June in Finland

Prior to JWOC starting, I had already spent 5 weeks in Finland, half on various orienteering camps but also half holidaying around with Fiina. Things kicked off on the 1st of June when I flew to Tume's Jukola Camp in Joensuu, by far the smallest airport I've visited. Just a few hours earlier I was trying to decide which swimming trunks to Finland, but upon arrival it started to snow. Training on the first day was maybe the coldest I've ever felt orienteering, due to some really saturated snow, cold winds and wet branches with ongoing snow. The terrain was harsh on cold legs, although very interesting and wild. Proper bear country we were told, and if we should meet any, everything should be fine as long as we "don't get between the mum and the cub". Training was cut short early as even the toughest of TuMe boys got a bit too cold to orienteer. I learnt a lot in this session at the same time though, control circles were were mistakes were made here.

Thankfully in the next few days it warmed up, although only slightly. More Jukola specific trainings and discussions were done, and I began looking forward to racing as some night orienteering intervals went my way on the second night at the camp. Things weren't far from race ready as they were, and this was surprising. The only problem with the terrain was that the sessions were significantly more energy expensive, and as I tried to keep my hours consistent my legs grew tired a lot quicker. By the start of our club's Night Test on the final night of the camp, I was a bit more lactate than man, and this was made worse when I was only told this was our Jukola selection race 30mins pre-start. The race went fairly well though and I was in the chasing pack for the first half of the course, plus leading my gaffle round the first few controls. I found myself alone after the long leg and I knew I was up there somewhere. I identified number 9 on the side of the hill as the trickiest so slowed down and attacked carefully, but still not carefully enough. 3mins binned and I rolled in as 4th or 5th TuMe runner a few minutes down on where I wanted to be. But there were so many positives to take that I remained happy with this.

The next day we drove back to regular, central Finland before me and Tapsa split off to stay at the TuMe clubhut on Kimitoon island, the largest 'land-hugging' island in Finland, holding a small swedish-speaking community and many holiday homes. The clubhut was quite special, with sauna hut nearby, lots of space, a quality kitchen and heavenly terrain on the doorstep. Trained well, twice or thrice a day in smaller sessions, and the week went by quite quickly in anticipation of the weekend's Helsinki O-Games ft. Jukola team selection.

The heavy week once again made me question my fitness to race and I was therefore perhaps a bit tired in the middle race. One really stupid mistake put me out of contention for a good place but otherwise I was really happy to be orienteering so well in terrain which was likely harder than anything at both Jukola and JWOC.

Map

The long race was a much better story. It was a relatively long race (80+min winning) time so I decided to make use of the opportunity and really focus on it, with gels, dedicated warm up and full race mentality in some really relevant terrain (at least more relevant than Scotland). I headed off steadily and made a few mistakes early on, but then really clicked and delivered some fast and accurate solo orienteering. It was probably my favourite course of the year, and a real joy to run, in some really nice weather too. The highlight though was overtaking an old man, only to run into a tree catching-features style, except I won. The whole 5m high tree came down with a loud crack and a mid race laugh was shared with the man. The performance highlight was winning two crucial longer legs (7 and 18) against some real Finnish orienteers with their classic tactics as well - ignore any path temptations! This technique served me well at JWOC and I can only imagine how important this race was for that.

Map

After the O-games, I joined with the Latvian TuMe Juniors to go back to Kontioranta (Joensuu) for a further Jukola camp in the week prior to the night itself. Tiring from the last few weeks of O, I moved the focus a bit off the terrain and onto some running. Endijs and I ran most mornings to wake up two pairs of very sore legs, and we even smashed out a very positive 3x10min (path, terrain, road) session together which was very mentally boosting to complete.

As Jukola approached, I headed back into the forest more to fine-tune a few things, especially now that I found out I was very surprisingly running 5th leg for TuMe 1st team! The thought of the race kicked up the most nerves I've ever felt, and I knew I wouldn't be sleeping before heading out. This helped, compared to last year, as when I indeed didn't sleep before the race, at least I wasn't surprised. The team were in contention to improve on last year's 23rd place and I headed out really ready to race, especially after having a gel in the changeover.

The first few controls flew by and I was gaining with another GPS runner from Tyrving (these were easy to pick out). He took what seemed to me to be a risky route 4 so I broke off on a simpler one, and, long story short, binned 6minutes. Filled with anger, I forced myself past several teams and only lost 40s to Ralph for the rest of the leg. I gained a minute on the leading team and lowered my lost number places to only 4. Still this was quite a crucial leg and it could have gone really, really well seeing the rest of my splits. But it didn't and I knew I had let the team down regardless of how supportive they were at the finish. I'm lucky that others were also unhappy with their races, and eventually we finished 1 place higher than last year, 22nd. However, the fact that we were all unhappy with this result makes me proud to be on such a great team, and I'm confident in a few years they'll/we'll break through to the top.

GPS

Post-Jukola, a bit of a holiday replaced the training camps that were quite frankly breaking me now. I spent the rest of the period before JWOC with Fiina, with a 3 day gap over midsummer to visit home quickly. Some training was done, but this wasn't the priority anymore. I was ill for a period (probably lucky to get it out the way early), and I was otherwise quite happy to chill before a small build back up in the two weeks before the races. We went back to the TuMe clubhut for a bit, and generally toured round the majority of southern Finland. My plot from the six weeks I spent in Finland can be seen below, quite cool!