Sports :: Jukola relays

Well, since I dont have much what to write about, and not wanting to appear as a low-stakes-lots-of-hours hopeless poker player a.k.a. moron, here's another column, called "Sports", in which I'm gonna ramble about... sports ( bingo! :)

Most of it will be orienteering related, since this is the latest sport that I felt in "true love" with, and I can argue all night long that it is the best sport for your body and mind:) I was doing orienteering quite seriously (300-400km / month in training) for the past three years, except the last year, which I didnt do any sports at all. Now i'm planning a come back and this blog will be something to keep myself motivated maybe.

Before orienteering I was doing light athletics and was so-so in short distances (800m in 2:08) and high jump (175cm, at that time it was well above my eye level), and before that I was doing chess for 4years, and swimming for 2months when I was kid, but since I was semidrowning all the time I only developed swimming-pool-phobia :)

But back to orienteering. Recently I went to Jukola relays in Finland. This is the arguably biggest relay event in the world, this year 1300+ men and 900+ women teams lined up at the start, so in total there was 15k+ competitors (7 ppl in men team, and 4ppl in women team).
I didnt take part in any selection races, so I didnt make it to "best" pure-lithuanian team, that called themselves "Liettuan Lerpat" (in Finnish word 'lerpat' means "man after errection" or smth like that). Our team comprised only from amateurs, who just wanted to take part in Jukola, or to get away from home for a weekend. Most of us werent any good at orienteering, some (including me) never had ran in a finnish terrain ever before. But there's always a first time as they say.
The men competition started at 11pm, at dusk. 2nd leg and the beginning of the 3rd leg where during the dark, and after that the sun was set and one ran in daylight again. I ran the 5th leg (out of 7). Our team wasnt doing perfect (as expected), so it was already 6am in the morning when I started. I ran 1h 17min and pushed the team from 392th to the 363th. It wasnt perfect race though, not only that I wasnt fast (one cant be without any training), but I also did one bad mistake of 7minutes or so, so /slap myself, cause I could have finished in top 350. When I was on the last part of the course, the pro teams (fighting for the top spots) were finishing the WHOLE race, so I saw quite a lot of world class pros running by past me (walking:), which was nice. It would be even nicer, if I had strenght to run like them, but you cant expect champagne out of the water tap. All in all our team finished in 418th place, losing ~4.5hours to the winning team (their time was 8h 18min). It aint too bad, cause we still managed to beat 2/3 of the field.