Orienteering 1:04:55 [3] 8.6 km (7:33 / km)
shoes: 2005 Falcons
Day 1 of OK Linne's annual planning and training camp. We left Uppsala at 8am on Saturday and drove to the outskirts of Orebro (about 2.5 hours away), where the infamous wet Oringen was in 2000, and close to where Tiomila will be in April. As soon as we got there, we changed and went training. The training consisted of of 3 loops, each a bit less than 3km, in pretty technical but runnable terrain. Running in a couple of centimeters of snow was fun, but the ground wasn't totally frozen, so running in the soft moss was pretty hard, and breaking through the thin ice every step of the way across each marsh wasn't too pleasant.
loop times:
21:37
22:19
20:58
After training, we went to our cabins. Who was living in which one was predetermined weeks ahead of time, as was our whole schedule for the weekend, including the menu: we were given a bag food for the cabin and told what to eat when! I shared my cabin with Jan Troeng, Tomas Stenstrom, Henrik Gohl, Lina Akesson, and Sofie Johansson. As soon as we got to the cabins, we started cooking pasta and turned on the TV to watch the XC Skiing world cup race in Norway. I decided this was a good time to introduce my clubmates to Catching Features, and pulled out my laptop, which unfortunately only has the demo version installed at the moment. Of course, the guys were instantly addicted, and the girls sat on both sides of the player an gave him constant advice when he was lost, which was often.
After lunch, we had a planning meeting, where people discussed the club's results over the last couple of years, talked about goals and events to focus on for next year, as well as the schedule of various club camps and trips. Following this was supper, more Catching Features, and a scheduled "Social activity." We were told that the social activity would be a competition between cabins and given a list of items to bring to a specified location at a certain time, as well as a simple math problem to solve. So, we set out, dressed in the warmest clothes we could find, on what turned out to be a tresaure hunt/quiz through the snow. There were 12 question stations, each marked by a candle burning on top of a pile of snow. To find each question station, we had to use the one headlamp we were told to bring and find a path of reflective tape, with a small piece tape stuck on a tree every 20 meters or so. The questions were mostly of two types: random bits of trivia about the history of Swedish orienteering (Sample question - more or less: why were the results of the 1948 Vasterbotten District Relay Champs voided? (a) A control was misplaced; (b)The course setter went for a walk with the first two control flags after the race started; (c) The course setter thought the event was on a different day and didn't put out controls.)
The other half of the questions were little brain teasers (such as: how do you use six 9's and only the four basic arithmetic operations to get 100).
There was also a bonus question which involved calling a phone number that we got if we solved a math problem correctly. Needless to say, this was tons of fun, especially trying to discuss the answers with my teammates in a mixture of english and swedish and hiking through the woods in the snow on a Saturday night! After all the question stations, the path of reflective tape led us to a gazebo, where a fire was going, and hot dogs and marshmallows were ready for grilling. The results were counted and announced, and our cabin came second, with 10 questions right out of 12. After we returned to the cabins, the evening concluded with a round of Catching Features.
1:b
2:9*9+9+9+9/9=100