In recent years Magnus Johannson and Brent Langbakk have been volunteer coaches of Canada’s High Performance senior and junior team athletes. Due to education and family commitments, both have stepped away from their positions. The High Performance Committee (HPC) would like to thank Magnus and Brent for their hard work with the Canadian athletes, and wish them both well with their new life challenges!
The High Performance Committee is now recruiting in these four areas:
Head Senior National High Performance Program Coach (description)
Head Junior National High Performance Program Coach (description)
Team Leaders for the junior and senior teams (description)
Other individuals interested in assisting with coaching our High Performance Program athletes (description)
Please pass this information on to others you think may be interested in developing elite orienteering in Canada. With the number of talented young athletes, and the work of the HPC over the past couple of years, it's an exciting time to be involved in elite orienteering development in Canada!
With winter approaching faster than some of
us would like, the Yukon Orienteering Association held their final meet; a
night-O. With only five hours of darkness in the Yukon in mid-summer organizing a night-O can be rather difficult. So this years annual night-O was held in late September close to ten in the evening. The meet was held on the Hillcrest map where last
years WCOC sprint was held.
With my rather small headlamp I managed to find
all the controls but not without a few bobbles. Fortunately the course planner hung some reflectors on the flags but those only help a certain amount when your headlamp only illuminates about six feet in front of you. Running through the woods was
particularly difficult because your light would only illuminate the tree
directly in front of you. Therefore in any dense woods you could only see about 2 feet
forward.
Another note, avoid running in any rough ground, it often leads to face-plants irregardless of the lighting outside. A big thanks to all the volunteers who made this year very successful and enjoyable!
I have now been in Vietnam for about four weeks, and I'll be here for another two months. I am staying in a small community in the mountains of Hoa Binh province, called Dong Chua. The view from here is stunning and when I first saw the hills and mountains I could not wait to get out for a run. When I went for my first run, I ran up into the mountains, on a winding dirt road along the top of a ravine. I ran through another, even smaller community farther up in the mountains. I got a lot of strange looks from all the villagers, but I guess that's understandable.
The road I ran along.
Imagine. You live in a small community with less than 100 houses in the mountains of Vietnam. You have to boil all your water to drink. You have to boil water if you want to have a hot shower. You do your laundry by hand in a large metal bowl. You've probably never seen a person running just for the sake of it. You've never seen a person with blonde hair. You've never seen a Canadian. And suddenly there's this blonde haired girl, running through the one street in your community, wearing a very Canadian running top. Personally, I understand why they were surprised.
This is the kind view I had on my run.
Unfortunately, when I was returning from my run, the Vietnamese supervisor of the group I'm with saw me and questioned what I had been doing. When he realized that I had been out running in the mountains on my own (with a cell phone and on a road that never split so I couldn't possibly get lost), he told me that I can't do that again because it's dangerous. Looks like I'm not going to be orienteering any time soon.
Another view from my run.
I have, however, convinced a few other members of the group to come running with me occasionally, so at least that won't be given up completely for the next two months.
I also spent some time talking to other members of the group about orienteering and there are a few of them that seem quite interested in trying it out. I'm hoping that once we get to Port Alberni, BC, for the second part of the trip that we will have access to some maps and I can spend a day teaching orienteering to the nine other Canadians and the ten Vietnamese.
I am going to miss orienteering very much over the next couple of months, but I know that even just the occasional run or hike in the mountains will absolutely phenomenal!
The view from the Cultural House in the village. Don't you just want to running in those mountains?
It's quite typical to see water buffalo being herded down the street.
With 5 races to go, it's still anyone's guess as to who will win the Canada Cup Elite Series.... here are the latest standings after the 3 Canada Cup races held in conjunction with the BC Orienteering Championships.
In the women's standings, the 2011 Canada Cup Elite Series champion Louise Oram is back on top after winning the sprint, middle, and long races at the BC Champs. Carol Ross ran some excellent races to boost her in to second place, with Pam James holding on to third. Kerstin Burnett, Emily Kemp, and Molly Kemp are not far behind, which means all could change in these last few races...
In the men's category, Adam Woods won his first Canada Cup race in the middle distance on Whistler Mountain. Adam ran a confident race, commenting afterwards that his race was "excellent", and he enjoyed the challenge of the open, rocky terrain. In terms of standings, Graeme Rennie and Brian May both ran excellent races to close the gap to leader Will Critchley and second place Eric Kemp, but Will and Eric are still far enough ahead it's unlikely either Graeme or Brian can take over the lead in these last few events.
Since this was the BC Champs, the Greater Vancouver Orienteering Club (GVOC) amassed a good amount of points to have a comfortable cushion over Ottawa Orienteering Club (OOC). However, with all 3 sprint, middle, and long distance races at the Ontario Champs next weekend being designated Canada Cup races, OOC does have the opportunity to make up the difference. Can GVOC hang on to the "Best Club in Canada" crown for a second year??
The final Canada Cup races for 2012 are:
October 6-7: Ontario Orienteering Champs - sprint, middle, long
October 14: New Brunswick Champs - long
October 28: Blue Nose Classic, Nova Scotia
I had the privilege of going to the Park World Tour events in Beijing in 2010, and the big question in my head wasn't if I would go again, but when I would go again. Fortunately, that time was September 12-23, 2012! After a short 19 hours of travelling and the mysterious disappearance of Wednesday, I arrived in our first destination on this three city tour, Changchun. This was a pretty small city, with a scant 7.6 million residents. Its a relative small.
The races here were in conjunction with the Vasa China Orienteering festival. If you weren't aware, there is a pretty impressive Vasaloppet China ski event that has been happening for quite some years now, and these events are the orienteering side of the company that puts on these Scandinavian-inspired events. In the Jing Yuetan Forest Park, we did a sprint and middle distance. The sprint was your standard park sprint. Yet, it wasn't. Because its in China. You take your standard pedestrian bridge in Canada, for instance, and turn it into an arched log bridge with a decorative canopy on it. Its the little touches that turns 'average' park into a 'unique' place to race.
The middle distance, however, was decidedly forested. A tad on the green side in places, it started at the equally impressive Vasa house, which included a German restaurant, and an elaborate Vasa China museum, which certainly suggests the events are doing pretty well for themselves. The forest around this area was generally green, with a network of trails. There was some sort of mysterious stinging flora out there, too, as everyone came back with, not quite an itch, not quite a rash, but some mysterious feeling on their skin (most notably their arms), which seemed to have a burning sensation on contact for quite a few days. That part was slightly less than ideal. However, when it wasn't green and scratchy, the white forest was impressively open and fast. Anyone who says that China doesn't have good terrain really doesn't know what they are talking about. I lament the disappearance of the Asian Pacific Championships; I think many Canadians are missing out on some amazing opportunities to venture out and see this wilderness.
Not bad at all, if I do say so myself.
If you haven't seen my DOMA which has my GPS route for both of these races in Changchun, you can see it at OC Doma . At this point you will also appreciate why I'm not really discussing my personal performance from these races.
Once these two races were over, we hopped on a bus, and a train, and then a plane, and found ourselves in the town of Wansheng, just outside the Mega-mega-city of Chonqing, with a population of 28 million. Seeing this place at night was amazing. Wansheng was comparatively sleepy, probably the biggest upside was the absence of constant car horns blasting all day and all night long.
The reason for going to Wansheng was that we were now at the Chinese National Championships, and the "2012 Orienteering World Ranking Event". This event also took on a variety of other wacky English translation names along the way. I seem to recall one of them was "2012 Qualifying Championship World Event". Good stuff.
The two races we did here, a sprint and a middle, were unquestionably the two most unique races I have ever done. Words can't quite do justice to what the terrain was like for the sprint. It was a residential area, but a Chinese one. The passageways were incredibly narrow, and it felt like you were running through people's living rooms. It was extremely difficult to keep track of where you were, and you would look into the passage way you're planning on taking, and just say "That can't POSSIBLY be it, that's someones house!" But, it really was. To add to the adventure, it also started raining just as I started, making the entire course a slippery death trap as well. Several guys slipped and fell down stairs, walls, etc. Super sketchy, just to add to the craziness. I didn't end up having time to go back there with a head camera, however here is a brief video from Miguel Silva that gives a pretty good idea of what it was like. Amazing.
The middle the next day was equally wacky, in a completely different way. The terrain was a mixture of small tufts of forest on roundish spurs and hillsides, combined with plenty of cultivated land. The instructions we were provided ahead of time regarding the cultivated land was that the paths along the edges of each terrace or portion of farmland was okay to cross, and fields where the crops were already harvest were okay, but un-harvested farmland was not.
Not being a farmer, I was quite certain I would have no idea how to tell the difference. Can you?
So, for the first few controls, I was mincing around, sticking to paths and forest. However, once I crested the hill after control 4, I started to get to the area where all the kinds who were racing the championships were. And they were running every which way, on everything. Harvested, non-harvested, trees, cliffs, you name it, it appeared to be fair game. Problem solved! The only thing left to deal with was the mudfest that had formed from the rain and hundreds of people running every which way. It wasn't so much a question of if you were going to slip, but whether you could control the direction in which you were going to slide. This was probably my best performance of the week, I actually got my highest WRE score in a middle of all time. A unique problem for some runners is that the map paper quality was less than optimal, so in the end their map was slightly less paper and more.... well, I'll let the image speak for itself:
Problematic.
The final race found us back in Beijing, in the Botanical Gardens. A relatively straight forward race, this one came down to making good decisions and running really fast, neither of which is necessarily my forte. Although I didn't necessarily improve my standard ranking, I was certainly more in the mix than in some of the other more debacle'd races.
As Jaroslav, the organizer extraordinaire of this trip said, the great thing about these Park World Tour trips is that the athletes involved exist on the same level throughout all the competitions. Throughout all the travelling, bus trips, varying hotels, its not like the Norwegians are up in first class, or the French have their own fancypants accommodation. Even us lowly Canadians share the same space and eat the same food and travel the same way as everyone us. Were it not for trips like these, I'm not sure I'd ever have the courage to even make eye contact with World Champions, or share photos with a 2:18 marathoner (although I still don't make eye contact with most of the ladies, mostly out of fear). As long as can maintain a vague sense of competitive legitimacy, I will keep going on these trips for as long as possible. On this trip, I met a new swath of amazing people, and saw what I would consider the "real" China. When can I go again?
After a summer of orienteering fun, I’m now getting settled
back into university life in Squamish. While there is an active orienteering
club in Vancouver and a newly developed club in Whistler, there aren’t many
orienteering events or trainings within Squamish itself. I have to transition into physical
training by myself again.
One fun orienteering related activity in Squamish is the
Stawamus Chief. It is the second largest granite monolith in the world,
standing at approximately 700m. It’s a mecca for rock climbing, but it also has
an orienteering map on top! The
hike up is a training in itself (it took me around 45 minutes) and the views
from the top are spectacular.
Some sections are quite steep!
At the top with my Chief hiking buddy.
The orienteering is unique. There is lots of rock to say the
least and some fun contour detail!
Section of the Chief orienteering map.
It’s important to try to keep training fun, even when you can’t regularly get out to orienteering events. I hope to see some of you at the BC Orienteering Championships in Whistler this coming weekend. To the rest of you, happy training!
I was a bit at a loss of what to put up for a blog post, so thought I would try for something a bit less on specific to orienteering and more to do with training and life in general.
Some friends were over the other day to go for a run (a good percentage of our socializing centers around running and eating), and noticed the cupboard near our bathroom and started laughing. This cupboard is pictured below... and contains almost exclusively shoes (most of which are running shoes, of varying types and ages). In fact, my 2 pairs of icebug orienteering spikes are not even in this cupboard as I have another box in yet another cupboard with those for some reason.
Shoes are an integral part to running, you need different ones for different types of running/training. Also, your tastes change over time... and different types of shoes become your favourite. I have been slowly moving towards shoes with less heel drop, in an attempt to work on my running form (it generally emphasizes more midfoot strike).
at least 50% Thomas's I swear!
In Vancouver the last few weeks have been mostly nice weather, with the temperature in the morning and evening slowly getting a bit more bite. We have been making the best of it, trying to get out to places that might not be as easy in bad weather or would be under snow in the winter.
Some of our running friends / acquaintances got together on the labour day weekend and ran the Howe Sound Crest trail. We started at Porteau cove, so climbed up to 1500m at the beginning (http://lh6.ggpht.com/_bVFXWzpMoyE/TFj958LKq8I/AAAAAAAACoI/1qFNC3KIVhU/P7240917.JPG), but after that it was up and down a beautiful hilly ridge (mostly in the sub-alpine, and rocky in places) back towards the Cypress bowl ski area. There was a bit of cloud hanging around the Lions (2 prominent rocky mountains along the ridge), but it was clear for views in most places.
Welcome to the blog of Orienteering Canada's High Performance Program and National Teams. Follow along in our racing and training throughout Canada and the world!
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