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.