Jami provided some amazing terrain for this years Jukola with two contrasting areas of terrain - ultra fast (sub 3.5mpkm for some...) morrain and rocky, technical hills in a tough marsh.
Essu decided on a Finnish start to the race followed by a foreign second half: 1. Antti Keinänen, 2. Janne Hartman, 3. Antti Parjanne, 4. Matti-Pekka Vanninen, 5. Dickie Wren, 6. Me, 7. Fabien Pasquasy.
It worked well - everyone in the team ran a good race. We stuck close to the expected winning times, unfortunately the fastest teams went faster than predicted in the lightning fast forest. I was happy with my run, making only a few seconds of mistakes and finding a comfortable running speed. 35th is a par performance for us - although I know we are capable of better! Next year our goal must be top 25.
A big well done to Thierry and Kalevan Rasti for ending Halden's reign in such spectacular style!
21/6/04: Venla:
Helen and I returned to Tampere en route to this year’s Jukola at Jami
bringing back many a memory of training camps in 1999/2000/2001. Fortunately
the Venla terrain couldn’t have been less like that of WOC 2001.Vasteras SOK had decided to swap our legs round from the Tio Mila so Helen found herself in a mass start of 800 sprinting the 600m to the forest and the rest of the race in fact as the forest was so open and runnable! Helen ran cleanly to finish 47th under 3 minutes down on the leaders, Anna Thomasdotter ran well on leg 2 to pick up one place but unfortunately Elin Johannson made one big mistake to leave us down in 86th position. Finally it was my chance to get out in the amazing terrain after the earlier runners had told me how nice it was and they were right, I enjoyed every minute of my run (except perhaps the big hill on the spectator loop!) and finished in 43 minutes for the 8.6km course – one of the fastest speeds I’ve ever orienteered at.
Vasteras SOK finished in 62nd position, a disappointment after 35th in Tio Mila this year but nevertheless a great result against 800 teams. Congratulations must go to Heather Monro who returned from injury in some style to take Halden SK to the bronze medal on last leg.