Jukola

after leaving some of my biggest fans in the US, I feel that the time has come for the first english entry of my blog. Jukola was long awaited.. after watching last year's Jukola over the internet from California I felt that I can not suffer this hard another year. so I left San Diego on Wednesday morning, arrived in Riga on Thursday afternoon and left again for Jukola on Friday late afternoon. it was great pleasure to meet my old friends and teammates again, have some of this "orienteer-talk", for which you have to be one to understand, and later train in a technically demanding typical-finnish terrain. I felt pretty good about my running and orienteering skills, which brought me some confidence before the race.
on Saturday we had another short training in the official model map before the start of the ladies race, which we watched on the TV from our hotel. then, the always sarcastic but serious pre-race team meeting.. uncle Toni with "the terrain is shit in all of its forms" just nailed it :D some more sleep and I was ready to go. the start was as always amazing to watch with a record ~1500 teams running into the forest as bright lights at dusk. the first leg runners once again assured that the pace will be slow and that precise orienteering will be key to success. that was also my plan - always be confident about my location. I started my 3rd leg safe and took a longer route choice on roads to my first control, which was not-so-good, however, after not doing any serious mistakes to the first controls I felt I had found the perfect rhythm. so, I tried to keep it all very controlled. although I wasn't really pushing hard I started feeling fatigue in my muscles towards the end, which was probably also the reason for doing a couple of route choice mistakes to the CPs 15 and 17. well, road running in California isn't exactly orienteering in Finland. at the finish I felt quite satisfied with my run and my result of 1:37:14 and 42nd leg placing, 11 min after the winner. could have been somewhat better, but also worse, therefore I look forward to some even better performances later this year. in the end our team (Turun Metsänkävijät 3) placed 61st, just two spots after TuMe's 2nd team and right after the best 3rd team of Kristiansand OK.
of course, Jukola is a great party as well, so after my race I was hanging around the competition center for the rest of the night; cheering, watching and enjoying the greatest orienteering festival of the year.