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