Many orienteers have been updating their blogs writing about Portugal O-meeting (POM) but it was such a great event that it really deserves some attention and I want to give my share to it as well. I spent roughly a week in Portugal and it was my first training camp of the year. Emphasis was more on technical part and quality trainings rather than training hours or miles. It was a fabulous training week with altogether 258 controls, 76km of orienteering and 33km of racing. My goal was to do some technical training and to find smoothness and fluency in orienteering. It worked well and I found confidence in my orienteering despite some small mistakes. None of my races were near to perfect but they were good enough so that I got overall good and confident feeling. Just what I wanted. 
It was fantastic that there were so many international top orienteers taking part to POM so that I got a chance to see where I approximately lie at this stage. Although I was some minutes behind the winner at each event I was nevertheless happily surprised of my own consistency and my good overall result (5th). It was awesome to be able to compete against some world-class Swiss, Swedish, and Czech runners on the last day's chasing start. I was really happy about this great opportunity and I really look forward to get another chance to compete against those girls later on this season.. 
Overall the training camp with a mixture of British elite and lifestyle orienteers worked very well and it was great to make some new friends and learn to know better those I only knew by name before. My faithful travel mates Helen and Charlotte were just fantastic and I got them along to some crazy traditional Finnish things such as ice bathing. Rachel and Alex were brilliant company during our pre-POM-training camp and Mark & Co took really good care of us during the race days. It couldn't have been better. 
We also had a good set up what comes to trainings. First we did some sharpening of our technical skills on rocky mountains before the race days and then some nice and easy chill out on sand dunes after the races. It worked well because we were excited and loaded with energy for hills and rocks when we came whereas after the races we were more or less tired and it was nice to get to terrains were you could run quite fast without major effort. 
Necessities of the week: map book over Portugal, which we bought at a petrol station (it worked fine with some fancy iPhone app too but we really liked our old school version and wouldn't have survived without it)
Highlights of the week: villa in Ribeiradio, lobster lunch in Falca with a nice sea view, POM day 4 (all about it), ice bath in the pool
Scary moments: Helen's driving ;) and being stuck in the bushes unable to move to any direction
Things that impressed me:
-Kristin Lövgren's run on the 2nd day
-Rahel's sprint on the last day
-Charlotte's admirable passion for stretching
-Oli's choise of book
Pros and cons of Portugal:
+ Continuous sunshine
+ Posh restaurants with delicious food for crazy cheap price
+ RFM (local radio)
- Cold houses (even colder than in the UK!). Can't really come up with anything else negative..
