Hello again, everyone!
Summer races are not quite done for the juniors yet. There’s NAOC, of course, but we also have two juniors, Julia and Tyra, competing at WOC again this year. We are in the last stages of our preparation for the upcoming races, which start August 4 in Riga with the Sprint.
For the last week, we’ve been staying in a great place in Sigulda, about an hour away from Riga. The apartment belongs to Peteris, an orienteer with Cascade OC, and he offered it up for the team to use while training in Latvia. Gotta love those world-wide orienteering connections! His in-laws live in the downstairs, and we have taken over the upstairs. Every time we go downstairs, we’re greeted by Emma, an adorable, smiley 10-month old. She’s learning to walk, and loves to grab Julia’s hands and walk around the house with her. Tori Borish joined us here this evening, and we’ll all be staying here for a bit longer until heading to Riga on August 2.
Today is a rest day for us, as our past few days have been pretty intense. We did 1 full sprint, 2 days of sprint intervals, and 1 day of track intervals. In addition to all that, we spent one afternoon on a ropes course, and yesterday we went down a bobsled track with a bobsled on wheels! Neither of us had done a ropes course before, so we had a lot of fun trying to get past all of the obstacles without falling. It was a lot more intense than we expected!
The rest of our time has been spent on various more relaxing activities: playing the world’s fastest game of RISK (Julia demolished Tyra), trying to pet the neighborhood cats (unsuccessfully), slacklining, reading, napping, taking care of miscellaneous to-do’s, or doing armchair.
We’ve also spent a lot of time doing food-related activities: going to the grocery store, buying food, cooking food, picking currants, making currant pancakes. The currant pancakes were a little funky, but they were fun to make.
The other day, on our way to or from the grocery store, which we clearly do often, we saw this adorable, big fluffy dog! (See picture below)
HOWEVER, as soon as we got within a couple steps, this adorable doggo turned vicious and started barking at us, loudly. He woke up his fellow guard dog, who came galumphing over, and they both were snapping at the fence between us. We skedaddled out of there pretty quickly.
We’ll be spending the next few days doing a couple of sprint courses and some speedwork before we head to Riga. Stay tuned for our next post, and until then, enjoy this cat photo.
-Tyra and Julia
USA Junior Orienteering 
Thanks for posting the update…looks like you have been having a great time getting ready for WOC.
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