Rest Day Gossip

Today was the model for the sprint and middle distances. After a lazy breakfast consisting of large helpings of everything on offer it still ended in a sprint to the buffet counter to collect as much food as possible before they closed up shop for the morning (the finns don't flash the lights for last orders!). After lounging around and the drawing of routes, Dave headed out to the middle model event to practise compass while the rest of us prefered to chill out. Eventually we headed into the centre of Salo for the small sprint training window of an hour. Its looking like the sprint race on Wednesday will be fast and furious with only 33 qualifying for the final out of 121 runners in men and 97 in womens.

With the focus back on the middle distance Ruairi did his stint as acting team leader and headed to the managers meeting where once again the Swiss and Danish managers had some differences with the organisers. Over dinner we were informed by Roar that we would all runners would wear gps devices for live tracking in tomorrow's middle distance race. Needless to say the banter began to fly about what we could spell on the forest floor during our 20min warming up period. The most popular were Hi Mum or a combined effort of each of us doing a letter of Ireland. Email us your suggestions!

The Middle Distance event kicks off in the morning at 0900 Irish Time. The starts are as follows (all Irish time), with the men starting first, followed by the womens race (who may end up with manky GPS vests)

09:53 - Ruairi Short
09:57 - David Heally
10:16 - Colm Hill
10:32 - Neil Dobbs

12:10 - Rosalind Hussey
12:39 - Niamh O Boyle

The link to the GPS live tracking is avaible here - http://www.gpsseuranta.net/eindex.php?sivu=tt&id=20090606

The squad has come to a conclusion that Neil has gone through a midlife crisis, which resulted in the image below from Saturday's long distance race:
In the end it turned out that it wasn't only Neil.... check out http://news.worldofo.com/2009/06/07/gps-tracks-noc-long-mistakes-collected/ for a collection of mistakes that were caught on GPS - lucky for the first half of the field, we didn't have them

Hopefully all of the irish had that midlife crisis on Saturday and can keep things clean in the morning.

Signing out

Colm