Training Log Archive: Honza

Jukola 2019. Did the 5th leg (“Kindergarten leg”), setting off at half past six. A welcome change from the long 6th I endured last year. Fantastic weather - the sun had just come out and started shining in earnest. Started out cautiously, mindful of the pitfalls of a tough Finnish forest. The human chain stretched out for hundreds of metres ahead of me and was very difficult to pass anyway. Afterwards had a sequence where I stepped on the gas and just flew, and a sequence which required a lot more attention and was quite tedious. Made two errors throughout the race, each costing me about five minutes, and hesitated a few times but nothing fatal. Caught a “train” towards the end which helped me a lot (thanks guys! learned all the Finnish numbers - thought of it as a crash course :-) but luckily managed to get off when it veered off course.... In the end was a bit disappointed with my time, but the time loss wasn’t significant - 3 minutes equalled a 100 places. My congenital superstition prevented me from wearing a watch so no idea about the true length of my run, but I reckon I did a little over 10K. All in all, a wonderful experience. Very proud of our LuxOC team and our new Jukola best - we finished in 575th place, 24 notches better than last year.
https://orienteering.lu/en/news/jukola-2019-live-c...

Event: Jukola Venla 2019
 

Final training ahead of Jukola. A totally different experience from yesterday - a perfect map flowing exactly the way it should. Confidence restored :-)

Spent 1 1/2 hours honing my technical skills on a map named Ponsa that hosted the Finnish middle champs a couple of years ago. Didn’t understand the mapping style at all and found almost no flags easily. Extremely depressing! Eventually figured out the level of generalization - for every feature on the map there was a dozen features missing. Luckily, this map turned out to be irrelevant for Jukola anyway ...

Our first pre-Jukola training in Finland, courtesy of Jonas. Takes a while to get used to this type of forest .... performance-wise not bad but not great either.

A quick run around the neighbourhood. Off to Jukola 6 am tomorrow to run on the LuxOC team. Looking forward to an afternoon training in a Finnish forest!