Harvesting

Last weekend was the Harvester relays - GBs answer to Tiomila and Jukola. I confess to not having run it before because summer + orienteering + britain usually = nettles and brambles. That and it starts in the middle of the night. This year the Harvester was held in Ecclesall Woods on the outskirts of Sheffield. It's a great little area with a really good map so I signed myself up... The women's race is 5 legs, starting at 1:30 in the morning, and is run on the same course as the Juniors and B teams. Kim and Jenny P got us off to a great start running the two night legs (there can't be many teams that have the experience of two former GB WOC team runners to send out in the dark!), such a good start in fact that Lucy's dawn leg was in fact night and Clare's day leg was night/dawn. Clare was a bit suprised when she turned up for her day leg and found herself borrowing a head torch. Both ran great legs to set me off in second place overall (first women's team) and only 1 second down on our junior team... Adam pegged it out of the start and had a clear lead by the start kite. Fortunately for me he then missed number 1 slightly and and I never lost the lead after that. It was great to run under pressure and brilliant to win the overall competition :) The win also made us UK relay league champions for 2011 - hurray! More impressively there were 8 different women involved in the victory. Well done ladies!
ShUOC did an impressive job of organising and planning and this was the first event in Britain with GPS tracking. The courses were fun, the gaffling well planned and the atmosphere excellent. I hope that other clubs will follow their lead over the next years. After all, if a bunch of students get it right how difficult can it be?!!

Routegadget

Busy Busy Bee

The last couple of months have been crazy busy – lots of training, lots of racing, lots of work :(, and most excitingly we got married! So if you’re wondering who Rachael Rothman is, now you know ;) Alex and I had such an amazing day so thanks to all our friends and family who made it so perfect. Bolsover Castle was a stunning venue, I’ll try and get some more pictures up soon but in the meantime there are a lot on facebook!

After the wedding we travelled out to France for a training camp. We camped at Leschraines and it was great to wake up every morning to mountain scenery and fresh pain au chocolat. We also sampled a lot of local icecream, cheese and red wine mmmmmm. The Swiss and Norwegian teams kindly let us join in their training so we got some really great sessions done. By the end of the week I felt I’d got to grips with what you need to do to run fast in this terrain. It’s going to be an amazing WOC, I really can’t wait for the competitions to start! I’m now running middle and long which will be great fun. Each race will have its own technical and physical challenges and you can’t switch off for even one second – just how I like it :)

Triple tie - who would have thought it?!

Having said a tie for a medal doesn't happen very often in my last post I find myself eating my words somewhat - in the JK "long" distance yesterday, Mhairi, Riina and I tied for the bronze medal, all with a time of 61:01!!

It was held on Slieve Croob, a big open hill just north of Dundrum. I wasn't particularly excited about it in advance as the terrain wasn't very inspiring, but I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to. I orienteered really well for the first half but dropped a bit of time (1 min 20 total?) in the second half due to a couple of hesitations and trying to navigate to the wrong control. Claire and Tessa took first and second, both with an impressive minutes so a fair bit in front of us in third. I'm just not fast enough up hill at the moment but looking forward to seeing how i'm running in a couple of months time after finishing the next training block. It's always hard to know when to peak each year. This year after having a bad winter I'm just aiming to peak for WOC in the summer. We will see if that is a good tactic...

The only disappointing thing about yesterday was the length of the course - I'd been looking forward to running a real classic, but with winning times 18 minutes faster than predicted that wasn't the case. I'll just have to keep running the mens course to get the long sessions in.

Today was the relay, back on the Tyrella dunes where the middle distance was the day before yesterday. The middle distance didn't go to plan at all - I made a big mistake on number 2 and felt generally drained and heavy legged the whole course. I obviously didn't recover well after the sprint. A good lesson to learn but a shame it was for the JK middle. Normally technical races are my thing, but not this one. Quickroute map

I was really excited for the relay this morning. I knew we had a fighting chance to win and it was great to see my team mates up for it too. Jo had a stable run on first leg, setting Mairead off in 10th. Mairead then ran a fantastic middle leg to set me off in 2nd, only 18 seconds behind Sarah Rollins (running for British Army). I ran well at the start and reeled in Sarah by taking a better line on the first control. We were neck and neck for the middle section, but then I made a route choice error, dropping more than 30s. Sarah ran clear to take the gold medal about one minute ahead of me, with Edinburgh Southern in 3rd, over 6 minutes down. We were happy with silver but I am gutted about the route choice error, the finish would have been really exciting otherwise. It was very satisfying to run fast through the dunes today and not make mistakes. It's amazing how relays make your legs feel fresh despite racing the 3 previous days. Or maybe that was the ice bath last night?! Quickroute map

JK results

JK Sprint: a good start!

This year's JK is being held in Northern Ireland and today was the sprint race round Stranmillis University College and Queen's Elms Village. After my 6th place in the British sprints a couple of weeks ago I was interested to see how this race would go. Not having a map in advance made it even more exciting!
It was a great race with lots of controls and changes of direction and some tricky routes. I ran pretty cleanly with just a few small time loses to take the bronze medal :) Team mates Sarah Rollins and Pippa Archer were 12s ahead in joint gold medal position, not something that happens very often in an orienteering race! Results are on the JK website.
Check out the map below - unfortunately the olive green is all offset which makes it quite hard to see where you can/can't get through...
Looking forward to the next 3 days of races now: middle tomorrow, long on sunday and relay monday, then off to Sweden for Tiomila!

Fun in the Portugese Sun

I celebrated my 31st birthday by getting up at 4:30am to fly to Portugal... maybe not the best start to the day but the long lunch in the sunshine by the beach and 40 control pick was exactly what I wanted to be doing :) It was a great weeks training: four sessions in the dunes near Figueira da Foz (thank you to the Swiss team for letting us join in their training) then two sessions in the rocks at Alter do Chao followed by the first two days of POM.

We stayed at the surf camp in Figueira da Foz which was great - we had the whole place to ourselves, just as well when Helen planned me a surprise party complete with silly string!
The dunes are great for practicing fast orienteering and in our final trains I managed to hold my own winning 2 of 6. We got some great headcam footage which may make an appearance soon...

Moving to the rocky areas inland was a bit of a shock to my system and my first few controls were terrible. I worked it out though and really enjoyed the contrast of the two races I did. The long race was super fast and the middle really tricky, just how I like them and I was pleased with the results, a good confidence boost before the start of the season for real. Sadly I had to leave before the third and fourth races to come back to work... jealous of all the people still out there but my legs probably needed the rest day!

Results Day 1

Results Day 2