Finnish time

After a quite busy season, what about staying 3.5 months in Finland to train even more?

As I had to validate 14 weeks of working experience for my civil engineering studies (INSA), I was thinking that it could be a great experience to do it in Finland and use this occasion to improve my technique in Scandinavian terrain and especially get ready for next year world champs. (WOC 2013). That how I’ve been in Turku from the end of July (just after the WOC) until now.

There, I have been really well welcome: I could find some very good training opportunities and nice training company. Furthermore, as I can say that the work was not extremely demanding, it was like perfect conditions to lives there and train.

As the main goal was to improve my orienteering skill in the Finnish terrains, I’ve done quite many trainings on different interesting maps around:

After the end of the international O season with the NORT, it was also time for some interesting competitions around Turku:

And some other competitions some hours away of Ferry-boat to cross the Baltic Sea:

- The Swedish Middle champs where I didn’t get the final and the Swedish relay champs where we’ve got the Bronze medal with OK Hällen team-mates:

- The famous 25manna:

Moreover, it was also time to establish some ‘world records’ on some running spot of Turku’s orienteers to give references ;) And I’ve also presented how I train and we could see D. Hubmann training presentation. It could give some new ideas of training especially in Finland where the training culture is a bit different.

But it was also fun to do some Finnish activities:

              Happy ending?

Now, as I’m a bit afraid of the Finnish winter time, it’s about time to come back home in France where a new year at school is ‘waiting’ for me (must be the last one!). But before to leave, I was running my last orienteering competition of the year: Raatojuoksu a long distance with a mass start where I manage to cross the line in 1^st position… But the satisfaction was just for a short while until we realize that I was PM because I took the wrong map (n°26 instead of 29) so it was done before to start. (Anyway, would it be challenging to bring the chainsaw 1^st price to France?). Finally, it looks like I have still to improve and I may come back in Finland next year to show better performances…

 GPS

Train enough?

By the way, the end of October means the end of the training diary for most of the orienteers. It’s time to count the amount of training of the year: for me, it’s 575 hours. It looks like no big changes from the previous years, but I think to improve every year the quality and I have done quite a lot of orienteering (40%) with several training camps and competitions:

Kiitos paljon Suomi ja Hyvää jatkoa!