Estonian trio Tõnu Lillelaid, Karli Lambot and Rait Pallo were delighted with their third place in the recent World Rogaining Championships in New Zealand.
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Like so many others we believed that the Kiwis and Australian teams would use their home territory advantage knowing the type of terrain so we are very proud of losing to just to one of them:).
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Coming from a flat country we simply love mountains and hills but have very limited orienteering experience in such terrain so far. So the biggest challenge was the pre-start route and speed calculation planning taking into account endless ups and downs . After first six hours race it became clear that we had been far too conservative so we started to collect additional unplanned controls which meant our route was not optimal.
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Maybe it even cost us a second place for us in overall ranking. During the night we were able to avoid major orienteering mistakes, but the heavy mist about 6 pm and strong rain and wind during the night made life difficult. Despite some drinking water and food shortages (the unexpected cold played its role here) we were able to continue in a good self-confident rhythm, through the night and beautiful mountain morning.
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Right at the last moment we decided to climb an extra 220m to collect control No. 58 as our last one, and that was a happy decision – it won us third place.
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The performance of winners, Chris Forne and Marcel Hagener is most admirable and outstanding. Very best congratulations to them and to second planced Nicholas Mulder and Ryno Griesel of S. Africa too!
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Estonia is a little country (just 1.3 million inhabitants), but we have a boiling calendar of adventure and rogaining races throughout the year. Adventure race series like Xdream and Rogaining Race of TAOK have up to 1000 participants per stage so we can really enjoy a high number of competitive starts during the whole year.
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