During the past 3 years that I now have lived in Finland, I naturally might have adapted myself slowly to the Finnish life and activities. Besides going to sauna and visiting the mökki very frequently during the summer time, I’m also doing much more cross country skiing in the winter (unless there is no snow) … and I also started orienteering. While I have heard about and considered doing orienteering in Switzerland, I never actually went for a run. Most likely it would have required me to join a club, which was too much hassle just to give it a try. Here though, they have what is called “Rastit” – small casual orienteering runs which are organized by the local orienteering clubs and open for anyone to participate. When my father visited last August we decided to go together which was a lot of fun.
Orienteering with my father, Pauliina and Anssi
Now that I have done a few of those Iltarastit, I’m getting better in both running in the terrain and finding the control points. It required therefore only a few seconds consideration time when I was asked if I wanted to join a team for the Jukola Relay this year.
The Jukola Relay is a 7-leg relay race held annually somewhere in Finland. Since the first time in 1949 , it has been everywhere, from Lapland all the way to the south – this year it took place near Kuopio. With the race starting at 23:00, the first few runners normally have to go with headlights which makes a nice scene when taking off:
While the professional teams manage to finish the last leg sometime next morning, the runners of the amateur teams might be a bit behind so that they will start a new massstart for all the remaining participants. As I had the 6th leg, that’s where I ended up as well. The good part about that was, that there were already plenty of trails by the previous runners. The challenge still existed though coping with the very rough terrain and making sure that I was running to the correct control point. As it was a massstart I was surrounded by a group of people for the most time, but I always had to remind myself that not all of these were running the same route as I had (there were runners from different legs – and even runners who were doing the 6th leg as well might have other checkpoints as well).
In the end I was actually quite happy with my run. I only checked into a wrong control point once (but found the correct on soon afterwards), and otherwise managed to stay fairly well on track:
Even though I was totally destroyed when I arrived home (it was over 2hrs of running and then soon after 5hrs of driving home – and all that with little/no sleep during the night), it was an extremely exciting weekend… Definitely something to keep in mind for next year as well…