Owls Count

Days 1, 2, and 3, of the O-Ringen, were to the east of Mjölby. The courses were on different parts of one big area, finishing in the same assembly field. All of my routes from the week are on RunOway. The walk to the assembly area crossed a river, which was rather high after the recent rain.

Day 1 - Bockarp
This was my first time orienteering competitively in Sweden. It was raining heavily and I struggled. There was a lot of rock on the ground and it took a while to work out which features had been mapped as rock and which had been mapped as contour features. Also, the recent rain meant that the ground was wet and muddy. Marsh areas, of which there were some, were wet. I fell face first into one marsh early on and was impressed with how well the waterproof map stood up to the conditions.

I ran fairly slowly and made mistakes at 4, 7, 8, and 9. Losing at least 25 minutes. I was a long way behind the winner - 92 minutes compared to a winning time of 35. Not a great start to the week!

Day 2 - Hallarna
Overall there was not much change to the first day. I took 110 minutes against a winning time of 43. However, I only made one real mistake - at 3 I was following an indistinct path in towards the control and the path just disappeared into several elephant tracks. I spent a long while trying to work out where I was and finally, thirteen minutes later, ran off to relocate and promptly fell over the control.

Other than the mistake I was generally running too slowly. The first two controls I took particularly slowly - losing seven minutes on the first couple of controls due to being overly cautious.

Day 3 - Vifolkavallen
This was a shorter course and my orienteering improved. I took 59 minutes to a winning time of 23. The only real mistake was at 4, where I went into the area slightly off target and missed the control. After a few minutes I found 6 and then navigated to 4, via 5, and then back again - as it was a shorter course the controls were closer together and, so, I lost only five minutes instead of a much larger potential loss of time.

My running was still too slow, but faster than on the first two days. Especially towards the end of the course I was able to get into a better speed and finished reasonably well.