Happy New Year!
Our plan to make a training-camp on last-minute-call -basis didn't work exactly as we had planned. There were other people escaping the darkness of Finland as well and we didn't find a suitable trip. So, the warm south means here Southern Finland and some degrees above zero.
I planned as many o-sessions as possible, because the terrains were snow-free and in that case it was reasonable to do as much as possible, even though the musculature wasn't in it's best shape... So, the training wasn't done "exactly by the book" when it comes to physical consideration but in the other hand it doesn't have to be like that always. The eagerness to orienteer was the main objective and as we had the means to fulfill the orienteering-hunger - why not do it? The winter seems to be coming afterall, as you can see from the last training's photo on the left.
These seven o-session on snowless terrains give me more power to outplay the Nordic winter. Now I have only 2½ weeks before the first real training-camp, so there won't happen any big downturn in the physical performance level in orienteering running. Concerning this, one important coaching question popped into my mind again: what do you benefit from those nice sessions done in the gym or track during the winter (related to fast power production and running technique) if you can't transfer it to the real performance in the woods? I can see the point doing these kind of trainings, and I can totally agree with that when it comes to sprint-orienteering. But the traditional orienteering is in my opinion different case: as we are still waiting the complete scientific analysis of physical orienteering performance - I can only state this cruel realistic fact: orienteering is a slow sport for slow, but tenacious people ;-).
That might have been a bit provoking and to be honest, I really enjoyed when looking at the results from yesterday's traditional New Year runs in Finland. Many orienteers did fine and that shows good attitude. Finally, let's get back to this training-camp in south, as the coach of the camp (Minna) recorded some material from the Inkoo-woods with her camera. You can check the video from Youtube. The leg on the video (15-16) can be found on the map below. Have a nice start of the New Year!:
