High drama at the WOC Relay

The Relays provided a gripping end to the World Orienteering Championships. The Women's race started first and heading into the final leg, Switzerland held a clear lead of over two minutes thanks to a great run by Silver Medallist in the Middle Distance Vroni Koenig-Salmi. Lea Mueller (SUI) was being chased down by a pack consisting of Helena Jansson (SWE), Tatiana Ryabkina (RUS) and all three gold medallists from earlier in the week: Anne Margrethe Hausken (NOR), Minna Kauppi (FIN) and Dana Brozkova (CZE). Minna it was who made the difference, stepping up a gear in the long leg with the big climb. She brought home the gold for Finland running almost three minutes faster than the next best time on her leg. Russia were second and Sweden third.

Niamh O'Boyle started strongly for Ireland coming in ahead of Denmark, Portugal and Canada to hand over to Ciara Largey in 23rd. Ciara ran creditably but was passed by the stronger Danish team. Ailbhe Creedon anchored the team with a steady run keeping the team in 24th place, behind Canada but now ahead of the Japanese. Good work, girls!

Worth noting is the incredible 7th place of the Chinese women's team. They have extremely fast runners and the entire team has been training intensively in Czech terrain over the past two months and it paid off.

The Men's race was almost unreal. François Gonon (FRA) came back in the lead after the first leg to tag Damien Renard. The pecking order was only really established after the second leg though. Jon Duncan (GBR) taking over from Graham Gristwood came back with a 24 second lead over the French setting up a titanic battle between Jamie Stevenson and Thierry Gueorgiou. Behind them, Valentin Novikov (RUS) and Daniel Hubmann (SUI) were hot on their heels. Sixteen minutes in, Gueorgiou caught Stevenson and managed to get a clear lead. France now seemed unbeatable and about to claim their first Gold in relay. But... "les dieux en avaient décidé autrement", as the French put it. On the way to the 7th control Thierry swallowed a bee which stung him on the inside of the throat. He struggled on for a while but had to bail out. On reaching the finish area he collapsed, barely able to breathe. A helicopter duly arrived to take him to hospital where the word was that he was on the way to recovery.
This freakish accident left the way open for Jamie Stevenson to claim a historic Gold for the British team, despite Novikov's fastest time on the third leg which gave Russia silver. Switzerland took third, Czech Rep 4th and Latvia 5th, relegating the Nordic nations of Finland, Norway and Sweden to 6th, 7th and 8th respectively.

Andrew Quin ran first leg for the Irish. A mistake on the 8th control and some problems with dehydration hurt his race. Patrick Higgins ran better, passing Turkey, but not enough to bring us within striking distance of the teams further ahead. I anchored, and had an uneventful race, leaving us in 32nd place ahead of South Africa with three teams disqualified. For the men's team it was a disappointing end to the week as we are capable of beating several of the teams ahead of us if we run to our potential.

Some photos of the Irish team and result summaries are available at
http://runners.worldofo.com/woc2008pics_IRL.html
Full results including split times at:
http://www.woc2008.cz/en/homepage
More photos are to be found at
http://orienteering.smugmug.com/

Andrew and Patrick went on to Sweden with Andrew running O-ringen and Patrick the World Cup races. Patrick, Ciara and Niamh will be running the World Student Championships in Estonia and I'm going to the 6 days in France. We are all looking forward to a solid year of training and moving up the rankings.

Bring on Hungary 2009!

Neil Dobbs

Write about your Summer!

Despite the weather, there is lots of orienteering going on this summer. First and foremost is the World Championships,now an annual event, in the Czech Republic. The event starts on 12th July and the Irish team is


Andrew Quin (3ROC)
Neil Dobbs (WATO)
Patrick Higgins (LVO)

Ailbhe Creedon (CorkO)
Niamh O'Boyle (CNOC)
Ciara Largey (QUBOC)

Trail-O: Alan Gartside (LVO) and Wilbert Hollinger (LVO).

You can follow their progress each day on line here.

The programme is

Date	Time	WOC 2008 Events
Sat 12 July 2008	afternoon	Model Sprint Model start procedure, punching system, time keeping, refreshments
Sun 13 July 2008	morning	Sprint distance qualification
	afternoon	Opening ceremony Sprint final
Mon 14 July 2008	all day	Model long distance qualification
Tue 15 July 2008	morning	Long distance qualification
Wed 16 July 2008	all day	Model middle distance
	afternoon	IOF/VIP/media race
Thu 17 July 2008	morning	Middle distance qualification
	afternoon	Middle distance final
Fri 18 July 2008	all day	IOF Congress Model long distance final and relay
Sat 19 July 2008	morning	Long distance final Model relay
Sun 20 July 2008	morning	Relay
	afternoon	Closing ceremony
	evening	Banquet

If you are going orienteering,why not write about is for us? There's a Junior Tour to the Swedish 5-Day, there's the World Masters in Portugal, Junior World Champs, the Setanta Rogaine, the Welsh 6-Day, the World University Champs ...

CorkO's Fiona Barrett 3rd in L'Etape du Tour
John Scannell, Chairman of CorkO, writes "On behalf of CorkO I would like to congratulate club member Fiona Barrett on her super performance in the L'Etape du Tour. This is an event with nearly 7,500 cyclists competing on one of the actual stage routes of the Tour De France. This year's stage was the 165km route from Pau to Hautacam with two infamous category one climbs the - the 23km with 7.5% gradient Col du Tourmalet and the 15km with 7.2% gradient Hautacam. With inclement weather conditions, Fiona finished in 3rd place in the ladies category which is indeed a superb performance.

Our congratulation go out to you Fiona!"

Fiona finished the 165 km course in poor weather conditions in a race time of 7 hours 8 minutes 44 seconds, less than 3 minutes off 2nd place. The 16th Mondovelo Etape du Tour was on Sunday 6th July. For details see here.

Irish Teams at Jukola

More Irish teams ran in the Jukola and Venla Relays in Finland last weekend than ever before. Setanta Orienteers and Defence Forces Orienteers had entered teams while Irish runners also represented London and Finnish O-clubs.

The Jukola Relay is an annual 7-person overnight relay run around midsummer in Finland. This year's race, the 60th, was close to Tampere, accessible by Ryanair, and about 1500 teams took part: that'sover 10,000 runners. The Venla Relay is a 4-person relay for women only, run the afternoon before the Jukola (cynics might say that the girls are sent out to flatten the vegetation for the big race).

A largely-Setanta team of Nina Phillips, Mary O'Connell (3ROC), Deirdre O'Neill (FIN) and Hazel Thompson finished 727th in the Venla, while GEN's Mary Healy ran with Jalasjarven, who finished 669th.

In the Jukola, the DFO team os Seamus O'Boyle, Ruairi Short, Colm Hill, Tony Maher, Gretta O'Connor, Fabian Flood and Kevin O'Reilly finished a very credible 724th, with Ruairí's run bringing them in as high as 284th.

The largely-SET team of Timo Haikonen, Dave Weston, Mick Mangan, Brendan O'Connor (AJAX), Jim Mulroney, Stephen McCarthy and Seán Hassett finished 1128th, with almost every runner improving on the placing of the previous one.

London OK, featuring 3ROC's Ronan and Julie Cleary and John McCullough, finished 927th, having risen as high as 563rd after leg 2.

The Jukola started at 11 pm with the heart-stopping blast of an anti-aircraft gun, with 1500 runners charging for the narrow funnel, slowing to a walk up the sandy hill and dispersing in the young trees across the valley. Looking at it on the big screen at the changeover, it looked like a stream of coloured Smarties flooding into the forest, each runner's colourful top lit up by the following head-torch.

Leg 1 was 11.4km and the expected winning time was 72 minutes; leg 2 12.2 km (77 minutes), leg 3 13.2 km (81 mins), leg 4 7.8 km (45 mins), leg 5 7.9km (44 mins), leg 6 9.8 km (57 mins) and leg 7 13.7 km (77 mins).

Heavy rain during the night slowed up some of the runners on the first three legs, so the organisers delayed the mass start for remaining runners by 30 minutes to 09.15 on Sunday morning. This mass-start was even bigger than the first leg one, with long queues to punch the early controls: in fact, you could have to wait a minute or so even to see if there was a control there!

The terrain was coniferous forest with a few tracks, quite rough underfoot, with some extraction lanes. There was quite a lot of climb on the courses, plenty of marsh, some beautiful, fast forest with lichen-covered ground, but some parts of lower visibility.

Finnish club Delta, anchored by Valentin Novikov, won the Jukola Relay with the winning time 8.16.04. The Swedish team OK Linne (Patrick Higgins's (LVO) Swedish club) anchored by Mattias Millinger had been in top positions during the whole race finished second place, 92 seconds down, with Finland's Vehkalahden Veikot a further 7 seconds behind.

The Jukola website reports "The second position was a tight competition between OK Linne and Vehkalahden Veikot until the very end. At the last control the teams were separated by one second in favour of Vehkalahti, but during the final spurt OK Linne's Millinger was stronger and took the second place to Sweden.
Jukola's anchoring leg offered the spectators an extremely exciting play since the final decision hd to be waited for until the last minute. Right in the beginning of the leg the other top teams caught up Lynx who had started in the lead position with a difference of one minute to the other teams. Thereafter, the race was extremely tight. Novikov escaped from the others shortly after the middle of the course and after that he gave no chances for the other teams."

A live big-screen display using GPS showed the spectators where runners were going, while the whole thing was live in Finnish TV and radio through the night. On Sunday evening the Jukola had top spot on the TV sports news, displacing golf, soccer and car rallying!

Sweden's Domnarvets GoIF won the Venla relay in a time of 3.17.48.

Next year's Jukola and Venla relays are at Mikkeli, 230km NE of Helsinki and about the same distance from Tampere, on June 13-14. See

http://jukola2009.net/

This year's results, routegadget and photos are here.

Mission Accomplished

Recently Julie Cleary asked for your help to raise money for Different Strokes, a charity which helps younger people in Britain and Ireland who suffered strokes. She was planning to run 50 km in orienteering competitions during May. Here's how she got on ...

May 9th 2008 was the second anniversary of my brain haemorrhage and subsequent stroke, so I decided to try and raise some money for Different Strokes - a charity which helps younger people here and in Ireland who have had "brain attacks" like mine.

Progress Report 1 - 13 May: 23.33km down, just 26.67km to go and thanks to everyone who has been so generous in supporting me to date. I've had a lot of climb so far (1000m +) and loads of brambles at the BOKtrot, but at least the weather has been reasonably kind!

Progress Report 2 - 19 May: 3 races this weekend, including covering 9.2km between 3.15 and 5am on Sunday (while most of you sensible people were tucked up in bed!) takes the total distance covered to 38.35km - that 50k target is now in sight. Thanks to my LOK team-mates for joining me - and continued thanks to everyone who is donating.

Final report - 27 May: Mission accomplished! I hit the 50km mark at 14.15 on Sunday last (Day 2 of the Tamar Triple). In all, I have covered 50.96km with 1935m of climb - that's about 6350 feet (almost 1 1/2 Ben Nevises) - over the 4 weekends, and I am pleased to say that I was still running when the 50km mark came up - it was downhill and I had to get to the finish line ahead of Ronan!

I checked my diary from 2 years ago where it says "A 0.1 km walk floors me, how can I ever contemplate getting back into the woods?" which makes me appreciate how far I have come. So thanks to all of you who have supported me throughout the 2 years and over the last month, and to Ro who still keeps my spirits up when I flag. And despite my hopes for no brambles, my legs are scratched to pieces....

Julie raised over STG£2200 for Different Strokes. If you would like to add to this, you can still do it here.

Incidentally, Julie will be running this Saturday night on the London OK team at the Jukola sever-person overnight relay at Tampere in Finland. Setanta Orienteers and Defence Forces Orienteers also have teams entered.

Of Hill and Marsh

GEN's David Healy recently spent a week training in Sweden. This is a kind of training diary ...

"I decided to take a week’s training in Stockholm at the beginning of April with the aim of focusing entirely on orienteering technique. This is a report on my time eating hill and sucking marsh

To navigate, simplify routes, go straight, use the marshes and the hills to make your way and when you get close to the control slow down and start reading all the little details that can bring you into the circle and onto the flag. The hard part is getting used to knowing which details to read, which details to block out; and then in practice reading and blocking out the detail itself. That plan will get you quite far in Sweden.

I had already gotten to grips with the demands of Stockholm orienteering when I lived in the city in 2002/03 but after that I got injured and had not orienteered much over the next three years. What my training camp this April was to achieve for me was my re-introduction to the land, the maps and the ability to navigate at a fast tempo – Stockholm is a FAST terrain which demands that you run at speed and taunts you with immensely intricate terrain.

What I hope to gain from this camp is selection on my Stockholm club’s first team in the Tiomila ten man relay in 3 weeks time, held in south Stockholm terrain. For this there are some test races. I ran one such race during this camp on the 2^nd day.

Day 1 – Vasteras, 100 km east of Stockholm, this was my Ryanair destination so I decided to take in a local middle distance event – this being a Saturday. The only goal was to go like a snail and make good plans for each leg. This wasn’t a very hard race but it was good to get a course in hand in preparation for tomorrow’s relay race south of Stockholm. I run for a club called Jarla IF OK. As the race today was short I drew down a few training controls after and went straight back out for an hour more. Too often I show up to race in Sweden the day before, and without having any training I go out and run a poor race. This time I wanted a day before to get to grips with the map and the land.

Day 2 – Masenstafettan, translates into “The Masen relay”. This is a small relay, about the size of the JK event. It is good practice for teams to prepare for Tiomila and for coaches to pick teams. This year I want to make my clubs first team and the strategy for me is to show safe, secure results. Accordingly, the goal today was good route planning, strong concentration on the map and not taking risky choices . I’ve been told by some people, and it’s common knowledge in Sweden, that over there you should never cross the line in between the control more than once. Because in this flattish terrain when you start doing that you’re adding distance to the leg. You take a route choice; left, or right, or straight on – you pick one and run it hard. They’re probably all just as quick either way. It’s not about route choice; it’s about seconds lost due to not following the fine details.

In this map sample from the race you can see my route from 6-7 veers off a bit to the right, I wanted to ‘see’ the marshes directly north from 6 and take a direction off them heading towards the massive marsh that sits close to number 7. From there I came up onto the hill (my attack point) and hugged the marsh running SE to NW alongside it – I read a lot of detail into the circle from here and spiked the control.

In this clip of the control 6-7 I use the colour red for highlighting marshes and purple for contour forms like hills. Excuse the sloppy drawing!

This is pretty much the only detail I visualised in my plan. So it goes: hill hill marsh marsh hill and then the attack point which is a hill – while hugging side of hill with the marsh and reading detail to the left I made my way to the hill that sits 10-20 metres east of the control feature (a marsh). This is a prime example of a safe and secure route, however if I’d raced for myself I would have taken a bearing towards the massive marsh and gone straight towards the control picking up the two marshes on the hill rise. (A point to note, can you see the knolls on the left side of 6-7? Imagine if we chose a route that followed all 30 or so of them – it would take forever, it would be giving myself 30 extra controls to find so it’s always useful to simplify as much as you can when possible so that you can run fast in between legs. Save all those minor details for when it’s needed – to spike the control.)

Day 3 – Ava Norra. Racing over, I now descend on Stockholm where I stayed with a friend and trained pure technique without the distractions of races. I aimed to train individual skills on their own with an intent on putting them together later in the camp.

Ava Norra is south of Stockholm and you need a car to get to it, which I had a friend for – this map sample is a little bendy from my scanner. This map was used in the Swedish team test races for world champs 2004. South Stockholm terrain is like mashed potatoes; you stick your fork in around and all over the mash a hundred times. Splash some water over it and you’ve got this amazing intricate marshy mess! Well, how do you navigate in such insane terrain? My first training was control picking at very slow speed with no compass – the aim is to hit controls about 100 meters apart and just read every single detail you can possibly read in between the leg. I use the contours to orientate the map. It’s not easy but totally possible with practice, especially when you keep a running speed on par with a walk! That’s as slow as I’m talking about. I like this training as my very first training in Scandinavian terrain as it connects me fully with the ground and fully with the map. In any sport it helps to practice skills very slowly and then increase the speed. Also, when I did this training back in 2003 I did it for 3 hours doing about 100 controls or more and in the end my concentration was at its max and my UNDERSTANDING of the Swedish nature was finally clear. From that point I knew what determines the smallest marsh, the smallest knoll, the smallest waver in a contour, the smallest stones, all features in all sizes. In understanding these symbols on the map and their relation with the ground I was now able to predict with imagery in my head what the ground ahead of me will look like from reading the map. My training in Ava Norra was quite successful. With a tiny little rare error here and there I did some good slow control picking. There were no flags of course. I almost had to change my slow training plan for a sprint when I met two elk, but they wanted to run away from me so I was alright. But not for long, they ran in the direction of my next few controls. Caution David...

In the evening I did a second training session which was 1.5 km from where I was staying on Lidingo island. This time I wanted to stretch my legs out and also practice my compass technique. My aim was to go directly towards the control circle and pace the distance. To my surprise I spiked 18 out of 19 controls. For creating the course as you can see in the map sample I blocked out the area in between the controls to assure myself I would only look for the detail in the circle. And so the corridor I drew was very slim when leaving the circle for the next control as I could use this to confirm if I had hit my control or in fact hit a similar feature.

When you take a bearing you don’t want to read all the small detail, just the big thing you’re aiming for. I never take bearings for more than 300/350 metres as the precision will begin to fail from there. Accordingly in the training, legs were 100-300 metres. I haven’t worked on my compass technique since I was maybe 17, so it was quite refreshing. I’ll need to keep training this as my speed in setting the needle and then looking up to the horizon is quite slow. I had to work fast here also as the light was almost fading. I’m going to use compass bearings a whole lot more than I normally do now. Great weather all week. Better than Ireland funnily enough, and no snow!

Someone gave me the map to use (map sample above) and it already had controls. I thought I might run that course or use the map again and I decided to draw my course onto the plastic bag and seal it tight at the end so it wouldn’t move. It worked perfectly. Try this!

Day 4 - something fast was needed as I couldn’t run at slow speeds all week. So just for today I decided to run some orienteering intervals. This is a training that requires 100% maximum concentration on the map. You have a start triangle and draw 3-4 legs with an overall distance of something like 500-1000 metres. In the sample (to the right) I ran the sloppy course, there was in fact a pre set course already on the map so I had to draw over it and make sure I didn’t get distracted.

Again it’s incredibly hard to do this training with no flags, but, I chose features that I knew would be unique enough that I would know I was right when I got there, but also that I needed to find them firstly with good navigation. I did about 3 intervals really well, running 5 mins each one with a 2 minute rest in between. Each interval took longer than I thought. I didn’t miss anything on the first 3 but when I started the fourth I must have taken a wrong direction as I got lost for about 5-10minutes at which point I didn’t want to start increasing my heart rate again back up to interval speed, I decided 15 minutes hard running was satisfactory so I returned to my bag hidden at the start point, put on a warm jumper and walked 2 km back to the train station and embarked on my 80 minute ride home

In the evening I was lent a car, this time from the guy I was staying with, so that I could go to my club training. My club trains technique, like a lot of Swedish clubs, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Tonight’s training was simply a course with 3 loops, a mass start and as usual flags set in the forest. Trainings are more interesting than this but I figure that since it was the beginning of the season for them they weren’t focusing on their technique training just yet. It was getting dark so I managed two loops. Plus I got tired from this mornings training. I had to tell myself to slow down and take it slow or else two fast trainings will hurt me or at least tire me for the rest of the week. But it’s hard to hold yourself back when you’re running against some hot shot juniors in the club. This was a nice little area I orienteered on, I was planning ahead well and I took some bearings now and then. There was no real goal but to concentrate on the map and not lose focus. I sat back and enjoyed being able to choose good routes, navigate with precision and spike nearly all the controls. That’s a really good feeling. This next map segment is one of the loops I ran. In my routes I would ignore paths and overhead pylons in favour of choosing a more challenging route, it’s good training. But only for training, In a race I’d choose the fastest and simplest route choice – I wonder if I train like this too much will I run a race choosing these tougher routes? That would be a bad mistake to make – I need to pay attention to this closer to some bigger races.

It was a beautiful evening with the sun burning a dark orange and I was flying along over some foreign land. I didn’t miss much time anywhere on the course and I was always comfortably planned ahead. I felt my technique was coming along already; I would make sure I had a good plan and if I didn’t I would continue to scan the leg until I did. Once this plan was in place and memorised in my head I could then do the easy part, follow the route and pay attention to not veering off. When I set goals to focus I meant that I follow my plan and always be looking ahead towards what the next feature or checkpoint will be. Fatigue and loss of concentration on the map are the main demons to ward off – but I have a mental cue that helps me when I feel my focus is slipping. I literally tell myself to focus out loud, and I’ve done it so many times that it’s a built in fully functional component in my brain that I switch on and do it. But it has being practiced in training to make sure that when you say it you do it. You also need to be aware at what point in a race you’re going to lose focus. By analysing my races and looking at where I’ve made mistakes I can tell when I’m losing focus which usually means I refocus myself before I make a mistake.

Day 5 – Paradiset – about 60-70km south of the city. Great name, great terrain. One of the craziest terrains and maps I’ve been on in Stockholm. I ran this at a slow jog. My sole training goal was practicing making a plan ahead to the control after the one I’m on. Reading fast and making the best plan is the hard part. I want to make this plan when I leave a control, or at least as early on in the leg as I can. If I failed to make a plan while coming upon my control I can always take a quick glance at the direction I’ll leave in and when leaving the flag I make a plan while I trot in that direction. Anyway, this training went well. A few bad controls at the beginning but when I got warmed up (and I’m not talking about my legs) I was having a good training session. One big part of my technique this year is to read my description first and then look at the map and visualise the control feature and the detail in the circle before I even look at the leg. Then I look for an attack point that is best suited to the feature and then lastly I choose the route in the form of check points. In the past when choosing attack points I found it difficult but I would go through maps with courses I made up and while sitting down in my front room I would try and analyse which attack point is best – then the more and more I orienteered, the faster I would see the attack point while on the run. This was good, about 90 minutes of this.

Day 6 – Today’s training was a map I was given from a previous club’s training. It had 34 controls in a short distance so I figured I would not concentrate on leg planning, but orienteer by compass bearings today. Unlike the first training where I didn’t read any detail until the circle, in this training I would take a bearing to the control or attack point and read any detail I wanted to read.

A lot of the detail I read on the route would be to confirm my direction was correct, such as reading a distinct cliff face or hill or marsh or unique array of boulders. This was my only training today. I got stuck in rush hour traffic and missed my club’s training in the evening. But still I had good training so far this week and I think at this stage I felt I had no problem with the terrain. So I hit a 7-Eleven, bought some sweets and went back on home. Too many sweets for my own good, it must be noted.

Day 7 – The final day’s training. The morning I went in a car with 3 others and we ran into the forest about 2 km to the start flag. This was a great looking forest. Crunchy green flaky moss on the hills and mini heather. What paradise!

But the marshes this day were the wettest all week. The goal today was to put together all I’ve being training this week and see how I progressed. I ran the loop below at a little below race pace, and again another loop at race pace whereby everything was clicking. It was a good training and I left feeling I’d accomplished a full understanding again of the demands of Stockholm orienteering. I didn’t orienteer much at high speeds, so that’s the next objective with the training campI’ll do 8 days up to Tiomila, but I still think it was money well spent to come to this technical area and start real slow working upwards.

Second training – nothing was left to be done but one last forest to master, the forest I lived on for a year – 15 km long and 8 km wide. I took a bus to the part where it’s most difficult with the aim of a 30 minute training session before I went home and left for the airplane. I created a little course and ran it extremely close to perfection. I saw a few deer and just enjoyed this intense forest that at one stage in my life was the most difficult map to train on but now was something I could orienteer on and feel comfortable in.

No compass again as it was good to practise reading contours. And I wouldn’t use the paths as it would be cheating, just for this training - that is since I paid money to fly here and train technique. So afterwards I left the city and embarked towards my second sleep in a week on the floor in Stansted airport with a sense of real accomplishment. Although I ran fast only 2-3 times I learnt the terrain and maps all over again and it definitely helps to instil some confidence when running races in Finland and Norway this summer for me. The Tiomila is in Stockholm terrain and so the season for me begins with this one. I’ll take 8 days training beforehand to practise increasing the speed and run a relay called Stigtomtakavlen which is the final selection for the Tiomila team."

(Editor's note: David's article came with illustrations of the maps he mentions but I haven't yet managed to import them into this version ...)

Orienteering by Franc: the Irish 3-Day

Forget Rome and the Bahamas: Inishbofin, off the west coast of Co. Galway, is the hottest spot around for weddings. Just try running an orienteering event on a weekend in June and finding accommodation for the runners and you'll see. I was told there were 70 weddings planned for the island this year, but the small organising team from Western Eagles and CNOC managed to squeeze maybe two hundred more people onto the island for the June Bank Holiday weekend, on top of the resident population of 180 or so.

As one runner from abroad said, if you wanted to design an open mountain orienteering area, Inishbofin is what you would come up with. It has crags, marshes, shape, everything you need, without being too steep to run, and the underfoot conditions are ideal - short grass and short heather.

The planner, Frank Ryan, made excellent use of the areas: the west end for a short race on Saturday evening, the central and northern part for the classic race on Sunday and the complex southern section including the tidal area around Cromwell's Barracks for the chasing start on the Bank Holiday Monday. A rather dubious control on the first evening and shifting numbers on some of Sunday's overprinted courses marred the event for some competitors, while some unusual class combinations gave very short junior winning times. Having said that, it must have been an extremely difficult job planning easy courses here.

Most people seem to have gone away happy, vowing to return if there is another event there. Incessant sunshine, the low-key organisation and the friendliness of the people all went to make a memorable orienteering weekend.

The Junior Squad ran a table quiz on the Sunday night, raising almost €600 for travel, gear etc. The DFO team won.

3ROC's Andrew Quin held off the foreign challenge to take the M21L trophy while Irish Champion Niamh O'Boyle (CNOC) held Ciara Largey (QUBOC) at bay in the chasing start to win the W21L class.

Results are available on the WEGO web site here and on the IOA site here.

JMcC.

CNOC Evening Series kicks off at Donadea

When the stress of exams comes around, you know the CNOC summer series isn't going to be to far behind to help transform the stress of the mind to the burning of the legs. The first event this year was in Donadea Forest Park in North Kildare. Eileen Loughman took the lead in planning the course, and the Shorts highly involved in org as usual. Conor took control of the SI, with Don head sausage cook after being relieved of gate duty.

Three courses were on offer, the long at 5.7km and medium at 3.6km. The short course was a quick jaunt around the lake.The faithful began to arrive and vanish into the forest, as the car park filled. The beautiful evening was even tempting out a few of the locals.

On Long the fastest times were Christian Foley Fisher 42:05 and Kevin O Boyle in 42:34, only for the party to be spoiled by Marcus finishing in a time of 40:32. On Medium, Chris Blau ran it home in 35:33 closely followed by the young Sanni Kymalainen of Setanta only 12 seconds back, Brian Hill finished off the top 3 almost 5 mins off Chris. Caoimhe O Boyle contuined her winning form coursing to victory on the Short with Ciana Jones 4 mins back. Nora Casey was 29 mins with six runners clocking in at 32 mins.

Jukola Training in Donadea you say? A commotion at the start saw Seamus O'Boyle, Ruairí Short and Colm Hill take off in a mini mass-start at breakneck speed. People stood back as they accelerated across the car park - what no one saw was the Seamus running to the left, Ruairí and Colm following, Shea stopping and saying, right guys so where are we? The curses and abuse were let out before Ruairí relocated and set the pace. About 30 mins later they re-enter the car park, Colm reaching the map exchange seconds before Seamus, both pick up a medium map and are off again, a few minutes pass and Ruairí enters the map exchange and leaves without breaking step. After completing the Medium course, Seamus cruises in 1:01m clear of Colm - with Ruairí running strongly by himself to finish 5 mins off the pace. (Shea - 9.3km, 32 controls in 55:31!)

The sausages are eaten, the tea is drunk. . . only one thing remains. The car park begins to clear as the sun slowly falls. With tired legs, Ruth, Eileen and anyone else lucky enough to still be around set out to collect the controls at the far reaching parts of the map . . An enjoyable afternoon, and the perfect excuse not to do a bit of study.

Colm Hill