Marsh, Contours and Forest

Been in Sweden for the past while. The orienteering is sweet!

The first day I landed in Nicks gav and just fell into bed. Pretty hot and humid.
Day two was a jog around the Bosom complex. Its part of the swedish sports training facilities thingy. It had a lot of stuff. Indoor track, massive gym, outdoor sprinting strip, soccer pitch (outdoor and indoor) and its beside the sea, on an orienteering map! I ran, jogged, walked around the Bosom map. Missed a few controls, found a few controls. In the afternoon I ended up on IFK's home map. I loved it. Not that technical but fun none the less.

The next afternoon, after watching the tour I did this training.

The training was set up by Theirry Gueorgiou, middle distance master. The basis of the course is to get the fundamentals of orienteering down to a tee in the one orienteering session - must be a bitch to do in OCAD!

As can be seen, I was crap. Contour only was a horror, can't do it, at all. But once I gave up on that and bailed out on taking a compass over nothingness I opted to tackle the control picking and I was pretty happy with it. If only we had one may like this in Ireland. The guys living in Sweden have no excuses for not destroying the rest of us.

The day before I headed north to Borlange, the location of the World Student Champs I ran the 2009 IFK Lid KM course. It went ok. Some good, some bad but overall I really enjoyed just been out on the map. (Neil scoffed when I told him I enjoyed it).

After this training I caught the train north with Nick. Friday was an easy day. Just a light jog around Borlange, bumped into some Kiwis, hotel room, food, sleep and chilling out. Neil and Niamh arrived and Team Ireland were all in one piece.

Saturday was my first look at Borlange terrain. It was tough. Very tough. Very physical. Roz told me back in september that it was going to be a sufferfest and she wasn't joking. I did a "short" training session and ended up been out for 90mins. Some of the course was nice, some not so nice. I reckon my problems will be in the control circle so just have a BFA (big feckoff attackpoint, last seen JWOC, Gothenburg) and it'll be grand.

The model event is tomorrow and things are heating up to be an epic week!

Revenge attack on Sweden has begun . . . .