Finland Days 1 - 3

Monday, 12 August 2024

By virtue of flying west to east and losing 3 hours to the time zone change, our first day in Finland was pretty short – we arrived at 4pm local time, picked up the car, drove 2 hours to Turku then had dinner with some Australians before finding our apartment in the Port Arthur suburb of central Turku.   Turku seemed pretty nice – it was the original capital of Finland and is a port town with a big archipelago nearby. Our apartment was in the older part of town of converted workers cottages:

The World Champs had been going for a few days already with the sprint qualification and sprint final having been run and won – because we wanted to fit in Iceland and the Faroes we had chosen to just come for the forest events – a qualification then a middle distance final followed by a rest day, and then the long distance final on the last day.

The first day of orienteering for us was the forest qualification race – To make the A Final I had to finish in about the top 40 of my heat (of 2 heats),  while Jon who had to be in the top 30 in his heat as there were more competitors and 3 heats. 

I had a steady run with some moments of good fortune when I stumbled over controls on my way to relocating so I finished 26^th in my heat but a long way back timewise. The terrain was really lovely – really detailed with lots of open moss-covered bits of bare rock – definitely more challenging than O-ringen had been as there were way less tracks and hardly any easy legs.  Jon only just missed out on making it to the A final – despite being a lot closer to the winner in time than I was.

The next day was the middle distance final – It was really tricky but I had a good run and finished 30^th which I’m really happy with - especially as there’s also the threat of relegation – if you finish in the bottom 10 of the A final, you get relegated down to the B final for the long distance race (while the top 10 in B move up) – so with 80 competitors I was well clear.  Jon wasn’t far off being promoted but ultimately stayed in B for the long final.