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 26th 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 30th 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.
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