I see it everywhere: "Girls only biking weekend" - "Girls only skiing weekend" - and they are always together with yoga. Nothing wrong with yoga, I stretch every other day myself, but it seems to be always an activity included in girls only initiatives. I find it interesting how tight these two are linked together. For years I ran a few "girls only" clinics on the river, and it seemed like a good gig. Girls were happy to get on the water together, without any male interference.  Today I am not so sure about this concept anymore. Are we really in need of surrounding ourselves with only females...

  On september 4th I gave birth to my first son Benjamin. My nine months of pregnancy were surprisingly easy and allowed me to kayak up until 10 days before birth, endurobike and even paraglide up until month seven. In the 8th month I went hiking for 7 hours in the vicinity of Svartisen glacier, and in general feeling very good as the little man grew happily inside. As it turned out, not everybody liked the fact that a woman still goes down a hill on a bike or jumps in the kayak to paddle class four as soon as the belly can be seen...     Before pregnancy I repeatedly...

As I climb out of bed at the break of dawn I yet again think about how incredibly rich my life is. If I had never said yes to join a roll practise in the small pool in Sjoa at age 16, I would not be sipping coffee in my cabin Soria Moria, overlooking the magical waters of rio Futaleufu, Chile. But as it is, I do not believe in coincidences. Not at all.     I believe strongly that we shape our own world. The real challenge of life lies within recognizing the chances when they come along –to grab them and go with them. Of course, in a parallell universe I might have been...

These are the famous words from the opening scene of Henrik Ibsen´s screen play Peer Gynt, written in 1867. As a Norwegian I have grown up with quotes from this play, and many of them are engraved in my mind just as well as random German grammar rules and my grandfather´s firm advice on cross-country skiing. If you can quote the infamous Peer, you are definitely a true Norwegian. So what does Peer Gynt have to do with kayaking? Peer was an adventurerer, a womanizer and a coward, demanding attention at every corner. He entered the Norwegian stage with a bang, knocking over traditional Norwegian...