Orienteering 1:24:37 [2] 8.46 km (10:00 / km)
shoes: VJ - Cleats
Decided to check out the clubhouse map (on which the club classic champs will be on tuesday) for the first time in the morning. About 12 minutes jogging to get on the map, then - heaven! Such awesome terrain close to home - it's just unbelievable! Technical, classic swedish terrain, with tiny little marshes and hills and bare rock everywhere. Jogged or walked a few technical controls to try to remember how to read a Swedish map. On the way back, ran through some pastures with herds of horses grazing on them, just fifteen minutes from my place. This is cool!!
Stopped by the clubhouse, checked out the big headlamp that Lars Magnusson left for me to borrow for tonight's night-O champs. I seem to still be registered for H21, which is madness. Will try to switch to an open class. All i want to do is jog around with a headlamp and try not to get lost too badly.
Running 15:00 [2] 1.76 mi (8:31 / mi)
shoes: VJ - Cleats
Warm-up for the night-O and figuring out how to use Lars' lamp at the same time.
Orienteering race 36:23 [4] 3.6 km (10:06 / km)
shoes: VJ - Cleats
Night-O District Champs. Lars registered me for H21, but I whimped out and switched to Öppen 5, having had minimal prior experience with night-O. (I think the last time i ran with a headlamp may have been the 2001 Jukola long night leg, when it was basically light after the first ten minutes of my run, the ten minutes which i spent totally lost.)
So my course was basically an orange-level course, which meant i could run really fast on the trails and then get lost as soon i got into the woods, which is basically what happened. I did spike a coupld of controls, but made mistakes on a whole bunch of others, losing like 7-8 minutes over the whole course, but avoiding disaster, which is all i was hoping for. One type of mistake that kept happening was one i rarely make during the day: screwing up AFTER having hit your attackpoint right on. I think this just means my fine navigation skills need some work. Or does someone have better theories?
All in all, this was really fun. It was a nice cool night, beautiful starlit sky, and lots of headlamps flickering all over the woods. I only managed a couple of faceplants, too.
A couple more realizations about OK Linne. First of all, this club is stacked! These were the night-O district champs, and the first 6 men in H21 were from our club, and that's without Jan Troeng or Lars. Lina won D21, and Oskar, the kid who i was paired for intervals with, easily won H16 although his lamp went out two-thirds of the way through the course. These guys will have a killer Tiomila team!
Also, as i am starting to get to know people a bit, everyone is separated into people who i speak english to and those i speak swedish to. I am not sure how that happened, but there is a very clear divide. And, as Spike predicted in his blog, i have people coming to me after the race (Bjorn, Oskar, Lina, and some of the club's old folks) and asking "Hur gick det?" Hopefully i will soon be able to give a coherent answer...
Oh, by the way, i was second in Öppen 5, three minutes back of the winner and just ahead of some girl...