Niamh's Stage 1 report

Ireland's Niamh O'Boyle had a solid start today in the first stage of the 2011 Nordic tour.
Here she is reporting from Porvoo in Finland:


NORT Stage 1: Porvoo, Finland

The first stage of the 2011 Nordic Orienteering Tour (NORT) was held today in Porvoo in Southern Finland. The format for the day was a morning middle-distance race, with the top 30 qualifying for a sprint race in the evening. For me, after a long winter of injury, rehab and frustration, it was an ideal chance to run a high quality competition to see how things were going in the build up to the World Champs.

Normally before World Cup races there is a ‘quarantine area’ where the athletes are held to ensure that they can’t see the map or talk to those who have already finished. It can be boring when there is nobody else from your team there, but today the time was filled with an elaborate strapping routine – left knee, right knee, left ankle. For good measure, and because there was some spare time, I strapped my right ankle too - feeling very old and crippled at this point! After that, a good warm-up and into the pre-start and I was ready to go.
The plan was to stay calm, navigate well, minimise mistakes and let the running take care of itself. We had a long run-out (140m) to the start kite, enough time to glance ahead at the course and assess the long leg from 2 – 3. Number 1 was good, number 2 less so. I didn’t keep my direction in the vegetation and ended up slightly past the control. For number 3, I had decided that the far right route was too long and decided to go over the top instead of left. From 4 to the map exchange I was sticking to the plan and navigating well. Just after the map exchange, Tessa caught me and we were together from 9 to 11,when she went left and I took a more direct up-and-over route.
Herself and a Norwegian got away on the second butterfly loop en route to 15, which I was rueing when I was running (walking) up the ski slope from 16 to 17. This was a leg that really exposed my lack of fitness as I lost over 2 minutes to the fastest time. I lost some time to 18, turning too soon from the track, but at the finish I was pleased with the run. It wasn’t enough to qualify in the top 30 for the final, but I was happy nonetheless.

The finals were won by Linnea Gustafsson (Sweden) and Matthias Kyburz (Switzerland). The Swiss men dominated the final, taking the first 5 places!

Now it is on to Jukola where we have an Irish team from CNOC (in order of appearance: Conor, Ruairi, Seamus, Kevin, Me, Hugh and Colm) and will be blogging on www.cnoc.ie. Then it’s back to Gothenburg where the second leg of NORT will take place next Tuesday. It is a knock-out sprint with live GPS from the semi-final and final on Tuesday evening. Full results and GPS tracking from today are available at: http://nordicorienteeringtour.com/