Orienteering
Hi everyone. This has been extremely frustrating. I still don't know what I did differently this time so that the program allowed me to actually write stuff here. It took me 45 min of mucking around to get this far, and as far as I can tell, it was just a random happening that this time I can type. So I apologize, I will try to figure out what the problem is. In the meantime, stay posted.
Other than work, I have been spending most of my time for the past month orienteering. Up to today, I have been on a map training every day for over a month. However, tomorrow I am going to take a break. This weekend was the Swedish junior team trial races in Örskoldsvik, about 110 km south of Umeå. The races were held here because it is the closes to alpine terrain within easy access of most Swedes (getting to sites inland would have been logistically challenging for so many competitors). Before I go any further, let me just say that I have been incredibly humbled since I have started running here. I realize I am not - nor will I ever be - an elite orienteer, but the difference between my performances and the best guys here is just astronomical. I am happy if my run time is double the winning time. There is no other endurance sports that that is true. Even in sports I am pretty sucky at (road running) I can count on a time 1.5 times longer than the winner. In sports I am better at (skiing and biking) I can usually come within 1.1 times winning time of the elite guys. So being happy with 2x the winning time is humbling.
The reasons are multiple, but most of all, the terrain here is absolutely crazy. I am attaching a copy of today's map, I don't know how well it will come out. The terrain detail makes your head spin. The whole region is rocky, so the cliff and boulder symbols are very misleading. Back in Canada, a big boulder on the map is a pretty good reference point. Here there are dozens of boulders and the one that is mapped is the most "distinctive" boulder. Which Swedish orienteers can easily identify, because (as a good friend recently pointed out) their first experience orienteering is in-utero. This is not a joke. One of the women in our club is pregnant, probably just in her second trimester, and she came out to the race this weekend. She didn't run, but she was there. That counts, from an exposing-your-unborn-infant-to-
orienteering standpoint.
I am not ashamed to say that this race killed me. I was out for just under 3 hours, and running in this stuff is really hard (winning time was 1:28 by the way). Because everything is rocky, you have really poor footing, so you always have to concentrate on where you are putting your feet or else you fall. Onto another rock, which leads to unpleasant consequences. Happily, I usually absorb the impact with my skull, so damage is minimal. However, if all you do is focus on where you are putting your feet to avoid falling, you quickly lose contact with the map and then you are screwed again because you are lost. So orienteering properly here requires a really rapid ability to look where you are putting your feet, glance at the map, process what you are seeing, identify the next significant feature (also really hard) and repeat. Add to that the fact you are totally exhausted because you are running up a frickin mountain, and you might get an idea of how hard this is. The only good thing is that if I can get by on this terrain (which I am told is pretty much the hardest in the world) then when I get back to the easy "continental" terrain, which is what we mostly have in Canada, it should be a piece of cake. Uh, knock on wood...
Well, as I said, I will attempt to figure out whatever the problem is with this Blogger thingy. We now return you to your regularly scheduled web browsing...
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