Night Training & Jukola

Monday, 8 July 2024

Jett and 6 of his friends signed up to do a 7 leg orienteering relay called Jukola in Finland in June. All the legs are long and tough and the relay starts at 11pm so the first few runners have to contend with darkness as well as the tricky Finnish terrain. 

To ensure Jett and his friends made it home, Zali and I set up a series of night training events in Hobart, followed by a very quick weekend in St Helens featuring more night training sessions and a very early (and freezing as it turned out) training before we returned home via a regular organised orienteering event.

To do all the preparation for this training weekend Zali and I went to St Helens the Sunday before and spent our free time planning exercises, printing courses, taping sites and making a billboard to simulate the full Jukolo experience.  Jon, Jett and his local team mates Sam & Niko, together with some other keen orienteering friends arrived on Friday night, just in time to be sent into the darkness for their first exercise.  By the time we left on Sunday morning after a 6am training session everyone was exhausted but at least slightly more prepared for the relay.

Because I am writing this entry many weeks later I can also report that Jukola was a great success – with 1400 teams I was thinking the top 1000 would be a good result for a team of 7 Australian juniors, most of them having never run in Finland before. As it turned out they finished an amazing 210ish which was really impressive.

Not only that but they looked great in their new St Helens Orienteering Club orienteering tops which has been another project Jon, Zali and I have been working on. We haven’t done the paper work yet but we’ve done the most important thing which is create the logo and make some tops.  The publicity from the team at Jukola across the Australian orienteering network has already given the almost-formed club some momentum – we’re planning our first AGM in September.