So, Pál Joensen is now on his first altitude camp ever, in Sierra Nevada in southern Spain, together with the Danish national team and a few other swimmers. But it was no easy trip from Copenhagen to the Sierras, as they had Pál’s coach Jón Bjarnason with them, who is notoriously unlucky when it comes to flights.
(Pál and Aschwin and others at the High Altitude Training Center of Sierra Nevada)
We’re talking a guy who almost always hits a delay somewhere along the route, or at least has his luggage lost. Who had a team delayed once because of a flight service car bumping a hole in the plane, who missed the entire Mare Nostrum leg in Canet last year because of fog, and who even managed to be delayed in South Africa once because of a volcano in Iceland!
So a 5 hour delay from Kastrup was nothing special, and neither the missing of the connecting flight, so that they had to spend the night in Madrid. Long enough for them to need a hotel, and short enough for them to get only 4 hours at the actual hotel. With only room for part of the team on the flight the next morning, so that for instance Lotte Friis and Jeanette Ottesen had to wait for the next one.
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/lottefriis/status/163934167338467328″]
I doubt if Bjarnason ever bothered booking the first night at the destination. Napoleon Bonaparte is supposed to have once waved off the stories about new general’s heroism, bravery, skills in battle etc with an impatient: “That is all well – but is he lucky?” He would totally have failed Bjarnason as his logistics officer :-P
But they are there now, and everything is good.
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