Welcome to this fast fix blog about swimming. My name is Rókur à Jákupsstovu, and together with my brother Bartal Højgaard, I will try to grow this website into some sort of English version of our Faroese swimming website www.svimjing.com, only with more focus on topics of global interest.
As with www.svimjing.com, I want to write as positive as possible about swimming, since this in my view is a fantastic sport. Life saving at its core, embracing everyone everywhere in a super-healthy lifestyle. Nobody is left out, you can swim from the day you are born till the day you die.
But of course there are shadows too, with doping and all. The suit issue which seems resolved, but which might pop up again. Deaths in open water swimming and moral issues. They need to be pointed out, only I’ll try to do in an as constructive way as possible.
Speaking about myself, I’m (as of March 2011) a 39 year old Faroese father of four, with diplomas in production engineering and elite swim training. I work as an IT consultant, and am also vice president of the Faroese Swimming Federation. But I’d like to stress that this website is only a private enterprise, without any formal attachments to for instance the Faroese Swimming Federation.
My brother is a 36 year old geologist who can hardly swim, but who has helped me out almost all my life. He has always had much more patience than me, so I’m only happy to have him by my side, when trying to do a stunt like this. Also since he never sends me any bills, for all the things that he does for me :-)
We are not native English speaking, but then again, so is neither the majority of the World. Hopefully our ability to understand the Scandinavian languages, German and (with the help of my wife) French will weigh up against maybe at times weird ways of expressing ourselves in English.
So, HEY HO, LET’S GO !
Rókur