IOA AGM - Oughterard

 Cllr. Thomas Welby, Mayor of Galway, Mary O'Connell & Frank Ryan

Annual General Meetings are rarely the most exciting events and this year's IOA AGM was no exception. The AGM is an important point in the year of the Association, where the Executive Committee are called to account for their stewardship of the sport over the past year and where policies are laid down for the year to come, office holders elected and awards distributed. This year's AGM, on the Sunday evening of the irish Championships, was squeezed in after a good meal and a long prizegiving, and was a rather rushed affair, starting just before 9 pm at The Boat Inn in Oughterard. This was hardly the optimal arrangement for the serious business of an AGM, with people wanting to socialise or go home, nevertheless the business of the meeting was transacted smoothly.

Chairman Mary O'Connell welcomed everyone and ran through the activities of the past year - her full report and those of many of the other officers - are on the IOA web site here. Did you know, for example, that there were 144 registered IOA events in 2012 with 14300 starts and 2500 competitors? Mary highlighted the work in developing orienteering in schools and scout groups and the availability of the 17 permanent courses around the country. Orienteering is on the primary school curriculum and this provides further opportunities for development. She thanked the Executive Committee, the Child Protection Officer Barbara Foley-Fisher, and particularly thanked Brendan O'Brien for his work on IOA, as Chairman and as Elite officer. She also thanked, among others, Juniors Officers Ruth Lynam (outgoing) and Mike Long (current) for their work.
Treasurer Sarah Ní Ruairc presented the audited accounts for 2012, reporting a deficit of more than €11000, much of which was spent on the "Ten Elements of Orienteering" videos which Finn van Gelderen showed at a later stage in the meeting. Income in 2012 was €67000 of which €47000 came from the Government grant. IOA spent €15000 on high performance orienteering and €12000 on Juniors in 2012 (all figures rounded up/down). Our grant in 2013 is expected to be less than in 2012.
Juniors officer Mike Long reported on four junior training weekends during the year, plus teams running in Junior Home Internationals, European Youth Champs and Junior World Champs as well as a junior tour to the Welsh 6-Day last August. He was encouraged by the fact that 9 of the 24 on the JHI team were first-timers: a good omen for the future. This year's EYOC will be in Portugal and JWOC in the Czech Republic. One issue which was raised by several of the officers was the new requirements for Garda vetting of anyone dealing with juniors or vulnerable adults, and Mike has circulated vetting forms to be completed and returned to Barbara Foley-Fisher.
Communications officer Finn van Gelderen showed several of his "Ten Elements" videos and outlined some of his other corporate identity projects like car stickers and new kit for the World Championships team, and mentioned that the next CompassSport magazine will have an article on orienteering in Ireland. He also revealed that the new style IOA web site is here to stay (which is fine as long as the old one co-exists with it, as far as I'm concerned: thanks to those of you who agreed with me and are keen to keep the old format).
Development Officer Andrew Cox reported on schools orienteering (24 IOA-sanctioned schools events in 2012) and emphasised that for schools (particularly Primary schools) the maps must be close by. There will be a Schools orienteering meeting on June 9th at Kilcoran Lodge Hotel near Cahir, Co.Tipperary and all interested people are invited.
Ed Niland reported on orienteering education and Harold White on technical matters: new mapping registration rules and new event registration regulations are being introduced, to be followed by the general rules, protests and colour events. Consultation is still possible on the event registration issue but the die has been cast in relation to the mapping register.
Mapping Officer Brian Power mentioned that there are over 700 known orienteering maps in the country and asked clubs to try to resolve any disputes about mapping rights amicably. It was suggested that a previous mapping officer has a copy of the long-lost IOA mapping register and it would seem to make sense to use this as a starting point in relation to map registration rather than having to start from scratch.
Fixtures Secretary Fergal Buckley told the meeting about the new event registration scheme where the season will run from 1st August to 31 July and that June will be the month for event registrations. The proposals for event registration are on the IOA web site.

Other officers' reports were circulated (Darren Burke's on High Performance and Bernard Creedon's on anti-doping policy spring to mind) and these will be on the IOA web site for you to read in detail.

The elections which followed were uncontentious, with most of the officers prepared to go forward for another year. There are vacancies for Mapping Officer, however, and for Secretary.

Following the elections, the presentation of awards to those chosen by IOA took place: the Mactire Trophy to Conor Short for his performance in JWOC 2012; the Silva Trophy to Frank Ryan for years of dedicated service to orienteering in Connacht and nationwide; thew Silva Award to Pat O'Connor for similar work in Munster and particularly for involving scouts in orienteering; and the "Spirit of Orienteering" award to Ruth Lynam.

Two special awards were presented for the orienteers who ran in the most events in 2012, and they went to Paul Smyth (AJAX) with more than 41, and the ladies went to Eadaoin McCavana (GEN).

The only impassioned plea of the night came with Josh O'Sullivan-Hourihan's request to use the correct overprinting colours for courses so that colour-blind orienteers like himself can see the course on the map. Evidently one needs to tweak the OCAD colour palette so the overprint colour settings are 100 magenta and 30 cyan, because the OCAD colour called "purple" is actually red.

The meeting adjourned at 10.20 pm.

So: a businesslike but uncontroversial AGM. I have been at AGM's in small halls after Connacht, Championships, at Irish Championships, in schools in Dublin and in even EGM's in forest car parks, and there is no ideal time or place, but I would have to say that trying to squeeze a meal, two prizegivings and an AGM into one evening is not a recipe for success.

On a personal note, I would have to thank the entire IOA for their work in keeping the sport going from year to year. Orienteering is a minority sport among minority sports, with an aging and possibly dwindling population, and we will struggle to survive and to regain the critical mass we need to survive through natural wastage, but it's such a fantastic sport that we have to keep chipping away at it.

Irish Championships Report

Classic winner Marcus Pinker (CorkO) - 

Another fine Championships run by a handful of dedicated Connacht orienteers saw Marcus Pinker (CorkO) stamp his authority in the Classic race on complex open moorland, with Niamh O'Boyle (CNOC) retaking the W21E title. A dead heat for 2nd in the Classic between Conor Short (CNOC) and Neil Dobbs (WATO) provided drama, while in the Relay Cork Orienteers took their 7th Women's Relay gold, relegating the CNOC ladies team into 3rd place while the CNOC Men's team regained the trophy for the 11th time (if you count their earlier incarnation of "Curragh Orienteers").
In the Middle distance race former champion Una May (3ROC), having run a 5 km race that morning, claimed the W21Elite title with Conor Short taking the M21E.
These are the facts, but they don't take into account the amount of work it needs to set up and run a national championships, from the selection of areas, getting landowners' permission, mapping, planning, controlling and organising. The core of the organising team from Western eagles is only half a dozen or so, and the inclusion of the likes of Pat Healy as mapper (with Padraig Higgins) and general dogsbody swelled the numbers to perhaps ten. How many other, larger, clubs could unaided provide three days of excellent orienteering in remote areas? As a recognition of Frank Ryan's contribution to orienteering over many years, he was presented with the Silva Award by IOA Chairman Mary O'Connell at the Relay prizegiving on Monday.
The terrain was largely boulder-strewn open mountain with some tricky young forest but the difference between this terrain and, say, west Cork, is that it was more runnable,less hilly and more technical. The Leinster equivalent would be either much steeper or covered in high heather, or both; the Munster version might be bedevilled by large tussocks of grass and uncrossable marshes.
Organisationally, having to bus the runners in and out from Glengowla Mines near Oughterard, was a necessary evil given the absence of parking in the competition area. The ride to and from the assembly area was an interesting one (interesting in the sense of the closing minutes of the original "Italian Job" movie where the bus teetered on the edge of a precipice with the gold sliding perilously close to the open door ...). However, in this case the gold went to the deserving winners.
Excitement was never far away in the relays on Monday, either: despite a small entry in some classes, the races were hotly contested, with only seconds separating the teams in Handicap 6 class (Setanta edging out 3ROC and Cork) and Handicap 12 (Ajax edging out Fingal). In the Women's Premier, CorkO (Sharon Lucey, Ailbhe Creedon and Niamh Corbett) gained 5 minutes on LVO on the final leg, putting them a minute in front at the line and taking their first Women's title since 2008. CNOC (Conor Short, Kevin O'Boyle and Ruairi Short) in the Open class had a more comfortable 14-minute win over last year's winners, CorkO.
The drama reached its height, however, in the final moments of the Junior 48-  race, with 3ROC M12 Aidan McCullough outsprinting Ajax anchor-man Oisin Wickham only to be obstructed on the line by a race official, so a dead heat was declared.
Weatherwise, while the rest of the country basked in spring sunshine, the cloud, rain and wind visited the orienteers, particularly during Saturday's Middle Distance race. The organisers had thoughtfully provided tents to shelter the waiting runners, mindful of the conditions that prevailed in Donegal during the last Connacht-run IOC in 2009, but we can't blame the organisers for the weather.
In a busy weekend, there was a fund-raising table quiz on Saturday evening and the IOA AGM was squeezed into Sunday evening after the prizegiving (there'll be a separate report on the AGM soon).
No TIO report on an IOC would be complete without a bit of cuckoo-spotting and, yes, there was one in the early morning where I stayed, but not in the competition area.
Pat Healy and Val Jones took photographs of the events and the results breakdown and Routegadget are all on the IOA web site here. Philip Baxter also took photographs: see the middle distance here, classic here and relay here.
This is a rather brief report which may evolve over the coming days, so keep watching this space!

Shamrock O-Ringen Entries Close on May 10th
A reminder to enter the Shamrock O-Ringen in Kerry on June 1-2-3 before Friday 10th May. See the event web site at www.shamrock.corko.net

May 2013/1

Irish Championships

The rotation of the Irish Championships between the four provinces brings this year's IOC back to Connacht, with three new adjoining areas south of Oughterard in Co. Galway. Pat Healy's new maps, using LIDAR data, capture the detail of the terrain which is described as complex but runnable, undulating open with some young forest. It is reportedly more runnable than the areas used for last year's Irish 3-Day in the same general area.
Marcus Pinker will try to retain his Irish Classic title, missing the British Championships which are on the same weekend to run in Galway, but Darren Burke, last year's Middle Distance Champion, is also running well. Shane Lynch, winner of the recent sprint selection race for the 2013 World Championships, and experienced on open mountain terrain, could have a strong run, and Neil Dobbs has come home for the Championships, so it's hard to call.
Maeve O'Grady, winner of the Classic race last year, won't be defending her title. Ros Hussey, 2012 Middle Distance Champion, will be in the mix, with sprint specialist Susan Lambe, junior Niamh Corbett and previous winners Niamh O'Boyle and Ruth Lynam.
The Irish Championships are qualification races for all the International teams so interest will be high among all the elites.
Saturday will see the Middle distance race, with later afternoon starts; on Sunday it's the Classic long distance race and on Monday the Relay.
Follow the action on the IOC web site here.

Leinster Championships
Fingal produced a fine Leinster Championships on the sand dunes at Cahore, Co. Wexford on April 14th, on what looked a rather unpromising area to start with. The dunes are long and narrow, with small paths running along their length, not unlike Dublin's Bull Island (in fact the similarity didn't end there, with wind farms inland at Cahore taking the place of golf courses on Bull Island). Without SportIdent the event would not have worked, but the courses criss-crossed the  dunes and provided plenty of challenge and confusion.
Strong winds and loose sand underfoot meant that there was a physical challenge too, despite the small amount of climb on the courses. Val Jones's 1:7500 Lidar-based map was clear but extremely detailed with small contour features, and was printed in two strips on the A3 sheet to fit it all in (some courses used a 1:5000 scale map). Within seconds of the start we found that, while the tracks looked enticing on the map, they were hard work when it came to running, and the dunes themselves could give better runnability.
Fingal Orienteers marked their 25th anniversary by staging the event, so well done!
Ger Butler, 2nd on the day to Darren Burke, took the Leinster M21 title and Niamh O'Boyle took the Leinster Ladies title, though third on the day behind Áine McCann and Niamh Corbett.
One of the most competitive classes was M50, with three former World Championships team members Aonghus OCléirigh, Brian Corbett and Colm O'Halloran slugging it out, to finish in that order.
Results are here.

Shamrock O-Ringen closing soon
Entries from twelve countries have already come in for the 18th Shamrock O-Ringen 3-Day in Kerry on the June Bank Holiday weekend. Word has spread about this event but Irish entries are still disappointingly low (less than half the total entry) and the entry so far is less than 150. The events are at The Black Lakes and Croghan Mountain, between Killarney and Kilgarvan, with the event centre at Killarney racecourse. These areas were used for Irish Championships and/or World Cup races and Shamrocks before and provide the high quality open mountain orienteering we have come to associate with the Shamrock.
The closing date is Friday 10th May. If you've been to the Shamrock before, you know what to expect, so enter now ... if you haven't been, enter now to experience it. You won't regret it! See the event details here.
As a warm-up, Kerry Orienteers are running a sprint event on the wonderful Ross Island, a short distance from the event centre on the Friday evening.

Coastal Warrior Weekend

NWOC's Allan Bogle  took on quite a challenge to run sprint selection races at Gransha, on the outskirts of Derry, and a middle distance selection race at Magilligan on the weekend of April 27/28. The events were aimed at the Irish World Championships hopefuls but were open to others to run.
The format was a prologue with head to head sprint racing in the morning, to decide the starting order for the final in the afternoon. Gransha is a pleasant parkland area housing a hospital, used for a variety of sports (well known in cross-country running circles), but scarcely of the complexity which will be encountered in international sprint races. A small piece of forest added some tricky navigation in the final but the remainder of the area was less exciting.
Magilligan, on the other hand, is an excellent sand dune area used for the British Championships in 1992 and capable of sustaining any level of competition.
Numbers were disappointing: did the "Coastal Warrior" tag sound too much like an adventure race in Sligo or somewhere and put off the orienteers from coming?
The events served their purpose, however, with Shane Lynch and Niamh O'Boyle finishing first and earning themselves a place in the Sprint at the World Championships in Finland in July. No results yet for the Magilligan event on Sunday, but they should be here soon.

IOA AGM
Remember that the 2013 AGM of the IOA is on Sunday 5th May in Oughterard.
Recent changes and proposals about map registration and rules will be on the agenda so it's important that you are there to make your views known.
There will also be a meeting to reestablish the Munster Orienteering Council the same afternoon. Fingal's Tommy Burke made a plea on the Forum for a similar group to be reestablished in Leinster, to look after fixtures and the other things that need coordination. In fact it's a requirement of the IOA Constitution that the regional associations do this.

Am I all alone?
... but can we please have the old IOA web site back? The new version simply doesn't work for me ...

Hana Snow-Festival

Thursday morning training

Easter orienteering in the Czech Republic: shorts and T-shirts, sunlit forests with limestone pillars reaching to the sky ... it sounded idyllic. A group of similarly optimistic orienteers signed up for the trip to the Hana Orienteering Festival, organised by Greg McCann, as part of the preparation for the Junior World Championships in July.
Looking at the web site for the event, the fact that we were to be based in a ski resort should have rung some alarm bells, as should the 10-day weather forecast for temperatures of -3 to +3 with wet snow and the Christmas card images from the webcams.
The trip was to include some training days, then a three-day competition and another training day, all in terrain like the JWOC. The competition and training areas were on the Czech/Polish border at Zlaté Hory, about 6 hours drive east of Prague, in a depressed former gold mining area (Zlaté Hory means "gold mountain"). We did wonder why there were two 3-day events on in the country over Easter but we found that the Czech roads are like the Welsh ones: they are slow and they don't go to where you want.

Thursday afternoon training

The competition centre was a soviet-era former workers' holiday camp which provided  accommodation in blocks for the runners, at least with plentiful heating and hot water, and a central dining room and socialising area. The whole thing was organised locally by a very energetic and charismatic guy called Robert Zdráhal, who was one of the instigators of the Park World Tour and is the organiser of the annual international Silva O-Camp (details here).

Frozen gold mill (Liz Deane)

Arriving at night on snow-covered roads gave us little indication of what the terrain would be like, but we found the forests and maps to be excellent.  The first morning's training was about 40 minutes away near Vidnava, right beside the campsite used for the Silva O-Camp in the summer. The forest was rather like Mullaghmeen in Co. Westmeath, with a mixture of deciduous and coniferous trees, some roads and some hills. On the first morning we ran a course with small control markers in variable depth snow: the training had been planned for a different area but there was too much snow there so the organisers improvised. That afternoon we ran repeated mass-start sprint legs of about 1 km in the snow in a fantastic old gold-mining area with lots of depressions and contour features and a frozen watermill with sheets of solid ice about 3 metres high.

Day 1 - Glucholazy

The second day saw us back at Vidnava for middle distance training (lots of controls and lots of direction changes) with most of us using maps with all paths and tracks removed: the wonders of OCAD! That afternoon, another energy-sapping snowy forest with lots of contour features for short intense loops of perhaps 500 metres and 3 controls. The running was like soft, deep sand. Both afternoon training areas were about 15 minutes jog from the centre.
Saturday was the first day of competition: across the border in the Polish town of Glucholazy, about 15 minutes from base. The event centre was in the "John Paul II" school and the hilly forest nearby was even more like Mullaghmeen than the training areas had been. The courses were disappointingly easy from the navigational viewpoint but pretty physical and the forest itself was lovely: runnable beech and conifers, something like I imagine the JK competitors were running in. Our contribution to the Polish economy was zero as we didn't have any Polish money. It was Easter Saturday and the town was thronged with people of all ages walking around in their Sunday best, carrying little wicker baskets of Easter eggs and going from church to church. Conditions were cold and sunny and perfect for running, so we thought we were made for the weekend.
That evening at the event centre, a night event in the snow failed to tempt any of the Irish to don their O-gear again.

Easter Monday at Zlaté Hory

On Sunday morning it was clear that it had been snowing overnight and it continued throughout the day. After extracting the cars, the drive to Vidnava was a white-knuckle ride for drivers and passengers alike, with the team minibus leaving the road on more than one occasion; other cars crashing in the ditch or somersaulting off the road altogether, fortunately without injury.
The snow continued, reducing visibility during the middle distance race, with the runners creating tracks in to all the controls. The 1:5000 scale map with 2.5 metre contours took a bit of getting used to, while sauna-like conditions in the local school hall greeted the finishing runners. Back to base for a welcome lunch (pork with everything) and a rest for the afternoon.
There were runners there from the Czech Republic, Poland, Ireland, Italy, Israel, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary and Norway.
On Sunday evening the organisers announced that there would be a major change for Monday because of the weather: instead of the 10 minute ski-lift trip to start at the top of the forest (where there was more than 50 cm of fresh snow) the courses would be replanned in the lower parts of the forest with mass-starts for each class at 5 minute intervals. As the organisers had the maps on computer and a colour laser printer on site, the new maps (the map was named "Snow Calamity" for the event) could be printed overnight and ready to go for the first mass start at 10 a.m. Unfortunately two of the Irish runners were given the wrong maps for the mass start and didn't discover it until they were well out on the course. The leading runners had to carve elephant tracks through deep snow for the following runners so the amount of map-reading needed was minimal after that - maybe this is how our ancestors followed woolly mammoths in the days before orienteering?

Over the three days the only Irish prizewinner was Cork O's Corbett Brian (or Brian Corbett as he is known here) who took first place in M35.  LVO's Áine McCann was disappointed to drop from 3rd to 4th on the last day due to one route choice in W21A. Colm Moran finished 5th in H21A.
Moving on along more snowy roads brought us to Hradec Kralové which will be the event centre for JWOC and the location of the sprint race. Tuesday morning provided an opportunity to run in part of the relay forest, though not in the actual competition area: a fast, flat forest with lots of vegetation changes and a grid of rides and tracks.
The seven-day tour brought us to new countries, new maps and new terrain and brought the senior juniors and junior seniors closer together as a group: these are the people who could still be running with and against each other for the next forty years or more! All in all, a very worthwhile trip and a new O-country or two notched up.

JWOC Relay Training

One personal revelation was how effective waterproof socks are:  I wore them every day running in the snow and they were great! Will they cope as well with Irish bogs?
Read about the Hana O-Festival here.

Meanwhile at the JK ...

No reports yet on the JK in southern England but the Sprint results show Róisín Long (AJAX) 5th in W18E; Jean O'Neill (FIN) 4th W65; Oisín Wickham (AJAX) 7th M12; Declan McGrellis (LVO) 8th M40; James Logue 1st M45 and Angus Tyner 9th; Aonghus OCléirigh 9th M50; Frank Martindale 6th M75.
On Day 2, the long race for most classes, Marcus Pinker finished a tight 2nd on the 11.9 km/500m M35L course, 5 seconds off the winner and 7 seconds ahead of 3rd place, with Conor Barry 2nd in M35S. James Logue was in the prizes again, taking 1st in M45L. Aonghus was 5th M50L, NWOC's Noel Bogle was 1st M75S, Fionne Lynch 2nd W21V; Ruth Blair 6th W50S; Ruth Lynam 3rd W55L; Helen Baxter 2nd W55S.
Over days 2 and 3, Marcus Pinker was 3rd M35L, Conor Barry 2nd M35S, James Logue won M45L by over 8 minutes; Noel Bogle was first M75S, Fionne was 1st W21V, WatO's Bríd Casey was 1st W35S, Ruth was 2nd W55L, Helen 3rd W55S.
Scottish club Interlopers took the JK Trophy for the Relay and South Yorkshire took the Women's Trophy.
You can see all the details here.

Championship Time
Remember to enter the Irish Championships on May 4-5-6 (entries close on April 15th) and the Shamrock O-Ringen on June 1-2-3 (entries close on May 10th). Both are selection races for various international teams and should attract top quality fields. Incidentally, Kerry Orienteers are again running a sprint race on the Friday evening of the Shamrock weekend at the wonderful Ross Island near the event centre, Killarney racecourse.
Entries for next weekend's Leinster Championships closed on March 31st. Late news is that LVO's Tyrella event on the sand dunes at Ballykinler, Co. Down, has been rescheduled for Saturday 13th April, the day before the Leinster Championships, also on sand dunes: a good warm-up? Details here, including some specific instructions about access and times.

O-Bits
The Child Protection course planned by IOA for 20th April has been cancelled because there weren't enough people signed up. It's now up to you to find similar courses run by local sports partnerships or others.

EastWest Mapping have some new maps: they recently published second editions of two maps: 1) Dublin & North Wicklow Mountains and 2) Lugnaquilla & Glendalough. These are now available in standard folded format and they also have a small quantity of unfolded, flat sheets. You can purchase in due course from regular stockists or direct from EastWest Mapping.

Barry Dalby says "There are a number of changes to both sheets, probably more so to the Dublin map. The principal change is to a 10 metre contour interval by popular request. Do note however, that due to the method of contouring, not a lot of extra detail has been added. I've updated quite an amount of other topographic detail and there has been ongoing work in the matter of placenames. These maps are printed on Enduro paper - essentially paper with a plastic substrate, this should give better strength at folds and is practically untearable. There is an extra fold in the maps to reduce size

 I hope to have our map of Mount Leinster, Blackstairs and the Barrow Valley at 1:25,000 scale, published by end of April. Finally, I would like to thank you for your support in the past and hope that you will always continue to find something of interest in these maps."

Easter 2013

JWOC training in March

As usual, Irish orienteers are heading to the UK this week to run in the Jan Kjellstrom Orienteering Festival over the Easter weekend, this year in the south east, based around Reading in Berkshire. The format of the competition has stabilised now into a sprint, typically in an urban area on Friday, a middle distance race for the Elites on Saturday with a classic distance race for the other classes, a classic race on Sunday for everyone and a Relay on Monday.
This year the events are at Reading University, Hambleden (near Henley), Cold Ash (near Newbury),  and Hambleden again. See details of the JK here.

There's a big group of Juniors, led by Mike Long, travelling as the events are selection races for the European Youth Championships in Portugal and the Junior Home International.
The older Juniors and the younger Seniors are travelling to the Czech Republic for a three-day competition and training in preparation for the Junior World Championships there in July, led by Greg McCann. See details of JWOC here.
Weatherwise, it will be a cold trip for both groups, in marked contrast to the 20C+ temperatures this time last year. The JWOC organisers are advising against coming to train at the moment because of the snow, but the Irish group will be running in different areas and the local orienteers are confident that they can find snow-free forests.

Campus Sprint Series finishes
The four-event Campus Sprint series has just finished with a race on the hilly campus of University College, Cork. For those of us likely to get lost, a bid sign close to the start of Saturday';s race announced that we were at University College, Cork, Ireland, in case we were in any doubt as to which country we had been teleported to (see above). Darren Burke was a clear winner with 52 seconds to spare over Colm Moran, while the fastest lady was W18 Niamh Corbett, a scant second clear of fellow Squad member Róisín Long in 18th and 19th places.
The excellent 1:4000 scale map covered the main campus, the student accommodation blocks, the college sports grounds at the Mardyke and the neighbouring Fitzgerald Park. Josh O'Sullivan-Hourihan's courses were tricky, involving checking which level you should be on and whether it was possible to get at a control without having to negotiate "not to be crossed" fences and walls (which are different from "high" or "uncrossable" ones). Had there been marshals on the course to see which flowerbeds were crossed, or which railings were reached through, there would have been some disqualifications. These are vital lessons to learn in advance of more serious sprint races at European or World Championships.
Jonny Quinn (GEN) won the series with 2504 points, despite not having won any of the events, with Kevin O'Boyle second on 2500 and Josh O'Sullivan-Hourihan third on 2497;  Róisín Long (AJAX) was the first lady, closely followed by Aoife McCavana and Niamh O'Boyle. Nearly 150 people took part in the series: see the full results here.
The four events have left a legacy of new sprint standard maps at UCD, DCU, TCD and UCC which hopefully will encourage more sprint orienteering events. A second benefit is the money raised for the Irish Junior Squad to help their equipment, travel and training.
All in all, it was a very worthwhile initiative.

South by South-West
The three events making up UCC and Kerry Orienteers "South by South West" weekend provided great variety, from the sprint at UCC, through a night event in the muddy fields and forests of Knockreer on the edge of Killarney, to the splendid but steep Upper Torc part of Muckross forest overlooking Killarney's lakes.
The Knockreer outing was more of a fun event, with two courses on an area with parkland and forests, electric fences, deer, marsh and mud. It was good to get in some night-O but the map is showing its age.
The next day at Torc it was the orienteers who were showing their age, however, at least in my case: huffing and puffing up (and down) the hills, and struggling with a couple of relatively long road runs. What a great area, though: more like Scotland or Scandinavia than Ireland: runnable natural forest. Darren Burke's longer courses started high and finished low, but still managed to pack in some serious climbs.

Torc waterfall

The weekend included the Irish Student Championships and UCD's Colm Moran was the outright winner on the Brown course, two seconds clear of Swedish visitor Anton Hallor, with TCD's Conor Short in third. In the Women's race Rosalind Hussey (TCD) was the fastest lady.

March News

• Remember that the entries for the Leinster Championships at Cahore, Co. Wexford, close on March 31st. See the event web site here.
• LVO's attempts at staging a competition on the dunes at Tyrella, Co. Down seem doomed: the event was postponed from October to March 23rd only to be stymied at the last minute due to access problems. Update: the event has been rescheduled for Saturday 13th April - good training for the Leinster Champs on sand dunes in Wexford the next day.
• Setanta have an event to look forward to coming up: a new map of Mullaghmeen, Co. Westmeath, with a LIDAR basemap will be unveiled for their Leinster Spring Series event on 7th April.
• Entries are open for the Irish Championships at Oughterard, Co. Galway on May 4-5-6. Details here.
• Entries are also open for the Shamrock O-Ringen in Kerry on June 1-2-3 near Killarney. Details here.
• After the South by Southwest O-weekend in Cork and Kerry last weekend, NWOC are staging the "Coastal Warrior" orienteering weekend on April 27/28th. The weekend will consist of sprint races at Gransha in Derry (see an old map here) and middle distance on the dunes at Magilligan (see map here). More information will be on the NI Orienteering web site here.
• CompassSport Magazine is out: the latest issue (Vol 34, issue 1) of CompassSport has just dropped through the letterbox, with tributes to the young orienteers and outdoor enthusiasts killed in an avalanche in Scotland in January, including Una Finnegan from Co. Derry. On a happier note, there are also articles on the British night champs, ski-orienteering, how to increase club membership, night-O in Devon and Cornwall, equipment reviews, orienteering fitness training,  puzzles, a crossword, orienteering in South America, mountain marathons, and safety in orienteering, plus letters, advertisements for gear and events and so on. Subscribe at www.CompassSport.co.uk.
• Details of orienteering at the World Police & Fire Games in Northern Ireland in August are available here. The competitions are on August 5, 8 and 9, just after the Scottish 6-Day.
• New IOA rules for discussion: IOA Controller of Technical Standards Harold White has released a draft version of new rules of orienteering and new arrangements for map registration. Read about it here.
• Child Protection Course: There are still some places left on the planned IOA Child Protection Course in Dublin on April 20th. IOA needs another six participants to run then course. Remember that IOA will not accept affiliation from any club which doesn't have a qualified Child Protection Officer. Contact Áine Joyce for details.
• MerOC shuts down: Falling numbers and an aging core of members were reasons for the Liverpool orienteering club Merseyside Orienteers folding at the end of last year. Several of the club's members will be familiar to Irish orienteers, particularly in the south, as the Bolland family would have been regular supporters of the Shamrock O-Ringen in the event's early days: we all looked enviously at their early model Renault Espace and thought it was the ultimate orienteering vehicle. One of the club's maps was Ainsdale nature reserve, a sand dune forest near Formby with a population of red squirrels, which (a) was used for a Junior Home International around 2008 and (b) is beside Wayne Rooney's house. Not many people know that.
• Good news about chocolate: For anyone who is looking forward to gorging on chocolate at Easter, the National Medicines Information Centre based in Dublin's St. James's Hospital has some good news. According to research findings published in their December 2012 newsletter,"Therapeutics Today", the risk of a stroke among Swedish men was lowest in those who ate more than 51.6 grams of chocolate per week, in comparison to those with a lower consumption. A second study found that chocolate consumption improves cognitive function and that the number of Nobel prizewinners per ten million of population for a country is proportional to the consumption of chocolate, with Switzerland scoring the highest on both. The authors estimate that to increase the number of Nobel prizewinners by 1 in a country, the national consumption of chocolate would need to increase by 400 grams per person per year. The only outlier was Sweden, with 32 Nobel Laureates as against an expected 14 based on chocolate consumption, but this may be attributed to the fact that the Nobel organisation is based in Sweden. Read the full text here.
• Finally, a question: is orienteering getting too serious?  One of the points made by Thierry Gueorgiou when he visited last Autumn was that for him, orienteering is PLAY; it should be fun. Have we lost that?

February News Round-Up

EYOC 2013 for Portugal
Portugal has just been announced as the venue for the 2013 European Youth Orienteering Championships in October.
The competition, planned for Israel in November, was withdrawn from that country over security concerns and Portugal, along with Poland, Hungary, Italy and Serbia, was a candidate. The competition is held every year, usually in July, and caters for M and W 16 and 18 ages.
The event is now scheduled for 24-27 October and the event centre will be in a holiday centre in Foz do Arelho in Caldas da Rainha municipality, on the coast about 100 km north of Lisbon.
The bad news (or should that be the good news?) is that the dates are the week before school mid-term break starts here ... the 27th is the Sunday of the October Bank Holiday weekend ...

Wherefore art thou, Rome-O?
We learned late last year that the famous Venice street orienteering competition would not take place in 2013 as the area will be used for the World Championships in July 2014. However, the orienteers of Rome have stepped into the breach and now offer an alternative - three days in the Eternal City on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of November.

ROMe MMXIII is intended to be a one-off Meeting given the lack of MO Venice 2013. Outline Plan: Fri 1 Nov - a night orienteering event in the beautiful parks and gardens of Villa Borgese with an Assembly Area over looking Piazza del Popolo and the whole of Rome. Planner is one of Italy's most experienced orienteers Manu Manganelli. Sat 2 Nov - a middle distance race in the mixed park/land woodland of Villa Ada in the North of the City, some impressive ornamental lakes on this map too. The middle race Planner will be former pop singer, Stefano Zarfati, who planned all 3 days of MOC 2012 and who will be controlling at WMOC Sestrierre. Aim for the Saturday is to leave you with the PM for sightseeing. Sun 3 Nov - a morning sprint race in Rome's unmatchable historic Centre that will take place on a map that includes Circo Massimo, the Coliseum and the Tiburtine Island. Planner will be Mike Edwards and Stefano Z is already off seeking permissions to get you into as many places as we can. The Clubs aim to use a commercial provider with online booking facility for accommodation for those interested. All events will be accessible by public transport. More to Follow on this topic. An opportunity for 3 events like these and at this price level is not to be missed. See the event link here.

Tyrella on again
The NI Series competition postponed from October on the dunes of Tyrella, Co. Down, has been rescheduled for Saturday March 23rd.  LVO are running the event on the area used for one individual day and the relays at JK 2011. See the LVO web site for details.
You could make it a 2-Day Dune Weekend by running at the Bull Island in Dublin on Sunday 24th on Ajax's Leinster Spring Series event.

S by SW
The same weekend as Tyrella, UCCO and Kerry Orienteers are running "South by South-West", three events including the final Campus Sprint on Saturday 23rd and the Irish Student Championships. The weekend will also feature a Saturday night event at Knockreer estate, Killarney. The Student Championships at Muckross on Sunday 24th March will be combined with a Munster League event and will also be a selection race for the Junior World Championships in the Czech Republic in July and the European Youth Championships later in the year. See details of S by SW here. Muckross is a unique combination of steep forest and fast parkland dotted with islands of complex contoured forest, used for Munster Championships, Shamrock O-Ringen and the 1998 World Cup Relay race ... and the views are spectacular!

Norwegian Wood
Did you read about the controversy in Norway about wood stacking? Catch up on some fascinating non-orienteering Norwegian news here from the Irish Times. And, no, it wasn't April 1st!

Winter Sport
Last weekend's cancellation by CNOC of their Leinster Spring Series event at Kanturk Mountain/Scarr in Wicklow highlights how weather-dependent orienteering can be, particularly in open mountain terrain. The organisers found that roads to the area, between Laragh and the Sally Gap, were impassable by late on Saturday afternoon due to snow, so took the decision to cancel. The IOA web site, text messaging and social media were effective at getting the word out that the event was off.
It also brings home the fact that orienteering in Ireland can be a winter sport and that the gear you run in on the continent in the summer is not appropriate for Irish winter conditions. That is the reason that organisers often specify that weatherproof clothing should, or even must, be used, and why whistles must be carried to attract attention in the event of injury.
Orienteering started life here as an adventure sport, closely associated with AFAS, the now defunct Association for Adventure Sports based at Tiglin, and many of its early exponents came from a mountaineering background. where woolly hats and whistles were the norm. We may run in colourful O-tops and Lycra now, and use GPS and electronic timing, but we should not underestimate the power of nature. We have been lucky for more than 40 years not to have had any serious incidents, but you have to respect the conditions you are running in.
It's not fair on the organisers who may have to mount search parties in difficult conditions if you fail to take reasonable precautions against exposure. The recent event at Three Rock Mountain again illustrated the risks - just because you can see your house from the top doesn't mean that you are in your back garden: even young male orienteers and not invincible or immune, and will hopefully learn that some of these rules and recommendations are there for the competitors' benefit, not just for the sake of having rules.
 
Two Down, Two to Go
Two of the Irish Junior Squad fundraising Campus Sprint races are over, with Trinity College and University College Cork to go. The UCD and DCU races attracted good numbers, with runners travelling from as far as Cork and Belfast to take part. Both the "Long" and Short courses have been won in  sub-20 minutes in each of the events, so different techniques to the usual endurance/slog method have to be used: thinking ahead, looking for routes which shave a few metres here and a few there off the route, checking the descriptions to see which side of the uncrossable wall the control is on, or whether it's at the top or bottom of the stairs ...
Kevin O'Boyle and Eadaoin McCavana won at UCD, and Colm Moran and Mary Healy at DCU, so who will take the honours on Saturday?
See you at TCD on Saturday 2nd March, start 11 to 1 pm; UCC on Saturday 23rd March.

Spring is Sprung, the grass is riz ...

From Park-O to Parkour?

Campus Sprint Series Starts
Leinster orienteers will doubt that spring may be here, if they were out at DUO's Spring Series event last Sunday on Three Rock Mountain, but there's a stretch in the evenings, the Dublin by Night series is finished and the new Urban Sprint Series is about to start.The first of four urban sprint races is at the UCD campus at Belfield this Saturday, starting from 11 to 1 pm.
Mike Long writes
"A series of urban sprint events will start next Saturday in UCD. Specific details of the UCD event will be posted separately but the start time is 11:00 – 13:00 not 15:00 – 17:00 as it was originally stated on the web. This is a requirement of the UCD authorities.The events are at:
16/2 UCD
23/2 DCU
2/3 TCD
23/3 UCC (EYOC + JWOC Qualification Race)
The motivation behind the series is to provide some practice for sprint events, now a feature of all major international competitions, to raise some funds for the university clubs and the junior squad and to have a bit of fun!
At each event there will be:
- two courses; long (4 km) and short (2.5 km)
- winning times; similar to those encountered at the JK
- costs; adults €5, students €4, juniors €3, families €10
 - SI card hire €2
- profits split 50% between university club and junior squad
We will have a league with the best of 2 races to count. Prizes for 1st M/W 21, 1st M/W 45+, 1st & 2nd M/W 18 and 1st & 2nd M/W 14-.
Any beginners who wish to try are welcome and there will be people on hand to help them out."

Modern ISSOM sprint map

This is a great chance for runners and others to try orienteering in a familiar environment: there's no mud, no heather or bog, no forest, no mountains: just buildings, paths, patches of "terrain", lots of route choice, thinking on your feet, seconds to be lost, decision making, map contact, brain work, adrenalin. Urban orienteering, either in sprint format (like this) or longer races (like London or Venice) is enormous fun. It's a workout for the mind as much as the body, so even veterans and/or less fit people can do it and enjoy it. Maps are often drawn specially, using ISSOM (International Sprint-O map standard).
Beginners won't want to travel to deepest Munster or deepest Leinster to try a new sport, but they might hop on a 46A and take a trip to their local university to try it. What's there to lose? If it's good, they come back for more; if they don't enjoy it, they've lost an hour or two but still got some exercise. And who could fail to enjoy it?
Have a look at an old sprint course at UCD from 2008 here. Incidentally, here's the map from this week's evening sprint race at the Portugal O-Meet which Thierry Gueorgiou and Simone Niggli won. Here's another interesting one, from the Sky Tower shopping centre in Wroclaw, Poland. You can see a headcam recording of the race here: bemused looking shoppers outsprinted by colourfully dresses Lycra-clad orienteers ...

Save our Forests
Concern has been voiced over Government plans to sell the harvesting rights to Irish forests owned by the state forestry company, Coillte. The proposal is that Coillte retains the land but the trees will be sold off to private companies. This has economic implications but also implications for access for forest users like orienteers, mountaineers, walkers, cyclists and others. There are no official rights of way in Ireland and the forests in many cases provide the only viable route to upland areas. While orienteering may be less of the "forest sport" than it used to be - as so many open areas are used - it is still a sport closely associated with forests. Whether commercial interests would have the same view of recreational users as Coillte has gradually come to have, is an unanswered question.
The foresters working for Coillte have produced a booklet explaining their opposition to the proposals (see it here) and the RTE "Eco Eye" programme recently did a feature on this threat to Irish forests.
A campaign web site www.saveourforests.ie  has been set up to focus opposition to the plans. A recent meeting of organisations affected by the proposal included the Mountaineering Council of Ireland, the Tree Council of Ireland, the Society of Irish Foresters, the Irish Ramblers Club and the Donadea Forest Group. The Irish Mountain Running Association and the Irish Orienteering Association are quoted as sharing the concerns of the other organisations about the plans.
Orienteers, despite being a small group, have a part to play and should consider the effects of selling off the state's timber resources, built up over 80 years of forestry here. We have never been ones to protest much over access and conservation issues ("Keep Ireland Open" got no official support from IOA) but this is certainly an issue which affects us.

O-Bits
Entries for the Leinster Championships have opened. Fingal Orienteers are running the event at Cahore Sand Dunes, Co. Wexford, on 14th April. Details of the event are here. 
Entries for the Irish Championships, near Oughterard, Co. Galway, on May 4-5-6 are open: details here.  
Entries for the Shamrock O-Ringen in Kerry on June 1-2-3 are also open : see here.
Entries for the Jan Kjellstrom O-Festival in England at Easter are open: details here. 
Entries for Moray 2013, the Scottish Six-Day, at the end of July/beginning of August are open: details here.