Chilling out with the Southerly Storm

Christchurch the home to New Zealand's best orienteer has had a strong group of regular Orienteers, with regular Pack Runs and regular O-Training for many years now.

The Famous Wednesday Night run started out as a women's training run but quickly the boys worked out it was a pretty cool idea and started coming along. Now going for many years are the usuals of Matt and Lara, Myself, Tim Farrant and Georgia. Then there's the extra non orienteers that keep us all real like Calvin and Boyd. Sometimes when the run is from Sign of the Takahe Andy J will bless us with his presence. These runs are really good for the motivation especially in the depths of winter on a dark, cold and wet night.

Then there is the training usually on Thursday nights after work/uni/school/sitting in front of a computer reading orienteering blogs all day long. Jenni keeps us all busy organising us to organise training. Everyone has a turn, and there's lots of variety.

Just lately Carsten has started up regular weekly interval trainings so us Southerly Stormers will start carving it up with our sheer speed...to become a dominant force at these Turkey traverse and Sprint the bay events coming up.

Last weekend there was a group of us who braved the cold weather and waded through thigh deep snow to the top of Mt Oxford. The weekend before it was out into the hills on the Port Hills...and this weekend who knows its only Tuesday but Im sure Bloomberg who has found his mojo again will have some ideas.

Recently we held our regular fund-raiser, the Night Nav. Which involved putting controls out, untangling Kaia's kite, handing out maps, gorging on fish and chips, then running again feeling a little quezzy.

Right better get ready for this Rogaine tomorrow, the first of three!

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....

World Masters 2009

Australia is where all the Orienteering is happening at the moment. Schools team is just back, the Aussie nationals was last weekend and this weekend World Masters kicks off. A few NZers (including Irish, Danish and US citizens by origin) are all ready to race this afternoon in the Sprint Qualification.

From Jenni: Carsten is already there and has so far done the Canberra two days, in which he was beaten into second place by Bill Edwards on the first day but managed to have a convincing win on the second day.

In Carsten's words: it was pretty fast terrain - just race along on the compass and after "bom" on the first two controls I got my compass out and it all went well the rest of the way.

Swing dancing proven as beneficial to orienteering performance...

Canterbury Champs 2009

Been a week since the Canterbury Champs. For me personally it was a weekend of lots of fast running in what turned out to be the wrong direction...The weekend was basically a re-run of the Kairaki/Cragieburn maps at Oceania.

Kairaki beach was really intensely vague sand dunes. The large majority of the elite fields made horrendous mistakes. The map and courses gave little room for error and most were punished accordingly. So Carsten was left to mop up the M21E grade, closely followed by the Sneaky Michael Smithson and Greg Flynn. Georgia Whitla took out the W21E grade, 6mins ahead of Claire Paterson and still running around was a fairly pregnant Jenni Adams in third.

Cragieburn was as cool as it was the first time round. A map that requires a hundred percent concentration 100% of the time. This time round instead of intense heat as for Oceania it was extremely cold (So cold that it threatened to call off this event). The bad weather never eventuated to the extent that was forecast, but none the less there was the odd patch of snow here and there in the higher parts of the map. Jason Markham who mispunched on Day 1 cleaned up the competition, minimising on mistakes and out running all those who dared challenge him. Sneaky Smithson who claimed to be slow, unfit and injured the week before snuck into his second second place, followed by Matt Scott. In the elite womens grade there was not much competition for Georgia and She won by 55mins. Maybe she should have run in the mens grade, cause she would have been close to beating a Junior boy(or boys) who shall remain nameless....for both my safety and their own!

Another solid weekend of Orienteering under the belt, bring on the South Island Champs in 3 weeks time. Will be a big field of internationals at these events as WMOC finishes the weekend beforehand. Entries close on the 9th of October....I think?

Cragieburn