Sensational Salpa

Last weekend sensational Salpa-Jukola was held and it was a pretty good one for my club Wing OK. Last year we finished 34th in Venla and the guys were DSQ. Over the last couple of years we have lost some of our best runners like Stig Alvestad, Lene Bergersen and Øystein Kvaal Østerbø and for this year's Jukola festival we were missing current Wing stars Elise Egseth and Mathias Bjugan. Wing fought hard in the beautiful terrain and ended up 19th in Venla and 77th in Jukola.

I feel that the improvement in our results, even without our very best runners, reflects the work our new coaching team has put in this year. We have done a bit more technical training as a team and there has been even more encouragment for all runners, whatever their ability or goals, to attend these sessions. Almost all of our runners live in Trondheim. Sara Luscher lives in Switzerland now but lived in Trondheim for 6 months in 2009 and we are all good friends and work well as a team. Sara and I also ran for OK Ravinen together for a few years before I joined Wing in 2008.

Orienteering is an individual sport and it's what you do when you are out there alone against the course with the map that counts but to access your full ability you have to engage the right emotions, the ones where it's fun to feel challenged in a positive way. For some people that response comes more easily in a relay situation with a team that you feel part of and want to do your best for.

Chickn Wings Venla 2011 played out like this: Marte is in great shape and ran very well at the beginning and end of the 1st leg but unfortunately made a 4 min mistake at her 8th control. Pavla had a very stable race on 2nd leg and it was great to cheer her over the bridge and up the run in (in Czech). My race in Venla was quite good considering my current form, some small mistakes in the beginning but quite fast and clean in the 2nd half. I lost about 2:30 to the lead (4 min to the fastest leg time) but pulled us up from 70th to 38th. Sara was 9th fastest on the last leg and pulled us all the way up to 19th place. The top 20 teams in Venla were rewarded with a visit to the Jukola stage to collect our squirrels and Jukola medals.

Take it easy man. It pays to arrive early at Jukola, here we are getting a ride in a trailer behind a quad biker to pick up our luggage from the car park and get transported to the school where we stayed during Jukola.

Our guys were 77th but what about the other Jukola teams I was interested in following?

Team 44 Scotland: A lot of solid performances but it was consolidation rather than the top 40 finish they were looking for. After losing some time on the night legs they picked up and finished a solid 51st. Top 40 next year?

Team 498 NOPE team banter 1: Great success! The boys finished 375th to reach their goal of top 400. Preparation included playing the card game saboteur (and loving it), stand out performance by Ed Nicholas on 1st leg, he silenced his doubters by coming back 318th and losing only 17:26 to the lead.

Team 1300 Wing OK 2. Unfortunately Wing OK 2 could not field a full team but Marius Døllner and our excellent team manager Dag Erik Helland enjoyed the first 2 legs. Since the team was incomplete I was able to take the 6th leg map and jog through the course from the mass start at 9:15am after a full nights sleep. It was a pleasure to be in the terrain once more and soak up the special atmosphere.

I have also been competing in the Nordic Tour (NORT) but I've performed poorly in the first two rounds. This means I will start 13 minutes back in the chase start race in Oslo on Saturday. Despite my form dip I think NORT has been good experience for me, a reminder of the routines for international races. I was attending as a self-help athlete which was a strange situation since I was just staying with my clubmates in Finland. In Sweden I'm staying in the same accommodation as the British team so I got to spend some time with them for the first time since last Autumn's training camp in France, which has been fun.

Anyway I'm looking forward to two more races next weekend in Oslo, the final race of NORT and then 2nd leg of the Men's relay for Wing. After that my plan is to finish off some work in Trondheim and relax a bit and then concentrate on preparing as well as I can for WOC.

Happy midsummer! xx