Sweden Day 1 - 4

Saturday, 27 July 2024

We're in Sweden for the Swedish 5 Day orienteering event - aka O-Ringen.  We last went in 2019 for 3 of the 5 days and stayed in a campervan in the O-Ringen camping city. This time we're having the complete experience by camping and competing for the full week, including doing the indoor orienteering event on the rest day.

We've been using our new tent and it's been great - it will be sad to give it away tomorrow as it can't come with us for the remainder of our trip. We also bought an electric grill from the supermarket and have used it every day - the cheese toasties after the events have been a treat:

The weather has been a bit mixed - we have had stretches of rain and stretches of sunshine - our tarp (also a supermarket purchase) has been alternately used as a sunshade and rain shelter. We're lucky enough to have a really good tent site up on a small hill within this huge area - the sites on the lower ground have been flooded and the roads were very muddy just a few days ago:

As usual the organisational infrastructure is incredible - the amount of work and planning required for the camping alone would be years worth, let alone for 5 days of orienteering for 17000 people in  3 different arenas.   Not to mention the mountain bike competition which happens at the same time.   There are about 10 'service' points throughout the campsite - each one has about 10 portaloos, rubbish sorting areas, washing up sinks and charging stations.  Everything is maintained daily by a huge lot of staff and volunteers.

Today we used a washing machine - there's only one bank of them in the entire campsite so timing is the key to not having to wait too long.

So far the orienteering has been great fun - the Swedish forests are a delight - particularly after mostly-treeless Ireland and Scotland. The complexity of the orienteering has been so much fun - so despite making plenty of navigational errors it's just a joy to be here.  I love it.

During our time off we've been swimming in the sea and also in some beautiful lakes nearby - we've got a car as well which makes it easy to get around.

 Back to the orienteering the indoor event was insane - we entered the 'hard' class - which had a lazy 900 competitors, many taking it very seriously. The winning time was around 27 minutes.  Zali took 37 as she has a knack for solving the problems of each leg as there were barriers, one way passages and stairs to nowhere. Jett and his mates took around 39 and Jon took 1hr 13 minutes - I would have taken even longer but I followed Zali from start to finish - panicking every time she dissapeared around a corner. I voluntarily DSQed myself at the end as I had to step over a barrier to keep up with her at one point.

Indoor is fun but I definitely prefer the forest!  Each event has quite long distances to walk to the start - today I walked 3.2km then completed my 3.4k long course (of course I went longer than that with route choice and circling around being confused!). I'm trying to stay in the top half of the 150 strong field but it's been hard going as I recover from being sick and have made lots of mistakes (not that it matters).   I'll be sorry that there's no more Swedish orienteering after tomorrow - I guess we can look forward to coming back next time!