and others who traveled over for the weekend had varying ammounts of success:

Apologies if I've missed anyone.

Leg 1
98= Murray Strain Ostmarka
238 John Rocke, OK Ravinen

Leg 2
22. Oli Johnson, Espoon Suunta

Leg 3
91. Jenny Whitehead, Vaesteraas OK

Leg 5
209. Marcus Pinker, Nykoping OK
881. Donald McCarthy, Tolered-Utby OL

Leg 7
45= Murray Strain II, Ostmarka OK 2
159. Nicholas Morgan, IL Tyrving

Leg 24
38. Helen Bridle, Goteborg-Majorna OK
139. Janine Hensman, Nykoping OK

The relay was won by the Finnish club Kalevan Rasti, even without their French Superstar Thierry G who was on world cup duty. Last year they were pipped by Halden so it was sweet revenge this time.

Full results can be found here
Full results can be found here