Sonkajärvi

We had to catch a 1.30am bus to Stansted which arrived at 5am. Since our flight was at 9am, we slept on the floor of Stansted for about two hours before getting up and checking in. With barely any sleep, I was stumbling and incoherent all the way to Helsinki and then on to Kuopio, where the head of the organising committee for the Wife-Carrying World Championship came and picked us up from the airport. No, we're not VIPs- he was just in the area and volunteered to do it. That typifies the spirit here. Everyone is so friendly and welcoming and anxious that we're having a good time. Sonkajärvi is an hour north of Kuopio and is a small village with only 2,500 inhabitants, of which 500 have volunteered to help out for the biggest day in their calender!

Some random observations:

- Everyone is incredbily blonde here. Man, women, children- everyone is blonde haired and blue-eyed. It's incredible!

- This place looks like an IKEA catalogue. Everything is designed in a very similar aesthetic: wood, elegant, curved and clean lines, very classy.

- The air is extremely fresh and the area is remarkably clean.

- People who take part in wife-carrying seem to keep coming back. We've met or heard of competitors who keep coming back over and over again. Today we met Julia, from Ireland, who is here for the 4th time. She brings along a different strong man each time, but this year she's got no one to carry her and is trying to find a local to do so. Since she's 120 kg, that may prove difficult.

- Mmmm, pickled herring. Smoked reindeer. Blood soup. Delicious.

- Sonkajärvi is a very small town but there's competition. There are two supermarkets (opposite the street from one another), two banks (ditto) and two restaurants (ditto yet again).

- The water hazard in the Wife-Carrying course is a lot deeper this year- two metres instead of one. Word has it that it's meant to slow down the Estonians, since they have won every year since 1998. The last Finnish couple to win was in 1997. What I'm hoping is since I have swimming skills, the deeper water hazard will help me catch the couples who are faster on land...

- We'll be racing against a number of couples from Finland and Estonia, as well as the USA, UK, Germany, France, Australia and New Zealand.

Excerpts from How To Be A Master At Wife-Carrying:

Outfit

It is preferable to wear clothes which won’t be stripped off in full speed running and which are easy to hold on to. The carrier’s belt is the only equipment allowed to help in keeping one’s grasp. Some other tools known to be beneficial are a bunch of birch switches, swimming glasses and swimming slippers.

Eroticism

You can sense the excitement in the air during the wife carrying competition. The core of the race is made of a woman, a man and their relationship. The wife carrying and eroticism have a lot in common. Intuitive understanding of the signals sent by the partner and becoming one with the partner are essential in both of them – sometimes also whipping.