Get ready for the JK … The Northern Ireland Orienteering Association has announced that they will be hosting the 2011 Jan Kjellstrom international orienteering festival. The “JK”, as it is known, is the premier multi-day orienteering competition run under the auspices of BOF, the British Orienteering Federation. Jan Kjellstrom was a young Swedish orienteer who came to Britain in the 1960’s and helped establish the sport there. He was tragically
Mary Healy attended a planning course in the UK. Here she reports on the experience … A WEEK IN AN ORIENTEERING BOOTCAMP If anyone had told me that a week of sleeping in a dormitory and working from 8.30 am till maybe 11 pm at night, with sometimes only 15 minutes for lunch, could be exhilarating fun, I’d have said ‘Yeh, Right!’. But that’s what it was. With a last
Division of Labour Probably none of us would consider orienteering a team sport. We like to think of ourselves as independent, self-sufficient, able to survive on our own in harsh conditions. Mild eccentricity is tolerated; expected, even, if we think of the stereotypical orienteer. But at heart it is a team sport, in the sense of teamwork rather than in, say, the football sense. I have heard it said, in
Last Tuesday’s Irish Times article on orienteering by Ian O’Riordan may unleash a flood (is that possible?) of new orienteers seeking health, fitness and enlightenment, into the forests of the country, but how many of our current orienteers have sought the enlightenment of night orienteering? Night-O makes even the tamest area interesting, especially at this time of year when the plumes of steam from your breath in the beam of
The Irish Orienteer Guide to Some Major, some minor, and Some Holiday Events for 2008 It’s the time to plan your orienteering year: do you stay at home and do just the small local events, or take in the major national competitions like the provincial and Irish Championships and the Inishbofin 3-Day, or is this the year to go for something more exotic? If you don’t want to go too
This is the first attempt at introducing TIO in electronic form since the printed version became rarer and rarer. Normally at this time of year there is a preview of the major events for the coming year and I hope to do that in the next few days: CompassSport has just dropped through the letterbox with its version and 2008 looks very promising for international multi-day events. We’ve just had
2009-2010 is turning out to be the year of the sand dunes. It started with the JHI in Newborough. The Connachts are on the high dunes of Finner in Donegal, and 2 days of the JK are on sand dunes in Devon. All good practise for the Irish Champs on Magilligan dunes north of Derry, leading up to the subtle forested dunes of JWOC on the West coast of Denmark. Sand