WORLD CUP round 3 and 4 in Norway.

World cup round 3/4 is in Oslo, Norway. Round 3 is a middle distance, and round 4 is a chasing start long distance based on the times from round 3.

Irish starters in todays middle distance:
Ciara Largey - 12:47 (Irish time)
Marcus Pinker - 12:48 (Irish time)
Neil Dobbs - 13:28 (Irish time)

GPS / online results / arena speaker / web tv - http://app.o-festivalen.com/dp6/en/live
Start list - http://app.o-festivalen.com/dp6/en/start-lists-world-cup-friday
A second locatin for web tv (same footage) - http://www.nrksport.no/

Ciara is off in 35mins from now,
Enjoy!

WOC team manager

This year sees a bumper crop of elite Irish orienteers taking on the best at WOC2009 in Hungary.The team of 7 men and 3 women need someone to support them at this great event.Expressions of interest are welcomed from anyone who would like to help the teamwith this very important role.For more info on the duties of the WOC team manager please contact me asap at:IVANMANDYMILLAR@aol.com

Ivan Millar (Director HPO)

We're Finnished now..

The sun has now set on this Nordics competition leaving us with some memorable races and orienteering stories. But as the Finnish sun never sets this time of year we would like to take what we learnt and utilize it to train and aim for bigger and better things; to never let these experiences and the lessons learnt set and fade into a distant memory.

In two years time we have a chance to rerace against this incredibly tough line up of Nordic runners and top continental runners. Do we not have the terrain and mountains at home to be as fast and strong as them? Do we not have some good maps on our island that are as challenging as other world class maps? To answer these questions depends on which way you want to look at your own living situation, as all Irish orienteers find it difficult to get to good maps to train on. For any real success in O there needs to be committment and even sacrifice. Luckily for some of the Irish they've moved to Sweden for studies or work and have better access to maps and terrain for training. However, those in Ireland do have the maps and the terrain. We have great mountains and world class maps, and if we take training camps to train specifically for certain terrains who knows what success we could get on a good race day in the future.


Training ourselves individually through the winter and spring is a tough task but hopefully the squad is progressing towards a more closely knit community of Irish elites. And a very positive aspect of the team this week was that every person understood the maps and terrain properly, which shows great strength and potential for the future of the Irish senior squad.


Finally, the Nordics has being a very technologically focused event, with GPS tracking and tv controls, which shows great hope for the future of spectating orienteering from a finish shute in a remote field or at home in a chair. For Irish orienteering there is an annual break in the fixtures list. Whereas on the international scene it is the height of the racing season. Keep watching the senior blog as the next outing for the senior team is in the world cup round 2/3 in Oslo, Norway on June 26th/27th.

WC Sprint Qualification

Today the competitions concluded with everyone taking part in the World Cup sprint qualifications in the town of Salo. There were 3 heats with the top 11 in each to qualify for the final later today.

The men set off first (again) leaving the women alone to entertain themselves in quarantine (again). The men had about a 3.2 km course with a rough winning time of under 14 min.

Dave had the fastest Irish time with 16.37min. Ruairi was in the same heat with a time of 18.14min. Dave said he was "shaky on making optimum route choices, but safisfied with an ok performance". Ruairi felt his race went fairly ok with no mistakes. Colm had a fast run, slowed by quite a large mistake to #2 (again...he mutters). Otherwise he pushed hard and ran well with a time of 16.44min. Neil was least happy with his performance. It took a push to get a comment from him, including descriptive words that I will not pass onto the blog. In general he felt slow, with a few 10s mistakes. His finishing time was 16.58min.

Later in the day the women took on the speedy courses. Simone Niggli destroyed the field with a winning time of 13.05min. Can she perform as well in the final later today? Niamh had a time of 16.23min. She had no mistakes but felt too slow for the course. She's looking forward to watching the final but wishes she was competing!

I (Rosalind) also felt slow. It tough to push the legs so fast after such a tough weekend. I, along with most Irish teammembers (except smug Colm), feel that we took the poor routechoice up and over the forested hill rather than around the road. I believe most time loss was here for a few of us.

Anyhoo, none of us managed to qualify for the final. Boo.

Check out a full set of results here: http://www.noc2009.fi/ar/sprinttikars.html

We're all off to watch the finalists in action....

Technical, technical, technical

If we found the long long, the middle was intense. We were expecting fast, tricky orienteering on the open bare rock hilltops with good visibility. Instead we had fast, tricky orienteering through patches of green, varying visibility and complex contour detail.

The boys were out first today. Ruairi was the first of us out and first back, with Dave close on his heels. Despite the lack of sunshine the shamrock came out of hiding...

Ruairi had another solid run in his Senior international debut. He caught two minutes on a Swede by the second control, and was still ahead three controls later. Dave was better but still a little dissatisfied with his performance.

In his first World Cup race, Colm got a bit dazzled by the cameras and took an original route to the second control.

On the way to the second quarantine zone, we had to get off the bus a kilometre early and walk, because the Swedish team bus was blocking the dirt road, with half the bus in the ditch. It put us in good spirits :)

I was out last of our guys and came in very happy (for once!) with my run. Perfection isn't possible (for mortals) in this terrain, but I only made a couple of very minor mistakes and was pushing hard all the way to the end. My finish position belies the strength of the field... and my lack of speed.

As we were eating lunch, Ros and Niamh were still in quarantine drawing pictures. After using up all the crayons in the primary school, they eventually made it to the competition and headed out into the beautiful terrain.

Ros was "navigating quite well when I was on my own" and was a little frustrated with herself for not doing better. She looked strong at the spectator control and running in to the finish:

Niamh ran very well and was happier than after the long distance. While many packs formed in the women's race (the seven with Simone N-L wasn't the biggest!), Niamh ran most of the race on her own. A little more experience in this terrain (it's her first time in Finland), and she will be a force to be reckoned with.

Tomorrow is the sprint. Quarantine is 9am, so breakfast will be early!

Rest Day Gossip

Today was the model for the sprint and middle distances. After a lazy breakfast consisting of large helpings of everything on offer it still ended in a sprint to the buffet counter to collect as much food as possible before they closed up shop for the morning (the finns don't flash the lights for last orders!). After lounging around and the drawing of routes, Dave headed out to the middle model event to practise compass while the rest of us prefered to chill out. Eventually we headed into the centre of Salo for the small sprint training window of an hour. Its looking like the sprint race on Wednesday will be fast and furious with only 33 qualifying for the final out of 121 runners in men and 97 in womens.

With the focus back on the middle distance Ruairi did his stint as acting team leader and headed to the managers meeting where once again the Swiss and Danish managers had some differences with the organisers. Over dinner we were informed by Roar that we would all runners would wear gps devices for live tracking in tomorrow's middle distance race. Needless to say the banter began to fly about what we could spell on the forest floor during our 20min warming up period. The most popular were Hi Mum or a combined effort of each of us doing a letter of Ireland. Email us your suggestions!

The Middle Distance event kicks off in the morning at 0900 Irish Time. The starts are as follows (all Irish time), with the men starting first, followed by the womens race (who may end up with manky GPS vests)

09:53 - Ruairi Short
09:57 - David Heally
10:16 - Colm Hill
10:32 - Neil Dobbs

12:10 - Rosalind Hussey
12:39 - Niamh O Boyle

The link to the GPS live tracking is avaible here - http://www.gpsseuranta.net/eindex.php?sivu=tt&id=20090606

The squad has come to a conclusion that Neil has gone through a midlife crisis, which resulted in the image below from Saturday's long distance race:
In the end it turned out that it wasn't only Neil.... check out http://news.worldofo.com/2009/06/07/gps-tracks-noc-long-mistakes-collected/ for a collection of mistakes that were caught on GPS - lucky for the first half of the field, we didn't have them

Hopefully all of the irish had that midlife crisis on Saturday and can keep things clean in the morning.

Signing out

Colm

NOC Relay

Today the NOC relay was held, with the same finish arena as the long yesterday. The terrain was similar but with less pronounced features to guide you, it was easier to lose direction and become confused.
Dave ran the first leg in order to gain more experience and allow himself become a top class first leg runner in the future. He had a clean run making only one small mistake and came back in 26th, quite satisfied with his performance, about 10 minutes down on the fastest times.
I (Ruairi) ran the second leg but I wasn't able to have as good a race as I did in the long. I just didn't have as much fun and I lost nearly 5 minutes in total , getting fooled by the terrain, and came back in 27th place leaving Neil 5:30 to catch on the German second team.
Neil ran the last leg and had a solid run. He saw the German team's last leg runner looking lost as he himself was leaving the 9th control and really finished strongly, running fast to bring us home in 26th!
Niamh, Rosalind and Colm all ran the open races in the terrain from the long as there were no places available on relay teams. All ran well, capaitalising on an extra opportunity to get used to the Finnish maps.
As for the medals, it was very exciting with the final sprint deciding medals in three of the relay classes. The two swedish mens junior teams punched the last conrtol together, and raced for gold with the second team taking the victory. In the mens there was a race for silver between Matthias Merz of Switzerland and Tuomas Tervo of Finland, with Merz just managing to stay ahead. In the womens after the Norwegian anchor, Anne Margrethe-Hauksen, had been leading she was pipped by just 10 seconds by Finland who took the Silver, a minute behind Sweden. Also in the female junior relay Denmark took gold with Emma Klingenberg running the first leg, so we'll claim 50% of that gold!
Overall it was a much better performance today and we were happy with this result and plan to keep improving for the World Cup middle distance on Tuesday, after the banquet tonight and rest day tomorrow!

The Irish NOC relay team, David, Neil and Ruairi

full results are available here. Some interesting analysis of our races can be seen here.
And a video (in swedish) showing the arena and the swedes winning!
Ruairi Short!

NOC Long Distance 2009

The long distance today was testing for everyone. As Rosalind said 'the terrain was demanding' and it was easy to lose map contact. In the women's event, World Champion Minna Kauppi gave Finland victory. Niamh 'had a steady race, except for one bad route choice. I wasn't running fast as this was my first race in Nordic terrain ever, so I was afraid of getting lost! I had a clean race, and now that I have a better idea of what it's like, I can't wait for the World Cup races.' An excerpt from the live GPS track of her route is shown below.

Ros tells us about her race: 'I got very confused on the way to number one but I got back on track and the race went well after that but it wasn't amazing. I used techniques of catching features and, to a lesser extent, line features and ran on my compass a lot. For the middle distance World Cup race on Tuesday I want to keep focussed the whole way on the longer legs, as number one today was clean most of the way but lost it at the end of the leg. For the record, I had porridge with jam and milk, fancy bread and butter, berries and tea for breakfast!'

Niamh's GPS trace from the butterfly loop on the women's course:
there is live online tracking on www.noc2009.fi

The men's race was won by Daniel Hubmann of Switzerland. Neil summed the men's results up by putting his head in his hands when asked about his race. For the record, he didn't cry. Neil was carrying GPS as one of the later starters. He found the terrain 'fun and fast, but then it got tough. I got tired at this point and it was harder then to keep good map contact. Technique-wise, I used my compass to control my direction, looked ahead to identify features like bare rock that I could run to, and slowed down when within 50-100m of the control. I tried to keep to areas of good visibility.' Dave finished best of the Irish men today. He tells us about his race: 'I started well and got into the map, maintaining a decent speed. Then I got too far ahead of myself and tried to run faster that I could orienteer, so I had some problems. Later in the race, my legs were dead even after taking in some food. I want to take what I learned today and apply it to the other races.' Dave learned that you don't need to read every detail, but that you do need to know where you are; and that it's hard to relocate, so don't loose map contact. Colm felt good physically, but not mentally. In his own words, 'my compass and me had a fight. I won, but the compass was right. I need to concentrate more on the map, and not be afraid to slow down and read the features more carefully. I'm disappointed as I know I can achieve better, but I'm not used to this kind of terrain.' Ruairi (pictured on the run-in) had a solid race in the M20 class.

The terrain was challenging for the whole team. The relay is to be held at the same place tomorrow, with Dave running first leg, then Ruairi and finally Neil will bring the team home. Neil and the other final leg runners will be wearing a GPS, and tracking will be online from about 10:30 Finnish time.

All the GPS tracks from today can be seen on http://www.gpsseuranta.net/eindex.php?sivu=tt&id=20090606

Below: the final loop of the men's long race showing Neil's route

The Irish team arrives in Finland

The Nordic championships is an open event held every second year where Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark have to crown their champions in the long, relay, middle and sprint distance. Lucky for Ireland we're allowed to enter a small team. This year the first two rounds of the World Cup piggy back onto the middle and sprint distances held on Tuesday and Wednesday. Tomorrow morning is the Nordics long race and the Irish team has being busy preparing for the races the past two days in the local forests of Salo south of Finland.


Salos forests are fast and complex terrain with alot of bare rock, small hills and marshes. The ground is a little wet from the past week of rain. There is a stronger field of athletes in these race than there are in WOC. For example, in a WOC long distance final you might have 12 runners of the four Nordic teams to face off with. In the Nordic championships, each of the four Nordic countries can enter 10 athletes. So racing 40 Nordic orienteers in their home terrain will pose a tough field to rank in.

Ruairi Short heads out late with all the best runners and will actually have the last start on the M20 course. Heres hoping he earns a good run from the past nine months he has spent living and training in Tullinge, Sweden. It's also good practise races for his final JWOC to be held in Italy next month. However he won't run the junior Nordic races for long as he's on the senior team for the world cup races next week.


For results (after the long distance tomorrow) click here.
Some athletes are being given gps tracks to follow live on a big tv screen. I don't think it's being shown online but if it is be sure to check www.noc2009.fi out for all the jazz. Finland is two hours ahead of Ireland remember.

From left to right: David Healy, Niamh O'Boyle, Ruairi Short, Neil Dobbs, Rosalind Hussey, Colm Hill.

Be sure to check in on the senior blog for more news and pictures of the races. This is David Healy signing out from the Irish team NOC/WC 2009.