The Tjejmilen

5 days after I landed back in Sweden I had the privilege to participate in a 10K race called "Tjejmilen". You pronounce it like...Shay Meelan. The translation for that is "Girl Mile". This is one of the largest women only races in the world. There were 32,000 runners that day!

Many months ago, Sister Candilyn Newell, had a desire to get as many LDS women that we could to sign up for the race and have shirts made that tied us all together. She wanted to be recognized and show the people of Sweden that LDS women are alive and well in this beautiful country. Candilyn, Lana and I met together to discuss how to make this all happen. My job was to work on the shirts and gather the orders. Lana's was to get a group facebook page running to make sure that we could communicate with everyone, which by the way now has 176 members! Candilyn was the brains behind the whole operation and made sure that we were progressing in our goal.

Charlotte Karlsson, came up with this design. It says, We will go the extra/second mile.

On the front of the shirt in smaller lettering it says... Live it * Love it * Share it

What makes the logo so great, which us Americans may not realize, is that in Sweden they sometimes refer to a 10k as a Swedish Mile. So it is really quite clever!

 After searching high and low, I found a place in Layton, Utah called Shirtbatter. Since I was going to be in the area twice over the summer it worked out to have them made there (where it was much cheaper than Sweden) and then I could just pick them up and pack as part of my luggage.

I was able to put two orders in with Shirtbatter. Both orders came to a total of 115 shirts! However, that did include a few extra for some U.S. friends that were interested and family members.

Aaron made me this wonderful pre-race breakfast. What a great guy!

Meeting up with my friend Lana and...

all these cute sister missionaries before the race to travel into the city together.

Here is the only photo I could find with everyone in the same picture. Unfortunately there were other runners that were not able to meet for the photo so we did have a few more than this. 

Candilyn Newell, Lana Wimmer and I. 

Charlotte Karlsson was my running buddy and very difficult to keep up with :)

I could not ask for a better day or more wonderful people to share it with!!!