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Saturday, june 28
I have no orienteering plans for the summer, although I have lots of them! But I won't attend any competitions, we will do a lot of travel up north in Sweden, but as I have a big urge for forest detour:ing, my qualified guess is that it all will end up in a much randomized set of orienteering runs on some autogenerated lasermaps, the swedish "Hitta ut" maps, "course of the week", and such. How, or if it will end up in some videos on YouTube, is a question that will be answered sooner or later

This vacation starts with some cleaning at home, travel packing, laundring, and maybe a glance at the 52:nd Western States Endurance Run live broadcast today. There are some things there that the orienteering community might be jealous of. Just think about it: a trail ultra race going on for some 15 hours, not that unlike the big nordic orienteering night relays in the wilderness. But the media coverage and the hype in trail running is huge compared to orienteering. Here we have the old question of the orienteering sport: can it evolve and grow like ultra running have, or is that not at all possible? But if it is - does orienteering have to change - and will it be to the better or the worse? Thinking about that, I heard an intresting talk about this on the Orienteer Pod today, where they was discussing a possible future for a better and more fair orienteering championchips. For example they were talking about the past weekend's world cup in Idre. The thoughts Ralph had about limiting the final starting field to only 15 runners, and maybe a reversed starting field was a really intresting idea, with the best qualifiers starting first to minimize "hanging" (or following maybe is a better english word for it) running. Individual orientering runs must be as individual as possible and leave the ability to follow others only to relays. But there are of course other aspects of orienteering's ways to evolve with sponsorship money and possible problems that might come with that, which will possibly be a even more problematic question about the growth of orienteering.

Talking about orienteering podcasts, I think there are surprisingly few of them, as it is extremely few "orienteering influencers" compared to other sports, like trail running. Especially among the elite runners. Looking on youtube, for example, the main orienteering video content mainly consists of men that use headcam to record their runs without comments. (I'm one of them, sometimes.) I think this is one of the reasons that orienteering is not the wildly spreading sports in the modern days of social media. What is it among the orienteering community that people is not interested of expressing their love for the sport on social media, or rather don't really know how to express themself in a social media format? Or maybe the interest of expressing themselves isn't really that big? That makes the "Orienteering pod" so great: three elite orienteering runners that actually has evolved the last year to a really good podcast that captures the soul of orienteering in a really good way. Maybe they just are the perfect persons to do this - they were passionate enough to move to a totally different country (Tim from New Zeeland, and Ralph from Great Britain) to do this sport, but therefore they also have kind of an outsiders perspective on this originally nordic sport which makes it extra interesting. (Magnus, who is danish, also gave a interesting outsider wiev of the swedish obscure tradition of celebrating midsummer, doing the "frog dance" and all!)

However, I look forward to run some orienteering the upcoming weeks in the northern parts of sweden. I hope I will have the possibility to express this in some upcoming videos. Right now I don't really know how, but hopefully I can give you some interesting videos soon.

Happy summer every one, hope you will experience some fun orienteering!

Almost like orienteering, but less headlamps.