My Orienteering Summer 2014

The first thing on the agenda was European Youth Orienteering Championships in Macedonia so less than a week after I had finished my A-level exams, I was on a plane to Skopje with the rest of the GB team.

Thursday was sprint day. I was one of the last starters and tried to spend as much of the morning in shade as possible with it really beginning to heat up. The race itself didn’t go as I wanted. Some small mistakes in the first half and missing a better route choice to 6 meant I could be doing better. Then after I crossed a main road through the town and went off the map, I think I was really out of the game! It didn’t get much better after that and I ended up 42nd, over 2minutes behind the winner’s time.
Friday staged the “Long” race at Suvi Laki, 4.4km with 250m climb. I had dismissed yesterday’s poor run and knew if I planned decent routes and was a bit careful with my navigation, I could end up with a good position. If only… After relocating countless times and even finding my control 5, I eventually found number 4. On the bright side I got the fastest split to 5! The rest was slightly better and I finally came down the run in after 75minutes of wandering about in the Macedonian hills to take 60th place.
Following those two quite dire races, I was just going to try and get around the first leg of the relay safely to hand over to my team mates in a decent position. I was on my own for most of it and had only made a couple of little mistakes so I had no idea of what position I was in, until I heard I was 2nd coming down the run-in. Woohoo! Nice to end my last EYOC with a good race! Overall our team came 9th.

Macedonia was great fun, and although I was disappointed with my results, the areas were quite cool, with some lovely runnable forest. Thanks to WOA and MWOC for supporting me with this trip.
Next up was flying back to Luton and travelling straight to Austria in Mark Saunders’ car with Alice and Ben for the Tyrol 3 Days; a sprint, a long and a middle race. Before any races, we did some training at an area called Obernbergersee which was between 1600 and 1800m above sea level and it was absolutely insane terrain with little unmapped knolls completely covering the hillsides, and many more mapped features which were difficult to distinguish between. It was fun though, and interesting trying to figure it all out! The next day, we did some pre-breakfast training at an area a 3km jog from the campsite, and later in the afternoon was the sprint around Fulpmes which I won in 10minutes. I went into the second day with a little advantage (really little, only 1s), but I hadn’t realised how cool this area was until one of my routes took me under the Innsbruck Winter Olympics luge track! The forest was lovely too but a couple of small mistakes lost my lead to a few Swedish girls. In the afternoon, we went for a walk up Nockspitze - admittedly not the whole way but from top of the cable car there was still 800m of climb to the rocky peak (2400m above sea level) followed by a very long walk back down to our campsite. It was nice to jump in to the lake for an evening swim and get the weight off our feet after that 4hour excursion. After a good night’s sleep came the middle race in a very fast area – not ideal for a Megan who was no longer feeling so fast since going up the mountain! I got my legs going anyway and despite a strange route choice giving me a 40m climb up an almost vertical slope where I had to use my hands, I managed to reel the Swedish back in and win overall, earning myself a hand carved edelweiss and roof tile. Mark came 2nd in his class and Ben did well, and I’m sure Alice enjoyed walking around her courses with an unfortunately broken elbow.

That afternoon we drove a scenic route through the Dolomites to our next campsite based in Italy to do Italy 5 Days alongside WOC 2014. As Venice was the host of the World Champs Sprint, we began our Italian week with a trip there to support the GB team and Sander Vaher (SBOC, competing for Estonia) and also enjoyed being tourists exploring the water city on the boat buses and eating lots of ice cream. The rest of the week was spent in the Trento region doing the WOC Spectator Races. Somehow I managed to win day 1 by 6minutes on W18E in a very technical area full of boulders and WW1 trenches. This set me up with a big lead for the rest of the week (as times accumulated over the week to give the overall winner at the end). Over the next 4 races, I had decent runs but just slightly too many mistakes bringing me to finish on Day 5 in 2nd place overall by just 19 seconds to a Swedish girl. Unfortunate but I’m still very pleased with 2nd place at an international event like that, and I won a box full of spreads and jams to provide me with several months’ worth of tasty toast. Yum! As well as great racing for us, spectating the World Champs races on the same areas that we had been running on and the first ever WOC Sprint Relay where the GB team achieved 6th place was brilliant and really motivating. It was great seeing the likes of Judith Wyder and Tove Alexandersson in action and Thierry Georgiou have some surprising moments like mispunching in the Middle race – what a shocker! Apart from the heavy rain showers which left the tent flooded, Italy itself was fun. The scenery was fantastic, we got to eat lots of pizza (including sharing a the pizzeria with the Danish team one night) and enjoyed thick hot chocolates.
It was a great week and I’d recommend going to spectate WOC to any orienteer - luckily for us it’s in Scotland next year so not very far to go!

NB. Photographs to follow