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23.9.2023 Blog #6 After competition
Two weeks have passed and already the ERC weekend feels in many ways as something surreal. Did it really happen that 450 people were wandering in the Raasi forests just two weeks ago? Together with the wolves, I heard in the competition morning, as at least one team had heard howling wolves during the competition.
Regarding the overall course planning, my goal was to get the teams scattered around the area as soon as possible so that there are 4 or even 6 potential directions right from the beginning. In the South, I placed many controls with high points in a relatively small area to have something lucrative far away from the competition center. I thought that the decision to go or not to go to the South would have been a difficult one, as it was so far away and making mistakes in the South would easily have ruined the course plans of the teams. I also thought that going to South would be an even bigger challenge, as I estimated that many teams would be in the challenging South at night. I thought that the Kurjenrahka Park paths in the Southeast and the easy controls along the paths would be a good choice for the nighttime (although they would not be enough for the whole night). I expected the winners of the Open class to gain about 150 kilometers during the race, but it is obvious now that the marshes between the controls took their toll. I tried to place the controls in areas where the forest was older and more open but did not quite understand that the areas between the controls were slow to run.
During the daytime, the teams did not make that many or big mistakes except for in a couple of controls. Mostly the difficulties took place during the night, but that was something to be expected. The night was so long, making the night orienteering skills a central thing in succeeding.
Looking back now, I should have placed two controls in an easier place. These were controls 80 and 101. Control 80 was clearly too difficult. I originally selected the place of the control by approaching from the North. Many competitors approached the control from the South, and it was much more challenging from that direction. For some reason – which I find difficult to understand – the hill next to the control at East was like a magnet, pulling people there for long times.
It was a total surprise to me that many teams approached 101 from the North, by making a very long round trip using the paths. It never occurred to me that this would be a potential course option, so I never checked the map in the North of 101. There obviously has been something strange in the terrain there close to the fields, as none of these teams used the last path from the North and they all started searching the control from the East side of 101 – none of these teams found the control without problems.
Mostly the teams had realized that the northern part of the course was the most challenging one and left the area before dark. 5 hours from the start some 130 teams were North from Raasi, 10 hours from the start (at 23:00) just half of this amount, and 13 hours from the start (at 02:00) only some 40 teams.
I was amazed, how well the teams in the South clarified the controls during the nighttime. Clearly the more skilled orienteerers were the ones visiting the South. It was really nice to follow your performance during the night.
The difficulty of some controls became as quite a surprise to me. For example, 54 seemed to me as kind of an easy one as it was next to a big marsh. So, if you come from the North, from the road, you just take a careful direction with your compass and then proceed until the marsh is in front of you. Even at night, doing this kind of operation should be quite simple. Still, many teams had huge problems at 54 during the night.
Many of the mistakes did not come from difficult control positions but from the lack of the very essential skills of using the compass or measuring the distance. For example:
- if you in the end of a forest road should take the path 20 degrees to the left, why do you take the path that is 90 degrees to the right?
- if you leave from the turn of a road with a good direction towards a control that is 550 meters away, why do you suddenly turn 90 degrees to the right just 150 meters after leaving the road?
- if the control is below the hill, right next to a large marsh, why do you keep on searching the control from the slope of the hill?
- if the control is on an open marsh, why do you walk through that open marsh and spend tens of minutes searching the control in a dense forest behind the open marsh?
Many more questions like these could be asked. And maybe there are logical explanations behind these observations; I just could not see them from following the GPS dots. I do realize that a big part of these mistakes is that you are extremely tired and concentrating is difficult. Nevertheless, as the course setter, it was definitely, absolutely painful to follow these adventures in real-time. Several times I wanted to take the car and come and see and ask, what is the problem.
As a former university lecturer, I have learned that students appreciate if you require them to work hard, if only the learning topic is important. Students mostly understand that sometimes hard work is needed to learn skills that are essential in the working life. Maybe this “no pain, no gain” approach was unconsciously there during the construction of the ERC course – that to succeed you need to work hard, and rigorously use your navigation skills to have a good result. And then in the end, when you have completed the course and have experienced blood, sweat, tears and toil, you think that you have achieved something really specific. So, in a way, it was clear to me that ERC 2023 would be more demanding than most of the ERCs and WRCs I have participated. And I think that diversity between the competitions is alright – that different countries offer different kinds of challenges. Often the challenges relate to the physical challenge of steep mountain slopes, or to the difficulty of creating the best route for yourself. As a person with 50 years of experience in orienteering, I have always in previous ERCs and WRCs missed more difficult orienteering challenges. It was clear to me from the beginning that ERC 2023 would be more challenging orienteering-wise, much because of the terrain was so demanding. So, probably the nature of this years ERC offered a possibility to succeed to teams that might not be that competitive in other kinds or terrains.
I have heard rumours that in 2024 ERC will be in Estonia. That sounds really good! However, I do not understand, why the selection of the next organizer is not made and published earlier. This is something IRF should consider in the future – the earlier you grant the competitions, the more time the organizers have for realizing a good competition.
Now that two weeks have passed, I hope you all ERC 2023 participants feel that you have experienced something specific, something to remember for a long time. Thank you everybody for participating, congratulations to the medalists, congratulations to everybody who won themselves, and special thanks go to our Vetters Juhani and Iiro, who responsibly checked all the controls in spring and summer 2023. Also, I want to thank the TuMe members; your performance in organizing the competition and its processes was brilliant!
See you next year in Estonia, I believe!
Timo, ERC 2023 course setter
25.4.2023 Blog #5
The winter was strange this year – it actually only began on February 17th and ended during the first week of April (based on my first and last skiing dates). I was hoping to do a lot of fieldwork in March, but that really was impossible because of the amount of snow. As I had promised the vetters to have the control points decided by mid-April, I have been quite busy visiting the terrain since Easter. I need one more visit and then the map can be sent to the vetters. So far (Tuesday, 25th of April) I have visited the terrain 22 times, walked 285 km and spent 75 hours in the field. It will be a relief to hand the map over to the vetters, although the map will continue to be improved, as TuMe members hopefully improve the map when they visit the competition area. I can already say that it is frustrating that I cannot participate myself, the ERC route and competition terrain will be something I would love to experience as a participant: very challenging route planning, partly very demanding orienteering challenges, and extremely important to plan where to proceed during the night.
Naturally, I have at this point gained a holistic view on the whole competition area and can state the following about the terrain:
- The scarcity of dense vegetation in the area is surprising. Based on the age of most of the forests in the north and south in the area, there was a considerable amount of logging some 30-50 years ago. Right after the logging, the scenery to these forests must have been quite rude with huge open logged areas. Since then, the trees have grown – they are not saplings anymore. In addition, these young forests have been thinned out and the majority of them are really easy to run or walk in. For this reason, there is very little green on the map.
- The map will include plenty of ditches – see the figure from the base map material. Truly, the competition area must contain several hundreds of kilometers of human dug ditches. The ditches have been drawn on the map from aerial photographs, which means that no one has checked that they really are visible in the terrain. Moreover, I have made very few updates of these ditches on the map - they have been updated if they reach inside control circles. Therefore, a suitable amount of skepticism is appropriate when you assess whether the ditches on map are actually discernable in the terrain.
- Without exception, the hilltops are easy to run or walk on. There is very little soil on the hills and that is why the vegetation is thin. The small amount of soil on the hills comes from the fact that during the ice age, all the soil was “steamrolled” to the south by the glaciers. That soil is now in the sea, or in Estonia, or in another country to the south of Finland! Once the ice melted, the surface of the land was bare rock. Additionally, during the ice age, an ice layer of several kilometers pressed the earth’s mantle downward. Since the ice melted 11.700 years ago, the mantle has gradually risen. The speed of this rising in southern Finland is around 5 mm every year. This means that the competition terrain has been under the sea as recent as some 5000-7000 years ago.
Regarding the number of entries per day – see the attached graph. April has been very quiet - totally different from the end of January. Hopefully the end of this week will look very different!
Then to the eternal wondering – where are the Swedes and Norwegians? As of April 24, no enrollments have come from those neighbors. This is why our organization decided to create an extra temptation for those particular Scandinavians: the first two Swedes and Norwegians to register will get a 50% discount off the entry fee. As the present entry fee period ends by April 30, those of you who have not yet enrolled, you should all act now! Kom igen Svenska och Norska!
As you have noted, there was a rather long period of time between this and the previous blog post. From now on, map fieldwork no longer requires as much time, probably allowing more opportunities for me to write about important developments.
Timo, ERC 2023 course setter
29.1.2023 Blog #4
Who are the Men in Black (nowadays luckily also including some women), the ERC2023 organizers? Turun Metsänkävijät – TuMe – the organizing club of ERC2023 is an orienteering club that is one of the best orienteering relay clubs in the world. Anyone following the two most important orienteering club relays – Jukola in Finland and Tiomila in Sweden – is very well aware that TuMe has now for more than 35 years (with some breaks) competed for the top positions in these relays. The first significant accomplishments took place in 1985 and 1986 when TuMe was leading Tiomila on a couple of occasions. The best years so far have been 2001 (2nd in Jukola, 8 seconds behind the winner) and 2002 (2nd in Tiomila). We are still waiting for the big victory, which I am sure will come…
Since those days MIB have also had success in the world championships, the greatest achievement definitely being the middle distance world championship in 2012 by Edgars Bertuks. Nowadays TuMe has several national team runners from Finland, Latvia, Belgium, Scotland, Czechia, Spain, Austria, and years ago also from Australia. Quite an international team.
Originally, TuMe became well known for the collaboration with Latvian runners. In the 80s, the club was a forerunner in international collaboration, and actually maybe even slightly despised by this, as the conservative circles though that the teams in Jukola and Tiomila should consist only of members of one nationality. Since then the situation has totally changed, and nowadays no club in the Nordic countries expects to succeed in top relays without world-class reinforcements from other countries.
TuMe’s standard jersey is black with some yellow, hence the Men in Black. Our symbol is a bear footprint, which you can find in our jersey - you soon have the possibility of purchasing the ERC 2023 jersey from our web page.
The elite team in TuMe orienteering is called Team Karhu (Team Bear). The bear symbol originates from TuMe’s scout roots. The club was originally established as a boy scout club in 1925, but today the scouts and orienteerers are two independent sections in TuMe, of course collaborating strongly, for example in the organization of ERC2023. The origin of the bear symbol comes from the will to emphasize the strong connection between TuMe, the Finnish nature, and the wilderness.
At the time of writing (Sunday Jan 29th, 3pm Finnish time), 78 teams have enrolled to the ERC, with the following headcounts: LAT 62, EST 46, FIN 35, LTU 7, POL 2, HUN 2, CZE 2, ITA 2, GBR 2, GER 1, SUI 1.
What is especially nice in the list is the strong international flavor, which we hope to increase, of course.
Local news: we lost the snow (well, yesterday we got 0,001 cm of snow, so the ground is mostly white), the day length is 7:43h (already 2 hours longer than before Christmas), so the evenings will soon be light.
Still 2 days left to enroll with the lowest participation fee – act now!
Timo, ERC 2023 course setter
31.12.2022 Blog #3
Snow came exceptionally early this year, already on the ground at the end of November. For a long time, it looked like it would stay, but then the new normal returned. Depression and wet winds from southwest and 3 days of rain. On December 22, the ground was bare again. When the length of the day in December is 5 hours 45 minutes, the sun stays low behind thick clouds and everything in the surroundings is black, you really wonder why our ancestors moved this far north. But of course, even just 30 years ago, the climate was quite different and a snowy Christmas was the normal. Luckily, on Friday, December 23, the snow came back; maybe now it will stay on the ground over the New Year. The picture is from Christmas Day, a short and rare moment with sunshine.
I faced a personal setback in early November. I took part in the local classic Nenänvalkaisu (nose bleaching) orienteering, and got a sprain in my ankle ligament. It is a bizarre moment, when you feel/hear the pop in your ankle and at the same time start lamenting about the things you are going to miss (like Turku Rogaining Night Sprint and ERC fieldwork) while also pretending that this is nothing and continuing the race. Then when the ankle started feeling better again, I broke my little toe in the sauna. The outcome was that walking on the terrain was not an option for many weeks. So, no fieldwork in November and so far only two short trips in December. Fortunately, I did start exercising again by skiing on natural snow (not made with snow cannons) already in mid-December (before the toe accident), maybe this early for the first time in my life, at least since the early 1980s. But that fun is now over again, as there is not enough new snow for skiing yet.
So no news from the competition terrain this time, but I will tell you an old story, which you can assuredly believe, as it has been well documented. I am not telling this story to scare you, but on the contrary, to convince you that there is no threat. The chain of events took place in 1880-1882, and some of these events took place on the very terrain of the ERC 2023 area. These events have had a huge impact on how Finns feel about wolves. It is quite remarkable that these old events happened in the same area where some say we today have the densest population of wolves in Finland. I am not telling you this story to make you afraid of enrolling to ERC 2023 but purely because it is interesting and links to the ERC competition area.
As said, Finns have a complicated relationship with wolves. I believe the Estonians are much more relaxed with their much denser wolf population – in Estonia the density is seven times higher than in Finland. The main reason behind this different attitude are the events of 1880-82. In autumn 1880, a wolf abducted a 8 year old boy and killed him in Kalanti, ~60 km from Turku. During the next two years, the same wolf (or maybe a pair of wolves) killed altogether 22 children ranging from 2 to 10 years old in the area north of Turku. At least one of the victims faced his destiny in the ERC area (10 year old boy, 10.6.1881). Researchers have concluded that the main culprit was an old female wolf with poor teeth. The forests were empty of game at those times – especially of elk (moose in North American English), as it had almost become extinct in Finland after the great hunger years. In the 1800s, there were no white-tailed deer or roe deer in these forests, so, the only game for this wolf was cattle and children. To try and stop this problem, at best over one thousand people took part in a wolf chase in June 1880, without success.
The story ended when the wolf was shot by a sole hunter in early 1882. The outcome from this chain of events was that Finns started profoundly hating wolves, and the wolf became almost extinct in Finland. This all led to the Turku district lacking any regular wolf packs for over 100 years. Today, now that the wolves have returned, people are still intimidated by these ancient events, although the forests are full of elk and deer, providing the wolf with plenty of game. And no person in Finland has been killed (or attacked?) by a wolf since 1882. Regarding ERC 2023, the wolves will flee the competition area, when the competition starts. The tragedy here is that the whole wolf population has suffered from the acts of this sole female wolf. I am not saying that wolves would not be dangerous for human beings in certain circumstances, but today these circumstances of the past no longer exist.
From wolves to Swedes and Norwegians.
If you have any Swedish or Norwegian friends who might be interested in participating in ERC, please distribute ERC information to them. As I have mentioned, I am really puzzled why there have been so few Scandinavian rogainers in WRCs and ERCs. Especially considering that the Swedes and Norwegians have some crazy orienteering events that come very close to the physical challenges of 24 h rogaining. One event of this kind is the mountain orienteering (fjällorienteering) in Sweden, which has been arranged since 1938 (could not find any recent info on the event, maybe it is defunct). So, they have tradition for long events. Please, inform your Scandinavian friends about ERC 2023 and remind them that we have made it very easy to travel here by ferry from Stockholm.
The entry system will be opened on January 1 and we are very eager to see, where the first entrants will come from. Personally, I feel that we will have a good number of Finnish participants, as the Finnish rogaining events are becoming more common and there are more and more participants in them. I am quite sure we will have more Finns than there were in WRC 2015 in Finnish Lapland (rough estimate from the results of WRC 2015 gave me 150-160 Finnish rogainers in 2015), as we are in the south of the country and travelling for most Finns is much easier. Jari, the chair of Rogaining Finland, calculated that there were 15 bigger Rogaining events in Finland in 2022, and I am sure the list is not exhaustive.
The challenge in Finland may be that there have not been many 24 h events; the only one I know is the Finnish Rogaining Championships. It may be that many are slightly afraid of the length of the 24h challenge. For those I would like to say, go take part in the Finnish Championships (FRC) in Loviisa in May 2023 (www.extremeendurance.fi/sm) and find out how it feels. You might be surprised, how smoothly the race goes for you. And after a successful FRC it is easy to take part in ERC.
Happy New Year everybody!
Timo, ERC 2023 course setter
4.11.2022 Blog #2
Sunday, October 23rd, when mapping the competition area, I began pondering how privileged I am, to be able to wander here without needing to worry about whether I should defend my country against barbaric invaders. It is impossible to understand the pain Ukrainians feel now, but I truly hope the situation will be better next September, and at least the biggest war criminals have met their justified destiny. Politics should not be part of sports, but Russia truly has made it a compulsory part of sports, in so many ways. Slava Ukraini! – I hope the Ukrainians have the possibility to travel to Finland next September in a very different political situation, and you are able to defend your excellent success you had in Czechia in August 2022.
After the first mapping trip in September, I realized that once again I had started to make a map with too much detail. In a way, creating a rogaining map is more difficult than creating a regular orienteering map, because so much has to be left out from the rogaining map. This situation arises because the base material from the National Land Survey of Finland is so detailed (see an example in the northern part of the area) and when you shrink these details to a 1:30.000 scale, many of these details need to be removed, to keep the map readable. Most (if not all) of the form lines (the line between the real contours) need to deleted.
After five visits to the terrain, I am positively surprised by the forests outside the national park – there are plenty of “proper” forests and beautiful open marshes (see the video). Of course, there are also forest areas that are more commercially exploited, but they certainly are not as many as I expected. It is surprising how remote these forests are. In Oct 23rd, a day of very good weather, I only heard two distant cars and one barking dog during the 4 hour hike. If you look at the Northern part of the competition area (more than 110 square kilometers), there are fewer than 10 houses where people live year around. Still the center of the competition area is less than 40 kilometers as the crow flies from the old capital of Finland, Turku. The main reason the lack of habitation must be the fact that the terrain is not suitable for agriculture, replete with rocky hills and large open marshes between them. The area also closely resembles some parts of the terrain in which the Finnish Rogaining Championships in 2019 were held. See the map and the routes from FRC 2019 here. This area is next to the ERC 2023 area, just to the north of it.
I was planning to describe the fauna in the area later in spring, but this story needs to be told now. On Sunday, October 30, I was returning to my car, when I noticed a line of elk hunters in their posts. I walked to the closest man and asked, if it is safe to pass through their line. I tried to show him on the map where I was headed, but he started laughing and told me that he does not have his glasses with him. No glasses while hunting? He further added that “we will not shoot you, we are not that crazy” and laughed some more. I was not so keen on making a 10 km detour to the car, so I decided to believe that they are not “crazy”. Luckily, I had my yellow vest on me for the first time this autumn.
After a while, I spotted another hunter who shouted to me that a wolf had passed directly next to my car only 3 minutes ago while evading the hunting dogs chasing the elk. I replied spontaneously, “Wow, a wolf, awesome”, instantly realizing, that maybe the wolf is not such a welcome guest for the hunters. In any case, I unfortunately missed my first wild wolf sight by just a few minutes. What a pity. But now I do not need to speculate whether there are wolves here.
There was a comment on my last posting, wondering whether I am planning a course that might be too difficult for some participants. Certainly, there will be demanding routes between controls, but I am not quite sure if a rogaining route can ever be as difficult as classic orienteering because the locations for the control flags on a rogaining map must be substantial and distinguishable due to the scale. Moreover, we are not planning to hide any control flags, rather we will follow the IRF rules which clearly state that “Each marker [control flag] shall be placed in such a manner that competitors who successfully navigate to the correct position have little or no trouble finding the marker. …the marker shall be generally visible from at least 25 metres in most directions in clear daylight.” But the fact is that at least the documents that I have received from IRF, do not state anything about how difficult (orienteering-wise) the route should be. I personally very much liked the level of difficulty found in the course in Otepää, Estonia, in ERC 2021 - especially the controls in the northeastern and southwestern sections (see the map). In ERC 23, we will probably have something similar, maybe… But regarding the issue of how difficult it should be, I would like to ask your opinion about the topic. How would you define a suitable difficulty level for a rogaining championship competition? Any ideas
Bulletin II will be out by the end of November.
Happy running trails to everybody!
Timo, ERC 2023 course setter
27.9.2022 Blog #1
Now that WRC 2022 in Czechia has successfully been completed, it is time to gradually shift focus to next year’s ERC in Finland, the biggest and most important Rogaining event in Europe in 2023.
But first, let us all give a big thanks to Jan Tojnar and the Czech WRC team for the very successful and memorable event! It was a great physical challenge and mental test of route-planning skills. The WRC 2022 event clearly demonstrated that Rogaining in different countries and regions provides very diverse challenges, depending on the characteristics of the terrain. I think this time the biggest challenge was route planning, in which you needed to understand how big a toll was required to run up and down the many mountain slopes. Our team was not that successful in considering this, unfortunately.
ERC 2023 will be very different from WRC 2022 in many respects. First, the terrain is – compared to Paprsek region in Czechia – only mildly hilly. However, this will be compensated with terrain that provides the route planner the possibility to place the controls on the map so that the competitors cannot easily rely on paths and forest roads, but rather need to navigate in the forest and use their true orienteering skills.
Second, the terrain will be more difficult in terms of orienteering. The terrain is detailed and there is always a danger to become disoriented in the middle of a hilly area. Moreover, my goal as the course setter is to plan controls in as-difficult-as-possible locations in the competition area. Thus, ERC 2023 will be more demanding orienteering-wise than what we have seen in recent ERCs and WRCs held in Europe. This approach indicates a move towards traditional forest orienteering, in which you need be able to read the details on the map and understand the contours. Those who have come to Rogaining events with an orienteering background will love it, I am certain of that.
On Sunday, September 18th, I made my first field trip to the competition area. At 9am, I arrived quite near the middle of the map area. It was 9 degrees Celsius, no wind, and partly cloudy weather. Bird migration was in full swing: finches, bramblings, bullfinches, siskins and thrushes. Far away in the west, the black grouse was busy tending to its autumn courtship. In September, the forests are still alive, but in just one month it will be noticeably quieter here. Next year, the ERC will be held in this area in early September, which clearly is autumn-time in Finland, but the weather should be just perfect for Rogaining.
After more than 4 hours, I had walked nearly 14 km and covered one of the most detailed and hilly areas on the map. These hills are very fast to run because the surface is generally clear and quite hard. Most of the tops of the hills in this part of Finland are like this (see the photo). Thus, the tops are free of deep vegetation and even bare in some places. In orienteering maps in Finland, these kind of open hills are marked with grey on the map, but the ERC 2023 map will not include this marking. Nevertheless, you can expect that most of the hilltops are like this.
The detailed areas are unavoidably slow to map although I know that the mapping speed will increase as I move to the less detailed areas. The positive surprise from this trip was the fact that visibility in the large marshes in the area was quite extensive, not bushy at all. In general, the thickets here are nothing compared, for example, to the jungles in the Baltic countries.
One aim in my map-making is to be able to provide the competitors valid information on the passability of the terrain. This is an issue that has bothered me in many previous ERCs and WRCs – that the map does not inform you about the passability of the terrain – thickets as well as old forests are all marked in white. In ERC 2023, the situation will be different – the map will show you thickets, open areas, partially-open areas and areas that will reduce speed. I think this ensures equality among the competitors as these slower areas should not come as surprise to anyone.
I intend to report on and ponder about different aspects of preparing for the ERC 2023 around once a month, although perhaps less during winter and then more again when spring arrives. Please follow our website (https://www.tume.fi/erc2023/), Facebook pages (https://www.facebook.com/ERC2023/), and forward the news to your friends and colleagues. I will return with a new report in October/November, and Bulletin II will be published in November.
Timo, ERC 2023 course setter
