Start of Season

The orienteering season kicked off officially last weekend with a league sprint event at Ramat Hashofet, only 20 minutes from home. This enabled all three of us (Roni, myself and Alon) to participate, in that order – because neither of us can follow Alon before we finish our own courses. That’s the only real advantage of sprint races over forest orienteering; otherwise it’s usually a waste of time and money, in my opinion.

I’m running H40 this year, so I can have a challenge and some competition (H50A is too short, and in H35 I’m too far off the pace). It’s also Roni’s course in D21A, so we can compare routes. I finished 4th in 17:26, while Roni was 3rd in her class with 19:01. I simplified some of the route choices too much (especially 3-4) and probably lost 20-25 seconds overall, but that wouldn’t have changed my position. I’m aiming for the forest races anyway, and anything less than a podium finish there will be a disappointment.

The next league event is also a sprint, not so close to home, and we’ll probably skip it, with the first league forest race only in mid-November. Luckily there are some local races to look forward to before that, and I also plan to do some training in the forest.

It’s been a long summer (and it’s not over – no sign of rain yet), but I have been training regularly and doing various orienteering-related stuff:

• I got elected to our Ethics committee and then made chairman.
• Prepared and delivered an advanced course planning workshop.
• Started mapping an extension to my map of Naura, but postponed it because of nasty vegetation and half the existing map being charred from a forest fire.
• Finished mapping my home town of Ramat Yishai (it’s a large map – A3 at 1:5,000) and held a successful early morning training event.
• Started mapping an extension to my Ramot Menashe rogaine map (by running with a headcam) for our 2020 Spring rogaine. I’ve already covered 74 km there, with more to come.
• Planned and marked a training course (in the forest) for our club.
• Read Michel Georgiou’s new book “The Winning Eye” – it’s not written very well, but very interesting and useful.

My route – GPS was a mess as usual in sprints