One of my clubmates made a quite big sprint map covering downtown Stuttgart, downtown Bad Cannstatt, the surrounding parks a some more. Earlier this I was a little bored a designed a course that covers the whole map. I ended with a 26.7 k straight line, 62 controls ultralong sprint course. It can be printed on six A3 or 11 A4 sheets. On rainy Sunday in August we made to run the course. We needed 3 h 38 min and run 32.6 k but made to use the whole map and visit some new parts of the city. You can see the map with the course here. Contact us for the map if you came to Stuttgart and like to run the course too.
After 1 year and 2 months waiting the Arctic circle Jukola took place in Rovaniemi. Late August instead the usual midsummer date means that we had the darkest Jukola ever, instead of the no night Jukola that was planed. The August date made it a little tricky to complete but with two Swedes we made it up to 7. We travelled a few days earlier to visit the Santa Claus village (always when Santa was already resting), the Lordi-square and to made two of the Jukola trainings. The Jukola had far less visitors than previous versions. The long travel from major airports and international travel restrictions payed their tribute. Coming from a small o-country is as still a big event with a lot of people around and many big shops. We made a quick visit at Friday to pick up our team bag and do some shopping before the big crowd arrives. Saturday we transferred complete to Jukola. Temperatures were quite low and there was some rain but we managed to watch the complete Venla relay. As expected from the old map and one of the training maps the forest consist of a lot of marsh. This makes running sometimes very hard but still a lot of. We all had good races but our 3rd leg runner made a mispunch so we didn´t take the chance for a good result. You can find our results here. Next year Jukola will be in south Finland and hopefully back to normal date.
After one year without international championships the World Masters Orienteering Championships takes place in the hot Hungarian summer in the area around Velence. For me a first year M40 it was the first WMOC. Original the world master should have been together with the World Masters games in Japan. When the World Masters Games were moved to 2022 Hungary stepped in to host the world masters this year. Format was the usual sprint qualification, sprint final, forest qualification, middle final, long final. Sprint races were host in Székesfehérvár. Forrest races take place in some semi open areas between Csákvár and Székesfehérvár. I was at the Hungária-Kupa 2000 in Csákvár, so I had a good idea what I have to expect Sprint qualifying was around a big park with some residential area. Fast running speed was necessary and as expected I didn´t make into the A-final. Sprint final was in downtown Székesfehérvár and more technical than the qualifying. I had a stable race but my ranking wasn´t really an improvement. As I made a late entry I had the last starting spot in the forest qualification and was running in the midday heat. I made a big 15 min. parallel error at the end of the course. Without the mistake the last qualification spot would have been possible. The final races went OK but again didn´t lead to big improvement. You can find the results at IOF eventor and my maps in my map archive. So would there be more WMOC for me? Maybe as you get a high quality IOF controlled event were the master classes are not only a add one. But I´m not so hooked that I´ll go there just because I need to go to WMOC.
