EckO at the National event, Perthshire
Personal views of the event
Six Ecko members entered the S.T.A.G National and Veteran Home Internationals event at Errochty on Sunday 18th November 2007. Errochty is not far west of the A9 and Blair Atholl and east of Schieihallion. A nice eastern Pine forest on a north facing 200m slope. Notably different to our western spruce dominated forests. Slightly drier under foot but has more grassed over boulder fields which the weaker ankled folk had to carefully pick over. I enjoyed running through the open pine far more than I ever do running through whiplash spruce and have fewer scars to show for it too!
S.T.A.G stands for St. Andrews Orienteering Club Glasgow. Originally a school based club that normally centres around the parks and hills of Glasgow. So this was a bit of departure for them which co-incided with their 25th Anniversary. It also doubled as the venue for the individual veteran home international competition (between Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland). Gill did Ecko proud by being picked for the Scotland team. Her 5th place was probably not her best ever run but respectable all the same. Scotland came a close second to England overall. Seems to be Scotland’s sporting fate this weekend!
The rest of the Ecko contingent made do with entering the national event run along side the home internationals. Andy put in our best performance coming 2nd in the M35L class with a fast 79 minutes for a 8.9Km and 420m climb course. I was running the same class but could not match Andy, coming in 13 minutes slower, despite an almost navigationally perfect run. My excuse? Just not as fit and desperately protecting my ankles on the boulder fields. Just as well no one witnessed my mincing running action!
Meanwhile Lynne also put in a solid run – beating Gill by 3 minutes (which I bet she was secretly smug about!) and up there amongst the home internationals. I didn’t get to speak to Paul or John after their runs…but looks as if they both got value for money and Paul beat a Welsh and Irish home international into the bargain too.
Finally, Marieke enjoyed her run on the light green colour coded course so much that she went and bought her first pair of orienteering shoes at the Compass sport shop before leaving the event. Just goes to show how a class event like this can enthuse new comers to the sport. If you’ve not tried a national event before I recommend you give it a go. The new Scottish O League kicks off again in on the 2nd March 2008 at Thornhill, Dumfries but there’s lots of local and regional events in between. Check out www.scottish-orienteering.org for more info.
Ross Lilley
Getting ones money's worth!!!!
After my first orienteering run at the 11 person relay I was so enthused that I went straight out and bought a thumb compass. This will make all the difference, I thought.
I was then on holiday in the Lake District and decided to enter an event near Kendal. (Helsington Barrows) The plan was to take my time and practice with the compass. The ground was all open woodland and fields, with the odd Juniper thicket here and there. All very runable. To get my moneysworth I entered the Blue course. With my new toy on my thumb off I went. 52 minutes later all checkpoints had been visited and I'd come 12th out of 60 odd. Great! This Orienteering lark's a piece of cake, I thought.
So it was that my new found OVER confidence had me standing at the start of the Stag VHI and National event M40L course with my trusty thumb compass in its rightful place. Ahead were 22 checkpoints, 8.9k and 420m of climb. Piece of cake???? There was just one small problem, well no actually there were millions of them. BLOODYTREES!!!! The following 2 hours 39 minutes was a hard lesson in humility and my thanks to Paul and Lynne for not laughing at me when I finally staggered into an almost empty field.
See you at Kilmory on Saturday. Now, what's the hardest course!
John Anderson
Have a look at some of the routes taken on RouteGadget.
