Umeå's Proud Sporting Tradition. No, Really.

To Americans, Swedes, sporting-wise, are best known for skiing, ice hockey, shooting while skiing (skiing while shooting?), Zlatan Ibrahimovic, and armed conflict neutrality.

In Umeå, sports and being active are an important part of the culture. The largest sports facility in all of Scandinavia, IKSU, is located in Umeå. I recently got a membership there, and it really is a ball-busting, sweat-inducing fortress. It has indoor beach volleyball, 30 different fitness classes with class-specific rooms (like a spinning auditorium), and huge gym/cardio area. It also has indoor golf for some reason:

Nothing like getting out and playing a quick indoor nine.

And even tables for arm-wrestling:

I just, I just don't get it.

There are also a few popular sports clubs with some pretty competitive teams. On Monday I went to a floorball (Innebandy) match between the city's two big teams. It drew a substantial crowd of a maybe 2000 people. Floorball has the same rules as hockey, except instead of ice and skates they have a composite court, they don't wear pads, the walls are only half a meter high, and they play with a wiffle ball. A plastic, hollow ball with holes in its surface so that it doesn't hurt when you get hit. When you see them warming up it's kind of cute really. Like a bunch of kids playing with plastic bat and wiffle ball at a family reunion.

They think they're big people!

But then they start playing, and hitting each other, and moving that wiffle ball at a hundred miles an hour. It's a frenetic atmosphere.

 You boys be careful out there.

Anyway, one of the two teams won, and some number of people there were happy about that. Afterward I went out to the T3 Exel Football Field, also part of the sports club. I had been there a few weekends earlier when the stadium was deserted and the gates were open.

Not bad seats, but I bet I could get a little closer.

Better, closer, warmer..

Ahh, field level, perfecto.

The Umeå female footballers, known as the Umeå IK, were in the middle of their match. They have a pretty impressive following as well, and have even won the Women's Champions League a few times in the past ten years. For some reason I could again walk right into the stadium. I decided to try to recreate my earlier shots because I crave temporal symmetry.

Yeah kind of, but not really.

My angles seem to be a bit off.

Nailed it!

Alright that's enough pictures and sports talk, at least for now.

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