Real Swedish winter in Jönköping
Whole Europe is facing a pretty hard winter right now and Jönköping is no exception with temperatures far below zero (up to minus 20 degrees) and 40cm of snow in the upper parts. During these days running training and orienteering becomes even more demanding. I came back to Sweden 10 days ago and since then I have done 3 pretty tough night orienteering trainings. Technically they were not too demanding but physically they were pretty rough though. Due to the deep snow that has accumulated on some open cutting areas up to half a meter, it is usually better to take route-choices far around on roads than wading through the snow. You can follow my routechoices of the recent night-o trainings on the map samples below.
Nevertheless, I also took advantage of the positive side effects of such a strong winter when I decided to go on a skiing trip with some friends from school to the nearby ski run in Ulricehamn, 45min driving from Jönköping. All in all, they had two lifts and three perfectly groomed ski runs there. Since we went on a Monday there were almost no other people on the slope although the weather was fine: sunny and pretty cold. I really enjoyed carving over the slopes and I also had my first experiences on a snowboard for some minutes. It is a totally different feeling but it was worth a try and did not end too badly! 
In two weeks from now, I am already in Alicante for a training camp with some guys from IKHP. We will be running “la Primera Prueba de la Liga Espanola”, the first competitions of the Spanish national ranking including a WRE. Afterwards, we will be staying for some high quality map trainings without snow, hopefully! I am already looking forward to training in the sun and also talking some Spanish again!