A random Twitter message on a December evening led to five fantastic days in the sun and biting cold

. My first Femundløpet will not be my last.

It was thanks to rookie Markus Ingebrigtsen that I became aware of Femundløpet last winter

. Because of his previous adventures I was following him on Twitter and I did not have any particular relation to dogsledding.  But the interest and curiousity I had first experienced when hearing about Robert Sørlie and Iditarod was suddenly back. Out of the blue, I was presented with an opportunity to be a part of this adventure – and it was only a few hours’ train ride away from the messy and slippery pavements of Oslo.

A brief email was followed by several more, then phone conversations and documentation of my “talents.” From the news desk at NTB the road to femundlopet.no was short and suddenly I had a route, a car, and a colleague with a camera. The only thing left was to acquire a new vocabulary and to get acquainted with the most famous names – and to get warm clothes. I was gleaming with satisfaction at the purchase of my new Sorel Caribou boots. For -40 below Celsius the box told me and for those remembering Femundløpet 2012, you would recall I was given ample opportunity to test this claim.

That was more than I knew when I showed up in Bergstaden. Far too many people whose names I could not remember. Never mind trying to recognize faces I had seen at registration when meeting them out in the tracks covered in layers of clothes, scarves and fur.

The mood was set at the start. Anxious and excited dog, the handlers running around to get the last pieces of equipment, and the mushers’ practical and mental preparations were suddenly focused on one goal; to follow the tracks into the night, to get going on several hundreds of kilometers of work, sweat and lack of sleep. Such were my days also, albeit in a different league than that of the mushers and the handlers. By the time we returned to Røros, a van which bore many resemblances with a deep-freezer had brought us around almost just as many kilometers as the racers. I slept when I could, which didn’t amount to all that many hours of proper rest.

Despite this, I can’t recall one single frown on all the faces I saw. There were smiles all around, even on the dead tired faces at Drevsjø. School classes cheered on when passing a sunny Søvollen and a nice lady brought me the wallet I had lost in the snow at Grimsbu. At Tynset 2, Robert and Ralph were sharing stories. Only minutes were separating the two leading teams, still they were joking and I’m sure, making secretive underhand remarks.

All those smiles have had me looking forward to this for almost a year, from the race’s secretariat and musher, from volunteers and handlers, from overworked veterinarians and excited dogs. I still count myself as a novice and I hope I will have just as good an experience in Femundløpet 2013.