World Champs Test Races

So, 2 weeks before the European Champs and 3 months before the World Champs, we had our test races for the World Champs. A really good set of races in Glasgow, and up on the west coast of Scotland near Oban. I didn't really try and peak for these races, rather take them as preparation for the Europeans at the end of the month. I was really satisfied with my performances in the middle (2nd, 10 seconds down) and the long (3rd, 1.50 down), but not with my sprint race (2nd, 40 seconds down). Especially in the middle, I feld my orienteering was going really well, and with a couple of weeks taper, I hope to be in really good shape in Bulgaria.

Sprint routegadget results

Middle routegadget results

Long results, routegadget

I have been selected for middle and sprint for WOC - I was hoping for long and sprint.

British spring season building to a climax

My spring domestic season entered its final week this week, with a trip down to the Harvester relay in Kent. The 'Jukola of British orienteering' - a 7 man night relay. Bit of an anti-climax after Tiomila, with about 50 teams in total, and not very many challenging for the victory. In fact, the trophy was ours to throw away, and quite a lot of the team did their best to try and do that, but in the end the might ShUOC managed to pull out a win despite letting a team 30 minutes down after leg 1 finish leg 6 20 seconds behind us. I ran the last leg and ran in winners by about 15 minutes. The B team also won their race so it was a successful day to end a very successful spring for ShUOC, with 3 wins from 3 in the relay league - JK, British and Harvester to complete an unprecedented treble and win the UK Relay league after South Yorkshire dominance for 3 years.

Results

This weekend is the test races for the World Champs team up in Scotland, sprint on Friday, then middle and long at the weekend up near Oban. Will be hard to beat last year...

Tiomila

High hopes again this year for Lidingö, with many talking of us challenging the 'big 3'. Well it didn't quite work out that way, and 4 of the team will feel a little disappointed with their performances. We failed to get to the front early on, were not in the leading pack on long night, and from then on it was all chasing and overtaking the other teams dropping off. I ran the 8th leg, and went out in 14th place, a long way behind the leaders but with lots of teams not too far in front to chase. I ran really aggressively from the start, and picked up a number of teams. My orienteering wasn't quite clean enough, and I wasn't quite strong enough to pull away from the other runners though, and I ended up running in a bit of a pack with about 5 other teams. At the end though, I managed to get a small gap with the gaffling and managed to change over in 7th place, and I had the 3rd fastest time on my leg which was pretty satisfying. The last 2 boys held on to 7th, but it was a big ask to take any more places. The potential is there, and one day we will have a good team performance and the result will come.

UK Cup

Thanks to various people doing various things like not entering races, I managed to retain the UK Cup without running the final races :)