Thursday 14 April 2011

Temp-O and Trail-O at the JK

It has now been confirmed on the JK 2011 event website that there will be Temp-O at this year's JK in Northern Ireland. Details of this and the two Trail-O events are included in the Final Details.

This must be one of the most international Trail-O events held in UK/Ireland with entries from GBR, IRL, NOR, SWE, DEN, FIN, CZE, GER, JPN and ESP. Many of these are well known for their exploits at World and European stage so it will tough for the Brits and Irish.

Courses look long at 3.2km and 3.5km (both 21 controls and 2 TCs) which should favour the younger, fitter guys. The combination of courses closing at 18:30 and max times of 159 and 168 mins mean those starting around the 16:30 last start will have to be quick!
My first O event in Lithuania went well: 35:56 for 5.4 - the initial results sheet suggested this was 4:46 mins/km, but the official results had the more accurate 6:39 mins/km. As you can see it was pretty flat with set compass and run hard being the order of the day.


Two interesting notes about the classes on offer. In Lithuania M21 and M35 are the women's courses with V21 and V35 for men. In fact at this event the only Vets class was V35 with A, B, C and D lengths on offer, so I did V45B.

There is another evening event tonight and then 2 more and a Trail-O at the weekend if I can work out the transport.

Tuesday 5 April 2011

Lithuania

Next week I am off to Lithuania for a week's work. Fortunately I have found some Orienteering to do while I am there. All being well I can attend one of the two mid-week events as well as a two day event southwest of Vilnius. Thanks to my Ski-O friend Danielius Pralgauskis for helping me with the entries, travel and accomodation.

Even better than this is that there is also a Trail-O event on the Sunday at the same venue, so I get to do my first Trail-O event since last year's World Championships one week before the JK (whose 2 days comprise 2 of the 4 selection races for this years WTOC).