Recently discovered footage of orienteering from 1973

England regain the crown from Scotland in the Senior Home International

After several years of Scottish dominance, it was finally time for England to take back the bragging rights in this annual competition. Saturday was the relay competition, and although Scotland took the win in the men's class, England were 2nd and 3rd and the girls 1st and 2nd to give England the overnight lead. I had a good run on 2nd leg, going out about 3 minutes behind in 4th place and coming back in with a 25 second lead.

Sunday was the individual race, down in the New Forest, combined with the November Classic. The men had 17.2km, my longest race since WOC 2009! I won in 80:58, 30 seconds ahead on Matt Crane (nice 4.30 per km pace!). England had another good day to take the overall victory.

Results here

Routegadget here (something funny going on with the course at the moment but I am sure it will be fixed)

Victory in Smålandskavlen and fast at the FRA Relay Champs

The last few weeks of the season have been productive for me, first up running the fastest time on leg 3 with Andi Davies at the FRA Relays in the Lomond Hills in Fife (both in X-talons) as our club Mercia came 4th overall.

Results

Here is the map from my leg - quite simple navigation, and fast running! 14.3km 620m climbing, 67 minutes.
This weekend, as many others were running the OMM, I headed over to Sweden for the traditional orienteering season closer Smålandskavlen, a 5 man relay with the first 2 legs held in the dark and the other 3 run as a chasing start in the daylight the next morning. My club-mates did an excellent job in the dark, actually getting a 2 1/2 minute lead over the 132 other teams! That meant on 3rd leg, I was heading out on my own into the forest with a 2.34 headstart, being hunted down by 132 guys including a chasing pack 2 1/2 - 4 1/2 minutes behind of about 10 really strong teams including Halden, Kalevan Rasti, Kristiansand and OK Linne. I have to admit, I was pretty nervous! But I actually had a really good race, with only one technical problem of about 40 seconds over the 40 minute race, and I was able to actually increase our lead to a little over 3 minutes. I had the second fastest leg time, around 25 seconds down.

Anders Skarholt and Fredrik Johansson, my Norwegian and Swedish respectively team-mates did a really good job too, to keep our approx 3 minute cushion all the way to the finish, and we were able to celebrate our first big team win of the year (and last!).

Results

Map here with my route