O-Ringen Day 4 and 5: Its O-ver!

I thought it necessary to do one final quick blog post about the last few days of O-Ringen. WOC will be starting up soon, so there will be plenty more news come tomorrow and in the future, so this is the final wrap-up on O-Ringen.

Mother Nature clearly felt that everyone was enjoying themselves too much, what with the nice weather for day 3 and the rest day (illustrated by the impromptu ice cream party with Ireland) and decided to bring the rain back for Stages 4 and 5. The campground rapidly turned into a swamp, and everyone finished soaking head to toe, not necessarily from the rain but from the very damp forest.

Day 4 was long-ish middle distance style race, in a very nice pretty fast forest, with some steep steeps and some flat flats. Everyone had a generally solid race in this terrain, so, oddly enough, there's not much to say about it. Perhaps Swedish terrain is now becoming old hat for us all! And the rain, well, we were all pretty much resigned to it at this point.

Day 5 brought a nice respite from the rain for racing time. The sun briefly came out, with some occasional showers. The evidence of rain was most obvious today, as the small blue lines marking streams on the maps were full blown rivers, marshes were more like lakes, and I can personally say I was hip deep at one point. I daresay if Carol found this particular marsh she may need a life jacket. However, this deep deep water clearly didn't affect Carol much, as she pulled out the performance of the week, placing third on the day in D21, running alone most of the time and destroying several hundred Swedes.

Robbie Anderson also had a great final result, finishing 24th overall in a massive H21 class. Overall, everyone did pretty darn amazing, and had at least one or two good races, and I'd say we all did Canada proud. If you've never been to O-Ringen, I highly recommend you do it at least once. It feels like a fundamental experience for any orienteer.

And, we'll leave you with Carol's final thought of the week: "I love orienteering in Sweden! Though I would appreciate it if it would stop raining."