Leinster Council Meeting

On the 12th of December after the Leinster League Prizegiving there will be a meeting to restart the Leinster Orienteering Council. This meeting will take place in the evening at Basecamp on middle Abbey Street, Dublin 1. It is vital that each club in Leinster sends a representative to this meeting. Hopefully will lead to increased co-operation between clubs and a streamlined fixtures process.

Only one event on this weekend (in Cork)

Inchydoney is the venue for the only orienteering event this weekend, Sunday 1^st December 2013

Orienteering this Sunday in Wicklow and Cork

New Orienteering Forum

Dear fellow orienteers

After much consideration, debate and beta testing the IOA have decided to replace the Yahoo “Irish Orienteering” forum with a new forum for the orienteering community hosted on the IOA website.

The reason for this is very simple.  Since Yahoo changed the way its forums were disseminated via RSS, it was no longer possible to get a feed for the forum on the IOA website.  We felt that this therefore became an ineffective way of spreading information about the sport, as forum participation means having to constantly log into Yahoo.  Critically, non-members cannot view the Yahoo forum, either.

You will see the new forum here: www.orienteering.ie/forums.  The change will impact in several ways.

On 31 December 2013, the Yahoo forum will cease to be active.  We will archive the entire forum for the last 15 years and put it on the IOA website as a searchable database.  Your Yahoo membership will NOT carry over to the new forum.

You will need to re-register with WordPress, which you can do here: https://www.orienteering.ie/wp-login.php?action=register.

It will NOT be possible to post to the new forum via email, but you can subscribe via email to posts from the forum from any one of the individual categories, which are: General Discussion, Events, Beginners and Technical Support.  In addition, you can subscribe to individual threads of posts of a discussion if you are interested in doing so.  Although arguably a little more complex than Yahoo, ultimately it gives more control of what you want to read.

There will be an FAQ section within the forum to let people know how to use the forum.  The forum will be moderated to ensure discussion is fair and does not get too heated.

The hope and intention is that with time, this new forum with its additional features will become a great resource of information and debate for the orienteering community, be it discussion on a particular event, technical questions about Ór or Ocad, an information resource for beginners or an opportunity to share stories, pictures, video and experience.

We look forward to seeing you participate actively.

Finn van Gelderen

Communications Officer

Irish Orienteering Association

For all queries or comments or please contact me at comms@orienteering.ie

Ireland Junior Team Selection Policy 2014

Junior Selection Races and Outline Squads for 2014

This is not necessarily the complete outline of races, but covers most of the details,  so Juniors can start to look into events and plan ahead.

Selection Races

Likely to be:

• Derry races (St Patricks weekend)
• Leinster Champs (6 April)
• JK (All 3 days 18-21 April)
• IOC (sprint, middle and Long, 2-5 May)
• We will need to add one more race for JHI.
• We will also have the compulsory time trial in the Phoenix Park in the early Spring

Outline EYOC and JWOC squads

(these are not teams, which will still need to be selected as usual, but here is the current squad of juniors likely to be considered for selection – If anyone else is interested please let us know.)

EYOC Macedonia (25 to 28 June)

• Caoimhe O’Boyle (CNOC)
• Meabh Perkins (BOC)
• Siobhan Delaney (CNOC)
• Jill Stephens (LVO)
• Aoife Mc Cavana (GEN)
• Roisin Long (AJAX)
• Robert Pim (WATO)
• Zac O Sullivan Hourihan (BOC)
• James Millar (LVO)
• Peter Meehan (NWOC)
• Paul Pruzina (LVO)
• Jonathan Quinn (GEN)
• Frazer Howe (NWOC)

JWOC (Bulgaria 21-28 July)

• Eoin Mc Cullough (3ROC)
• Jack Millar (LVO)
• Harry Millar (LVO)
• Jonathan Quinn (GEN)
• Niall Mc Carthy (BOC)
• Laurence Quinn (GEN)
• Mark Stephens (LVO)
• Cliona Mc Cullough (3ROC)
• Roisin Long (AJAX)
• Aoife Mc Cavana (GEN)
• Niamh Corbett (CorkO)

JWOC 2015

JWOC 2015 is in Larvik, Norway. A training camp is hoped to be held in Trondheim, Norway during the last week in August 2014. Could those interested let Mike know (Mike.Long@ucd.ie).

This weekend’s Orienteering Events ….

For more information click on the Venue name to get a map to the location and for start times. For more information go to the Club’s websites.

November 2013

Championships Time
While the Irish Championships come at the effective end of the competition season, at the beginning of May, the Northern Ireland, Connacht and Munster Championships cluster in the autumn. This year the Connacht Championships were brought forward to the end of September only to be moved back to the end of October again following a clash with the Senior Home International, and the Munster Champs were run a week later.

It’s unusual these days to get to run in a forest on two successive Sundays, with so many events taking place on open mountain, but both Championships provided good orienteering in good forests. The Connacht Championships, run by Galway’s Western Eagles club at Newcastle Demesne near Ballymahon in Co. Longford, offered an interesting mix of coniferous and beautiful runnable beech wood, with an elegant setting in front of Newcastle House, the seat of the King-Harman family since the 1700’s, on the banks of the river Inny. Heavy rain early in the day tested the waterproof maps to the limit, while Frank Ryan’s courses used the best parts of the wood, though anyone taking the longer road routes got to know one or two sections of road intimately. 3ROC’s Colm Moran took the M21Elite course while CNOC’s Niamh O’Boyle won the W21 Elite. The event was run largely for the benefit of visiting orienteers as the small number of Connacht runners were mainly involved in helping: there was, however, one Connacht prizewinner in Derek Conerney, 2nd in M40L. Once again, hats off to the small group of orienteers in Connacht who ran the event: in all honesty I have to say it was much better than I had expected! You can see the results, routes and split times here.

The following Sunday, Cork Orienteers ran the Munster Championships in a classic Galtees forest at Toureen Wood near Cahir. Galtees forests tend to have large erosion gullies running down the sides of the mountains and forests roads running parallel to one another across the slope, and Toureen Wood is no exception. Starting high and finishing low may have reduced the climb on the courses but it didn’t eliminate it altogether. The turnout was better than for Connacht, with a good representation of Munster and Leinster runners and a handful from Connacht and Ulster, not to mention a couple of Swedish visitors. Cork O’s Darren Burke retained the Munster title, his fifth, while his clubmate W18 Niamh Corbett continued to make her mark and took the W21 title. Yet another good day’s orienteering in quite detailed forests where, again, the planners (Liam O’Brian and Willie Fitzgerald) made the best use of the area. You can see the results, routes and split times here.

Wherefore Art Thou?
For those unfortunates who weren’t able to make the Munster Championships, there was some consolation in the Three Days of Rome the same weekend.  About 20 orienteers from Ireland made the trip, and you can read Niamh O’Boyle’s account of the races here:

Day 2 in Villa Ada was a totally different proposition – green and hilly with lots of route choice (through the green or around on paths?). It was hard to follow the little paths in places and many people lost time wandering around, including me on no. 10. Wilbert was 1st again, Mary was 2nd again, and Marcus Pinker took 3rd place in M35. Again, my course/route is here.

Day 3: the main event. This was the one that we had been waiting for; a chance to run around ancient Rome, past the Colosseum, on the same streets that the Emperors once ruled over. The race didn’t disappoint and required forward planning and nifty footwork to avoid tourists and garbage trucks in the narrow streets. There was also a challenging crossing of a major road – the option being to throw yourself in front of the cars and hope they stopped on time to save time or politely wait until they had passed. Marcus was the only one in the top 3 today, with a fine 2nd place in M35. Most of the W21 course is here (no A3 scanner – hence no. 1 is missing).

Calling all Controllers
IOA is running a one-day Controllers’ Course in Kildare on 16th November, given by the doyen of UK controllers, Graham Nilsson. Graham has given controlling and planning courses here before and they are excellent. However, it is limited to 15 people and by the time most of you see this it will probably be over … (but look for a dramatic improvement in course and event standards?)

O-Bits … EYOC Photos taken by Gerry Meehan at October’s European Youth O-Championships in Portugal are here … IOA are running a two-day First Aid course in Newbridge on 30th November/1st December. At present there are only 2 places left. Details here … There is to be a sprint event at Dublin City University on Saturday 7th December to raise money for the Junior Squad. There were four great sprint events last year for the same purpose, so here’s a chance to do some sprint-O training in preparation for the Irish Sprint Championships at Maynooth at the beginning of May … JK2014: entries are now open for Britain’s biggest O-event, at Easter (April 18-21) in South Wales. See here … Sad news: the death occurred on November 5th of Nuala Rothery, wife of Seán Rothery, one of the founders of Irish orienteering, and mother of former Irish Champions Eoin and Colm.

WATO on the Radio

Development officer Andrew Cox and Robert Pim from WATO orienteering club were interviewed in Open Tempo FM.  You can listen to and download the podcast here:

http://opentemposss.podbean.com/2013/11/09/interview-with-waterford-orienteering-club/

Orienteering this weekend

This weekend there are four orienteering events. There are in Kerry, Cork, Waterford and Dublin.

Click on the Location name and the Club name to get more details.

Schools Orienteering Video

The Final version of a promotional video for Schools Orienteering is available at the link below.

https://vimeo.com/75401229

It features children form Cork. With thanks to Andrew Cox and Liam O’Brien.

Regards

Finn van Gelderen