O-ringen orienteering race

On Thursday afternoon we went to the organizers’ start show of O-ringen, the largest orienteering competition in the world. Every year this competition is organized somewhere in Sweden, and this year it’s placed just half an hour drive from Maria's parents' house. Our orienteering club is one of 21 clubs helping (voluntarily) to organize the five days of running races, as well as a temporally camping site for a few thousands caravans/tents. We listened to an interesting/motivating seminar by Renata Chlumska, the first Swedish woman to climb Mount Everest. She told some fun episodes from her alone trip around USA when she paddled a kayak from Seattle to San Diego, bicycled with the kayak on a carriage (an unusual sight in the middle of the huge desserts) from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, continued kayaking around Florida to Eastport, Maine, and then bicycled back to Seattle (all in 439 days). During the evening we also went to the temporally sport shop to take the chance to buy walking shoes, some sport clothes and hiking backpacks (we found the exact brand we want), since the organizers had some discount in the shop this evening.
Maria was as young as 8 years when she completed her first O-ringen competition and there has been several more since. So for her it was obvious to help organizing one year, when you get the opportunity.
{"Orienteering require navigational skills using a map and compass to navigate from point to point in diverse and usually unfamiliar terrain." "Usually, a foot-O is a timed race in which participants start at staggered intervals, are individually timed, and are expected to perform all navigation on their own. The control points are shown on the orienteering map and must be visited in the specified order. Standings are determined first by successful completion of the course, then by shortest time on course." from Wikipedia}

On Sunday was the first race day of O-ringen. We had agreed to help with the start our club was responsible for (one of nine starting places), the one for all the recreation classes (Motion). These classes have free starting time, not drawn lot of starting minute as all regular classes have. This also means the runners were not so stressed when they came to start and something needed to be checked.
Maria's father was responsible for the radio communication between our start and the competition center, while us two where placed in the information tent. The plan was that we should be able to help if Swedish wasn’t enough :-) Nowadays the punching at the control points is done electronically, and afterward you can also get a list of running times in the forest. Some runners had updated the number of the electronic card, but the secretary used a pen not suitable for the today rain (the surface of the bib, where the number should be printed, is very slippery). So the most what we did during the day was to compare with the updated start list we had printed.

The procedure was the same all the other four days of the competition, even if our duties with the card number decreased and instead we helped some runners to prohibit chafed feet (as usual when you buy new shoes or so). The runners started from 8.30 AM, so since everything should be prepared around an hour before first start, these days didn’t mean any late mornings for us.

After all runners had started (at 1.30 PM), we moved the equipment to the starting place for the next day, to get less to do early next morning. Some days we then went to the Camping site center, where we had dinner.
Unfortunately, we didn't have time to see the goal area during the days. So being one of the thousands organizers meant seeing less of the competition than a year when you compete yourself.