It's been a busy, stressful but still wonderful month. First we've been
living in a chaos in the middle of a move here in England and then before we had
really settled in to our new home in Rugby I did a short trip to Finland
to do some technical O-training and take part to first races there. Shortly,
training there went brilliantly and I feel I'm getting fitter and faster
day-by-day but unfortunately I wasn't able to deliver any good results because
of numerous small mistakes. Anyway it's going forward now.
Before Finland I spent a wonderful weekend in the Lakes running the LOC
double in Esthwaite and Graythwaite,
undoubtedly among the best O-terrains in England. See Hollie Orr's great description about
the weekend here.
In Finland I stayed a week near Turku orienteering there on daily basis
before taking part to the second race of Huippuliiga, the Finnish premier
league in orienteering. The week went well and I felt that my skills got better
and better day-by-day and I got more and more used to running in that tough terrain
there (believe me it's quite different from West Midland terrain!). But it
wasn't particularly easy and as you can imagine my legs were pretty tired after
6 days of training there. So I wasn't expecting any high speed or miracles on
Saturday when starting on to a 11,1km course in the same terrain type. But I
was actually happily surprised how good and easy it felt physically all the way.
Unfortunately I cannot say the same of my orienteering.
Trainings had gone technically well and I had found confidence in my
orienteering but 1:15000 race map and a very detailed area in part of the race made
it a lot more challenging. I had difficulties to see details on the map, such
as to which direction crags pointed and whether a control site was crag or a
hill (yes I forgot to see the descriptions a few times or misread them). On
most legs I made very good job until the circle but it took me some extra time
to spot the flag there. Half a minute here, a minute there, 5-6 minutes
altogether. That's awfully lot but I'm learning, adapting, and making progress.
Bottom line I'm running again, painless and without compromises.
Tiomila, the highlight of the spring season, coming up this weekend, stay tuned!
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| Picture Suomen Suunnistusliitto |
