AFTERWORD by Klas Karlsson

Lohja, Finland, June 18th 1986.
Gårdsby IK, my mother club, was on the road a few days after Jukola. After a training, we happened to end up in a sauna with Hiidenkiertäjät and their reigning World Champion Kari Sallinen. While chatting, a friend (no, it was not me) asked Kari for some advice:
“What do I do wrong? I usually run well but always end up missing one control with like ten minutes.”
Kari smiled and answered: “You are just lucky on the other controls!”

That’s how the Afterword begins — a powerful closing reflection written by Klas Karlsson, one of the test readers for Book 2 of Confident Orienteering. In reality, his contribution went far beyond a typical test read. His review was so thorough and insightful that he essentially acted as an editor.

As a result of his feedback, we made several important improvements to both the main text and the practical examples throughout the book. And on top of that, Klas wrote a brilliant piece — part afterword, part essay, part review — which we decided to include at the end of the book. Everyone on the editorial team felt that it served as the perfect conclusion. It offers a final reflection that brings together the book’s structure and core ideas in a thoughtful and personal way.

So even if you haven’t read the full book, I wanted to share Klas’s Afterword with you — because it offers not only sharp insights into navigation, but also a broader understanding of the orienteering mindset.

A huge thank you to Klas for such a rich and generous contribution.

Here is the full text of his Afterword.

AFTERWORD by Klas Karlsson, Test Reader

I am an orienteering athlete, born 1970 in Sweden. A junior star with a handful of international medals. As a senior, I reached the Swedish national team, competed in the World Cup, but without results worth mentioning. Today I am part of the coaching team in IKHP Huskvarna.

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Lohja, Finland, June 18th 1986. Gårdsby IK, my mother club, was on the road a few days after Jukola. After a training, we happened to end up in a sauna with Hiidenkiertäjät and their reigning World Champion Kari Sallinen. While chatting, a friend (no, it was not me) asked Kari for some advice: “What do I do wrong? I usually run well but always end up missing one control with like ten minutes”. Kari smiled and answered “You are just lucky on the other controls!”

Some people dream of writing a book, perhaps just to make something tangible out of all their intangible thoughts. I’m one of those people. I’m also a lifelong orienteering athlete, thinker, analyzer, nerd, and coach. On a few occasions, I’ve tried to structure all my ideas into something book-like, but I’ve never managed to get there.

One day, while scrolling on my phone, I came across a new e-book about orienteering technique. Reading it made me decide not to try writing the book on orienteering myself.

“Confident Orienteering: A Systematic Approach to Minimizing Errors, Book 1 – Fundamentals” was so promising and ambitious that I realized I would likely fail to do it better. And why put effort into a lesser version?

A positive review I posted about the book led to a connection between me and Aleksandr. After a few discussions and exchanges of insights, I volunteered to review his upcoming second book. While reviewing it, I became even more convinced that there’s no need for another general book on orienteering. Aleksandr’s competence, structure, and dedication have resulted in something truly impressive.

I have tried to boil down my own experiences, as both an elite runner and a coach, into a few key insights. I would like to take this opportunity to share them, and help you understand why I am a strong advocate for Aleksandr’s “Confident Orienteering” approach:

(1)    Deceptive direct feedback. Learning happens through action, feedback, adjustment, and repetition. The process relies on fast, accurate feedback and is heavily disrupted by inaccurate feedback. In orienteering, this second part is a major challenge. While a typical control offers many chances to make mistakes, it often provides just as many ways to recover, sometimes so effectively that made errors go unnoticed. This means that even a nonchalant approach will give you positive feedback most of the time. Taking a safer route, making safety stops, or checking your bearing more often, may rarely feel worthwhile since you do not experience the problems you avoid. To learn correct behavior, you need to filter feedback through knowledge and understanding, drawing the right conclusions instead of reacting to immediate results. This requires outsmarting the normal learning process, which is very hard.

(2)    Risks add up. Say you have the skills to nail eight out of ten controls, an 80% success rate. That is decent, and your brain gets rewarded, reinforcing current habits. Annoyingly, failures happen a little bit too often. Yes, there is always a reason: a lapse in focus, a vague map, a small mistake. These “exceptions” are easy to dismiss, but they add up. At 80%, the chance of a flawless 20-control race is just 1%. If you’re okay with a perfect run every few years, keep going. But if you want more, you need to reduce risk. To perform consistently, you should act safer than you think and feel.

(3)    While racing, you become stupid. The allure of orienteering is the cognitive challenge during high physical load. When pushing hard physically, the ability for complex problem solving is greatly reduced. Just try some basic calculation when running at high pulse, it is amazingly hard. A reasonable conclusion is that you should strive to reduce the number of situations requiring complex cognitive challenges.

To summarize your situation during competition: You operate with limited cognitive capacity, shaped by misleading feedback, yet expected to make a large number of accurate decisions.

To me, the most plausible remedies for this situation are to: (1) understand the challenge, (2) use a structured approach to simplify it, (3) execute with consistency enabled by dedicated training, (4) emphasize process over outcome. The “Confident Orienteering” approach embodies all of this. It emphasizes the true nature of the orienteering challenge, and that’s what makes it so powerful. The method stands on solid ground.

Aleksandr has also introduced me to completely new aspects of orienteering - concepts that may feel somewhat unfamiliar or even awkward to a modern Nordic runner accustomed to open, detailed terrain and high-quality maps. Yet, these ideas may well be the missing key to understanding how to navigate in terrain that demands a more diverse orienteering technique than simply catching clearly visible features at high speed.

A few individuals reach greatness seemingly through pure talent. But if you find yourself outside that group, you can still thrive by embracing the “Confident Orienteering” approach. Consume the knowledge, practice its application, sharpen your skills - and get out there and nail it!

Aleksandr, thanks for the lecture!

/Klas Karlsson, September 2025

Oh, almost forgot! That story from 1986, and Kari’s joke. How we laughed at that roasting punchline. It stuck with me over the years, a legendary joke I loved retelling with friends. But somewhere past thirty, I began to wonder: was it truly just a joke? Or had Kari, with a flash of his brilliance, put in a great piece of wisdom, subtle enough for only the enlightened to unfold?

Confident Orienteering practical guide

Book 1: Fundamentals: 

Book 2 Planning Reliable Routes: 

Aleksandr Alekseyonok, January 29, 2026.