Finland - the team comes together

Saturday, 1 July 2006

Lahti. The home of Mika Tervala, Finland's top MBO rider. And some of the best MBO terrain in Finland. Varied and detailed.

This week we have ridden on great maps twice a day. For the most part it has been an arrive and get used to the terrain week. And what terrain it is. It's hard not to rave about it. The number of tracks, the beautiful forest, a mixture of fast easy riding and really tricky single tracks covered with roots and rocks which take all your skill and concentration. It might just be mbo heaven! Or at least since the sun came out.

We are living on a map. Perhaps not the most relevant terrain to WOC, but lovely forest. And a few kilometres away is another map which is even better. So it makes training very easy.

Thursday and Friday we travelled to maps a bit further away. These were basically glacial moraines and had a lot of deep, steep depressions on them. It's quite trick in this stuff to pick a route which doesn't have a huge up and down, and if you miss this point, you can waste quite a few minutes compared with going around the rim of the depressions. The morning's map was very detailed and used 1:10,000 to make it possible to read it. Even then it was pretty tricky at anything like a decent speed.

Friday deserves special mention as it was very flat, open forest. Not unlike The Whipstick, but of course with more detail - as usual.  But a delight to ride and at 1:15,000 quite readable. In the afternoon we used a different part of the same general area with even more tracks and a sprint course at 1:10,000 again. Great fun!

Tomorrow we will all go to a local race for some final practice before heading to Joensuu for the final training camp. But we are all well and fit and feel the training here in Lahti is great preparation as most of the stuff we expect will be more difficult than what we'll encounter at WOC. Except for the pressure of course! At least that's the theory.

Click here to see photos and VIDEO of the terrain, accomodation and ski tunnel!