Euro Day 33 - O-Ringen - Race Day 1

Friday, 26 July 2019

It's 11:24pm. I don't know where the day goes! 

O-Ringen is still mind blowingly huge. We got into the bus queue to go out to the forest at 8.30am, and even though 5 busses were arriving every 5 minutes, we still had a half an hour wait to get on.  The journey was 15 minutes from the O-ringen square, where we are camping.

Walking into the arena for the first time in 30 years was amazing.

So many people, so many club tents, so much action.  Huge shops for food, clothing and other gear. 

By the time we had settled, got our shoes on and were ready to start, the sea of people had thickened so it was hard to get to the start of the 2k walk to the start!   Arriving half way through the 5-day event was a little tricky, as most people knew the drill, and we were all a bit rusty. First I realised I'd taken my running shoes to the event instead of my orienteering shoes. Chunky Hokas are NOT a good choice for mossy swedish terrain!

Then we got stopped on the way to the start as Zali and Jett were wearing shorts (it was 30 degrees). Turns out full leg covering is compulsory!  Jett got around it by pulling up his long socks to half way up his thighs, but Zali's long legs were never going to be acceptably covered by her socks, so we had to turn around and walk back (through the sea of people) to get my credit card and buy our way out of this situation.  One brand new pair of o-pants later and we were off to the start again. Luckily we have 'free' starts. I knew this meant that we could just go to the start whenever we wanted to, I didn't realise that we could also get our map, study it as long as we liked, then punch start!  I didn't want to ruin my orienteering experience so I just had a quick look at the first leg before I started, heaps of other people were spending a long time looking. We're just doing a 3 days 'challenge' category, so it's not serious anyway. I'm doing the 5k hard course, Jon the 7.5, and Zali and Jett are both doing the 3.5.   There's about 70 competitors in each of our classes so it's very little by O-ringen standards!

Jett didn't have a great run but the rest of use did ok-ish with some mistakes. I think I was 27th or something (our classes are mixed too) .

The bus queue home was a lot quicker, but still huge:

Back at the campervan we relaxed for a few hours. Jett and I went to play games in the O-ringen square while Jon napped and Zali read. Then it was time for our next event - the indoor orienteering we'd signed up for. Indoor orienteering has been Zali's dream for years, so it was great she finally got a chance to do it!  It was really hard working out where to go up and down the stairs to get to each control.  The organisers had put a lot of effort into it -with artificial barriers and crazy soundscapes  - one control was in the school's sauna (of course they have a sauna), and they'd put in disco lights. Another section was in a gym, so they'd build a labyrinth and the music was tetris game style. It was crazy!  Lots of fun. 

Zali thrashed us all - she took 13 minutes, Jon took 20, I took a bit over 20 but I mispunched by taking some controls accidentally out of order! Jett was slightly longer than me.  Zali is clearly the family champion! Tomorrow we get another chance though as we've signed up for it again.