I grew up as an ordinary young girl in the small town of Otta, Norway, and ended up in a beautiful life of adventures. I started kayaking at the age of 16, and when I turned 18 I packed my kayak and left on a 7-months travel to New Zealand, Chile and California. Since then I have travlled to more than 50 countries with my kayak, and in Chile I even fell in love with a river and built a cabin on the shore of the mighty Rio Futaleufú in northern Patagonia.
Being more than average competitive I have a strong drive to test my skills, and this drive has made the past decades a whirlwind of competitions in freestyle, exreme races and canoe slalom. Some highlights were when I became the 2015 World Champion in extreme kayaking, on the Otez river in Austria. I repeated this in 2019 after winning the North Fork Championships on the North fork of the Payette river in Idaho. I also paddled into a semi-final place in the highly competitive field of canoe slalom during the World Cup final in Pau, France, in 2015.
I also like to push myself outside of competitions, which is why I run endless waterfalls, surf huge river waves and travel to corners of the world that many never get to. I never get tired of exploring – curiosity is what drives me forward from adventure to adventure.
There have been amazing moments of happiness in my life, for which I am grateful, but also a fair share of hard times. Too many friends are lost to the river, and sometimes it is hard to understand why we keep going. But we always do.
This page is a glimpse of what it means to live a life worth living.
Enjoy.
Mariann