Owls Count

Back in my previous entry I mentioned that I would write about the World Orienteering Championships and the Tour races. Since then I have been a bit busy and so it has taken a few weeks to write anything. This was my first experience of orienteering abroad and overall it was fairly good. As terrain went it had reasonable similarity with some areas in the UK and so was not the complete shock that some places can be.

For the WOC Tour races it was a case of starting well and getting worse - saving my worst run for the last day, which, due to the odd results system being used, was the day for the overall competition results were based on. Having not run much this year I had opted for the comparative safety of M21AK.

The first day (Linå Vesterskov) was a lot tougher, hillier, and longer than most people expected. I had been expecting a 40ish minute winning time, where instead it was about 53 minutes. For me this meant that I was out for just under 90 minutes and I am pleased with this time. I managed to keep running well and kept my concentration for most of the way - even when it was obvious I was going to be out for longer than I had expected. One gripe that a lot of people had were that the WOC controls were still in the forest and in some places this meant that there were SI and Emit controls very close together, which confused quite a few people.

The second and third days (Storskoven and Fløjstrup Skov) were on the coast, on an area that was similar to chunks of the New Forest - though a little less wet! Day 2 was advertised as being a classic distance race (as the first had been) and day 3 as being a short classic (about 2/3 of the distance). I viewed this with some scepticism, as the course lengths for the two days were about the same and there was nothing to suggest that the two halves of the area were going to be vastly different. My times for the two days were almost the same (around 53 minutes) and the winning times for the two days were a couple of minutes apart (33:36 and 31:29 respectively). On day 2 I navigated well, but ran too slowly and on day 3 I ran better, but made a few bad route choices and small mistakes.

Day 4 (Løndal/Velling Skov) was a return inland, back to hilly terrain. The forest here was better than the first day and so the course was quicker, even though it was both longer and hillier. I enjoyed running through the area. The long legs were challenging and where I lost time - not making a good route choice on any of them. I was out for 80 minutes, but should have been about ten minutes quicker.

Day 5 (Gjern Bakker) was a mixed area. The southern part was low visibility and involved precise navigation (a couple of people compared it to Loch Vaa) and the northern part was fairly open. This meant that the courses had a control pick in the southern part before running a few control round the northern part to make up the distance. Never really managed to concentrate well enough in the first part of the course and so lost a bit of time on most of the first half of the course. Having realised that I was not going to get a good result on this day I slowed down and jogged the rest of the course - to conserve energy for the final day. Eventually finished in 48 minutes - just under double the winner’s time.

The final day (Sletten) went badly. Made a big mistake on the second control and lost ten minutes. Did not enjoy the area or the course. Several of the legs seemed to run us through the nice parts of the forest only to have the control hidden in some grotty part at the end. I took 76 minutes - far, far behind the winning time of 34 minutes.