Namibian Viking

I will try to give some further details to who I am here. If you click on “Background” you will find more details as to why I am doing this, and on this page I will write about Joakim Jonsson, the person behind the Namibian Viking.

I am 33 years old and live in Wandsworth Common, London. I work for a small communications business called Cantos. From the early days of the Internet boom I have been working with different ways of using the net to communicate.

This brought me to London in 2000 when a friend of mine raised money to start a streaming company, and since then I have been working with how to use video to communicate over the Internet.

Prior to moving to London I have lived in the Netherlands (Amsterdam) and Spain (Bilbao); and of course Sweden.

I was brought up in the south of Sweden, in a village called Höllviken. I early on liked sports and was always encouraged by my mum and dad to do sports of all kind. Even though I tried everything from badminton to fencing, it was football that was my main sport growing up.

I have had asthma and allergies since I was born. My doctor always recommended me to try to exercise as much as possible, with the clear logic that if you only have 70% lung capacity it is better to have 70% of a great lung capacity, then 70% of a mediocre one. So from early on I always fought to stay as fit as possible and not let this beat me down.

I am a keen photographer and although my friends laugh at the fact that my interest typically stays for one or two years and then I move on, I must say that photography is a great release for me. When I re-discovered photography in 2003 if felt like I finally had found something that I could use to create. I predominantly do wildlife photography with a certain strange love for dragonflies (much to the enjoyment of my friends who take the mickey… ). Photographing insects is a great balance to the macho culture you sometimes find among ultra races.

The last couple of years I have been more and more interested to see how far I can push my body. What started with running an ultra marathon without any prior experience of long-distance running has now become part of my life.

I want to find out how far I can go, how much I can prepare my body to achieve and how far the limits can be pushed. 2009 is only the start and I cannot wait to see what lies beyond today’s limit.