Jukola

Chris and Em go to Jukola Jukola has to be the biggest orienteering competition in the world. This year over 14,500 people took part in the competition - 1,500 men's teams in the Jukola relay and 1000 women's teams in the Venla relay. Chris and I decided it was an experience not to be missed, so we flocked to Kytäjä, Finland, with all the other thousands on the weekend of June 19/20.

Chris was running for our local Trondheim Club WING OK, while I had managed to find myself a spot to run for the Trondheim university club NTNUI. The women's Venla relay takes place during the day on Saturday, then when the sun goes down and it begins to get the dark its time for the mens relay.

We arrived at the arena at about midday and spent some time wandering through the massive encampment of green military tents with oreinteering club flags flapping colourfully in the wind - it could be the Quiddich World Cup! But no, it is a crazy orienteering competition instead.

We wander past huge structures which turn out to be communal toilets where you can sit beside one another to do your buisiness. Then there are showers and saunas where thousands of naked people rinse off the sweat and grim from the run. Then you can go and have a beer at the numerous bars, or go shopping for some more orienteering gear at the great big Trimtex shop. The possibilites are endless - and we are out inthe middle of nowhere in a muddy paddock.

Enough of the shops though - it was time to get my orienteering gear on and get ready for my run. We had heard a lot about the extremly challenging terrain awaiting us this year, to was going to be low visibility, thick scrub, and lots of features such as rocks, cliffs and marshes. The terrain was also very steep, with lots of ups and downs, so contour detail was important too.

Fortunatly for me I got to go out in the daytime! I set out on my first leg making sure I always knew where I was and found it relativly easily, but from then on things got trickier and I started to make some mistakes. The funniest thing was the great trails of women along muddy tracks already well trampled by the time I got out into the forest. Many of them were middle aged Finnish women, and you could hear them shouting to their friends as soon as a control was spotted or a particular route choice chosen. I found ti hard to overtake there great swarms of women - that meant running off the trails and crashing through fresh undergrowth which was very hard work.
There was someone who was very good at that though - Lizzie Ingham (who will be representing NZ at WOC this year) was running for the British team Yorkshire 2. She began in about 930th position - and by the time she finished she was 30th! She said she just concentrated on where she was going and spent much of the time bashing along making her own way, and it wasn't till the finish that it dawned on her she had overtaken about 900 women!

After several more small muck-ups I was finally on my way into the finish, but all I could think was thank goodness I didn't have to do that in the dark - it was super challenging orienteering even in broad daylight! When I got back I decided to join in the mass showering phenomenon - but it was nice to be clean and ready to watch the exciting mens relay which started at 11pm. Chris and I waited in the long cues to get som dinner, before retreating to our army tent to set up our sleeping things for the night. Unfortunalty by that stage a light drizzle had started, which continued throughout the night.

The start of the men's relay is really an amazing spectacle. 1,500 runners are lined up, with white maps dangling on strings above them. They all have extremly powerful headtorches which beam out into the dark (and rain this year). There is a big screen displaying all the action, because it is hard to get through the crowds to see beyond the barriers to the actual runners. The top 20 teams will be wearing a GPS, so that the map and runners progress can also be displayed on the screen.

Countdown...and bang, the runners are off. Well, it looks more like a giant glittering stampede - they take off with colossal speed and I very much doubt that there is a lot of map reading going on at this point. Before you know it they have disappeared into the forest and the shouting guy on the loudspeaker and the big screen become the focus of attention. And so it goes on into the night - the legs take between 1 - 1.5 hours for the very best, so with 7 runners it will be around 8 am that the race is over.

Chris is running the 3rd leg which is also one of the longest. He has 12 km of bashing through dense forest during the darkest part of the night. It has also been raining so much that the rocks out in the forest are slippery and the tracks even muddier. Ola Berger is the first leg runner for Wing - he is an extremly good runner, especially on the hills, but tonight ha makes a few mistakes and loses 15 minutes to the winner of the first leg. By the time Chris heads out the team is about 20 minutes behind.

Unfortunalty Chris also found the navigation extremly challenging and despite being careful he still lost his way on the massive course and finished his leg in about 1.53 - a long run for Chris! The relay continues through the night (but I quietly sneak into the tent for a bit of sleep). In the morning it is the famed Halden SK from Norway which has triumphed in the relay. Wing's final leg runner and top Norwegian sprinter Oystein Kvaal Ostebro sadly mispunched on a control, meaning Chris's whole team is disqualified. The team is disapointed, but I think Chris didn't mind so much given he felt his run was pretty average.

Thousands of cars head away along the busy roads back to Helsinki. We caught a ride in Lizzie and Todd Oats's hire car and onto the infamous 'party ferry': the overnight ferry which takes all the Swedish orienteers back to Stockholm. We join the festivities for a while before retiring to our tiny little room at the very bottom of the boat - it is time to try and catch up on some sleep!