Hangin with the O gang

I have been promising for a while to ramble on about the developing O scene in Wellington, and after another great Monday night run with the dudes I'm feeling inspired, so here goes...

Wellington has always been an elite orienteering backwater. The terrain is average, and there are too many other adventure, and other temptations in the capital city. It has almost rivalled Otago University as a spoiler of talented young orienteers. A place where people go and have careers and do a bit of running.

For some reason though, this year has been different. Its probably numbers. There is the focused troika of young elite women: Sarah Gray, Lizzie Ingham and Tessa Ramsden, who when they are not designing orienteering board games, thinking of new names for our Super Series team or looking at foreign orienteering boys on the internet, plan us training and get us out running. There's Magnus and Lisa, who both hate orienteering with a vengence but keep coming back. There's Todd back from Europe, the Super talented Robinsons, Ramash - NZ's only orienteering Taranaki Bogan of Indian descent, The young guns, Jamie Brigham Watson, and Nick Hahn, Marvellous Mike Wood and the list goes on .... add in a few resurgent or crapped out elites like Bill Edwards, Jason Markham and the Kanewarts and there is almost depth. Bryn and Piret won't know whats hit them when they get back to town this summer.

But what do we do? Well eat mainly, garlic bread and ice cream. The potluck standard needs to be lifted! Next week at Lizzies lift your game people. We run on Mondays, some of us also run on Thursdays with a wider group of rogainers/runners/adventure racers. We plan trainings, and we try to encourage the youth of today. Probably most importantly we get fit. There is nothing better for your motivation as a group, and I am hugely impressed by some of the improvement in many of our groups base endurance in the last six months.

What have we got coming up? Well there is the road trip to TONIC, a seat or two still available at this stage, a training weekend in the Hawkes Bay, 7/8 November, all fit bastards welcome, and then there is Wellington Champs where we will be trying to smash each other into the ground and run a sprint race at the same time! Choice. How about some updates on what else is going on around the country....