JWOC 2017 Finland - Day 1 and Day 2

After a very long Flight from Johannesburg to Helsinki, most of the JWOC Team arrived in Finland.
The drive from Helsinki to Tampere (pronounced Tum-pear-rare according to a friendly Finnish guy) was rather uneventful besides from the first five minutes where we were found ourselves on the wrong side of the road. We did seem to drive through three different weather systems - from sunny skies to a light drizzle to torrential downpour.

We arrived at the campsite where we are staying for the next week and were promptly handed the keys to the house and a packet of linen each. Needless to say the first thing we did was make the beds where we found to our great amusement, that there are holes on each of the corners of the closed side of the duvet cover for some unknown reason. We also found that there was absolutely no cutlery and crockery in the the house. We succeeded in borrowing some from the reception with a deposit of  a totally unimportant document - Sarah's passport. Let's hope we don't loose anything...

We took a short walk to the nearest shops to get basic rations for the next day and to get the blood flowing through our legs again after many hours of sitting. We were treated to some amazing views of the lake. For supper we unanimously decided that we were too tired to cook so we went to the pizzeria and were all impressed with our bacon and cheese pizzas. This basically marked the end of the day for us, even though at 10 o'clock the sun had shown absolutely no sign of setting any time soon.

After almost 11 hours of solid sleep, the excited team was up and ready for something we were all looking forward to - the orienteering shop. It was truly an orienteers paradise, you could buy everything orienteering from compasses to strapping tape to an orienteering board game. We collected the JWOC training maps and obviously bought quite a bit.

Our first training was in a sprint relevant area that was next to the embargo for the actual sprint area. We were all completely shocked by the sheer amount of stairs there were but quickly consoled ourselves after checking the actual map and seeing that there are not nearly as many in the actual area. We started with a map walk/jog - just to see how different things were interpreted and then moved onto five different intervals planned by coach Sarah. The area seems to be less technical than traditional European old town yet it still is technical with small paths and inlets.

We then decided to have lunch on the "beach" on the safe edge of the embargo and were treated to an awesome view of the lake. The water is beyond freezing with Carl and Christie only managing to keep their feet in for a few moments. The rest of the afternoon was dedicated to card games and just general relaxing with a yoga/stretching session for Carl and Christie and a mini cross fit session for Sarah just before dinner.

Dinner was a rather interesting affair: the pot we had been given was tiny (it can only cook about 250g of pasta at a time). Dinner was therefore cooked in three stages with a short break in between each stage to run and get water from the ablutions. We also do not have any cooking utensils and therefore had to use a fork to fry the bacon.

The rest of the day/night had been put towards relaxing, planning tomorrows sessions and well to put in Sarah's terms "keep up the Fan Support" i.e. the blog and Instagram page (@JWOC2017_SouthAfrica)