September camps

 ..and the girls I was running with in the ending part of the course seemed to become scared of my outfit and didn’t take any moves to pass me! :)..

8th of September my autumn season started from “Matveev Memorial”. For 20 days before that I had been “lazy” for different reasons, mostly making photos;) and also was little sick.

                                            

    The starting list of this competition was based upon age handicap, so overall I got 2nd place, being pretty satisfied with the level of my orienteering skills.

                                    

 

    This and many following orienteering sessions once again had proved to me a very simple thing: “don’t try to run quicker, than your head can think”. It was so obvious after my 20 days break. My current conditions were only leaving me a hope that I can make a progress in 3 weeks, then it will be the time for Russian Champ, the main goal of this autumn.

The next thing on schedule was commercial competition in Moscow region. That was my second forest training in September and first experience of inappropriate orienteering. Huge desire to proceed as fast as possible completely ruined my o-System! And that was there I claimed such a sinister things should not happen again.

Quite soon after that I headed for a long trip, aiming to take part in Finnish Champ Middle&Relay, “Soldatkin Memorial” in Cherepovets and staying in between at my friends place in Petrozavodsk.

    Petrozavodsk is a nice place with lots of challenging terrains right around the city. A few orienteering trainings were enough to make my o-System work in a correct way again.

    A week before FC I moved to my club base in Angelniemi (it means “peninsula of angels”).

                                                              

It’s pure pleasure to run in local coniferous woods with cliffs, boulders and mostly dry swamps!

On Friday I travelled to Jyväskylä for FC. Middle qualification went well, except for bad route choice to 2nd control.

In a final race (map here) I was doing also good until I missread a control point description in the end of the course, looking for it on cliff, while it was behind a knoll. Trying to find out where else could it be cost me 1 minute and several spots in the list.                         

    Relay. During bus ride to the start for unknown reason I was anticipating the situation which can be called in short “me and the wasps”. It turned out to be intuition! 

    Our first leg runner Heini Saarimäki came to changeover with tumefied face – she got bitten by 8 wasps!  I must confess, at that moment I lost a mere wish to go to the forest and share her faith! A dreadful fear before these annoying insects made my brain acting in extreme ways. First I put on myself every extra-clothes available (thermo-shirt and warm up suit) and then went to medicine tent which was by that time quite full of people suffered from wasps. With some effort I was capable to explain that I’m not bitten yet but already want to take some anti-allergy medication.

    After I’ve done all this there was no time left to take any warm up run, but being inside of my super-suit made me feel warm very soon! :) Trust me, it was really Hot bath for me in forest! And the girls I was running with in the ending part of the course seemed to become scared of my outfit and didn’t take any moves to pass me! :)

    So I managed to ascend from 21nd up to 10th place, which was nice due to the fact that 10 teams got medals in FC Relay. I have also to admit, though to my surprise, that all the “scary stuff” I went through helped my orienteering to become almost flawless.. 

                                        

                                        

                                                        

    During the second stay in Petrozavodsk I made 5 runs in three days (~50km), 2 of which were orienteering courses. 

Map Древлянка .

    “Soldatkin Memorial” in Cherepovets was nice experience in quite unusual terrain. It was last opportunity to test my skills before Russian Championship. Unfortunately on a Day1 I passed one control unnoticed and that naturally led to my disqualification.

    Map can be found there, description of what happened only in Russian language. Well, it was a clear sign, that not everything yet working ok in my o-System. If I’ll manage to do right things in every moment of time there is no room for any mistakes like this.

Here Day2 map 

                                     

    The story about Russian Championships finals coming up in the next article!