Training in Karlstad

I don't think any of us anticipated how difficult or expensive it would be to access the internet on our trip, but it is the unfortunate truth. Hence, the very sparse postings on our part. Hopefully while we are visitng with the Håkansson family in Bränke-Holby we will be able to give a more detailed account of the last week, plus get some pictures uploaded.

So now we are in Karlstad, staying at the OK Tyr club house (Tom Hollowell's club in Karlstad). We are training in the morning with Tom and then running the OK Tyr's mini-5 day's in the evenings. Untill this morning there were 17 Americans gathered at the club house, but we lost Andy Strat and Holly Kunester this morning as they departed for Poland. As far as I can tell everyone is having a great time and running very well in their races. Some of the juniors are even winning in their categories. It must be said that OK Tyr has gone far and beyond the call of hospitatlity for our group. Not only have they offered us the use of their club house, which required that their juniors spend a day cleaning out an entire cabin for us to sleep in, but they also hosted a BBQ after yesterday's Sprint at this gorgeous spot on a nearby lake. The juniors are currently working out a nice gift for the club to show our appreciation.

Tom has also done an excellent job with the training. The exercises have been fun, the terrain beautiful, and the lessons learned highly informative. The 5-days courses have been equally good. My first two races have not been the cleanest and my times have been quite slow, but I still finished each race having greatly enjoyed myself. I'm glad to say that the juinors have been racing better than I have too!

Our trip out to Karlstad is noteworthy since we had an interesting time trying to locate the club house. We departed on Tuesday morning with nothing more to go on than that we needed to drive to Karlstad (3 hr trip) and then hope that we could find everyone once we got there. Unfortunately, the number that we had to call was not working so once we reached Karlstad we were at a bit of a loss for what to do. I'll spare you the gorey details, but after some deliberation we ended up just driving to a grocery store and asking the cashier. He did not know where the club house was, but he knew of a field where "your kind of people" often congregate. There were not orienteers at said field when we got there, but there was a police station right next to it. We got a map and directions that got us pretty close to the cabing, but not on the right road. After asking a Swedish woman at her bike along this dirt road we were on we got the directions we needed. The woman didn't know english very well so she gave us all of the directions in Swedish and just said "left" at the end of it. She pointed it out on the map too so we were able to find our way to the OK Tyr club house.

We have two more races of the 5-days. Todays race and then tomorrow's is a chase start based on our 3 fastest races and then we all go our separate ways till Oringen.

Almost out of internet!!!!! Hejdor!!!!!