Again after barely one month home I flew back to Sweden for a training camp but most importantly Jukolan viesti in Rovaniemi (FIN) in the end of these two weeks!
The camp started out way better than in June and I felt like I finally understood the terrain. After 3 competitions in the end of this week (which went solala…;)) it was time to enter the Redmachine mobil direction Rovaniemi!
Arrived in Rovaniemi it was first of all extremely cold (below 10 degrees). But that didn’t stop us from doing our last preparations for Jukola by doing some night trainings. Feeling more and more comfortable with orienteering in Rovaniemi the big night was coming closer and closer.
And there it was… Saturday arrived and it was time to get into racing mood. Watching Venla in the afternoon like every year didn’t really help with the fear of getting completely lost tonight. It was much denser than expected and the mistakes sometimes really big. So I was pretty nervous entering the «stadium» 2 hours before midnight… Five minutes before 23:00 Pyrintö 1, 2 (me), 3 etc. and ca. 1000 other teams were ready to take on the night.
With some shots fired the pack sprinted (yes literally sprinted) to the starting point. Being perfectly prepared by an amazing Pyrintö team the fast start didn’t bother me at all… I did my thing and found myself in the front pack shortly before my first control. Got a bit nervous there and lost some positions. Then gained position by position till I found myself in the lead after control 7… Well didn’t last long because I wasn’t prepared for doing orienteering completely alone, so was then pretty soon not the first anymore.
From there it went pretty much downhill two one minute mistakes and the leading pack was gone. Leading a pack was really difficult for me and we lost some more time till the last forking… there I made a stupid decision and followed the wrong pack instead of doing what I thoght was right. So I lost the guys going around and therefore 2min more on the leaders. 4min behind and fortysixth position was surely not what I was hoping for at least after my good start…
Luckily after me there was a truly amazing Pascal Buchs on the 3rd leg who got us back in striking distance. With a good team performance we made it to the 14th place and therefore the best 2nd team performance for Pyrintö ever! But we are now more hungry than ever and we will come back for Tiomila and Jukola 2022!
