We Have Moved

The Lagan Valley Orienteering Junior Blog has moved to our new club website. Come on over and and find out what we are up to. All the old posts are there and you can also access our Training, Technical, Incentive Scheme and Junior Development Squad pages from the drop down menu at the top of the page.

Time Trials Success

Some of our Juniors set off to take part in the Irish Junior time trails in Phoenix Park Dublin on the 14 Mar. This is a selection criteria for those who wish to attempt to make it into the Juniors Irish Team. The day started with the time trial itself. This is made up of a loop of about 1.2 km with 60m of climb that takes in a truly cross country experience. It was made up of up and down hill sections, contouring lengths, river crossings and even some paths. Depending on age our juniors had to run between 2 to 4 laps.

Our team all did extremely well with a big well done to  Paul P and Andrew E who came first in their age class.

Following the time trials the juniors undertook compass training loops and then an excellent MicrO session around the visitors centre on a 1:1000 map. This was a tricky event that required very close attention to the map and the control descriptions as the controls had no control numbers and were only a few centimetres apart in places.

Success In Limerick for Luke

Our very own Luke and Rachel took part in a weekend of sprint orienteering at the University of Limerick (UL) Campus. The UL Campus encompasses student accommodation, lecture halls, libraries, sports grounds, restaurants, countryside, concert hall, walk ways and cycle tracks. It provides plenty of scope for sprint races that can also traverse the river Shannon (via a compulsary crossing point bridge). Luke won the the short individual course and both he and Rachel had a really great time.  

Rachel Reviews Her Course

Rachel spent some useful time to review her course on the NI Score Champs and work out an improved route. This is a really important thing to do after your races so that you can work out what worked well for you.  You can then concentrate on repeating that again in your next race. Try to focus on the positive from each race more than the things that went wrong. If you do identify some areas that you need to improve on then you can always raise that and we will include it in future training.

NI Score Champs and Night Champs

The Northern Ireland Score and Night Championships took place at Crawfordsburn on the 21 Feb. This was a great day of orienteering.  The Junior Champions are Rachael Collins and Peter Reed (Score) and Andrew Elwood and Sophie Pruzina (Night). Well done to them. The event also saw the issuing of Silverware from the NI Champs in late 2014.

Some juniors also took part in training at Drum Manor earlier in the week. This was a great opportunity to get some top class coaching and everyone enjoyed themselves.

Compass Capers

Our Junior Squad had a great afternoon out at Barnett's Park practicing compass work. This session required our team to be able to locate the control flag on several courses in which elements of the map detail had been removed. This needed accurate compass work. As did the very tricky corridor exercise that they were tasked with completing at the end. All of this followed a time trial preparation run as the warm up. A big thank you goes to Steph P for planning a great session.

We also had a number of beginners at the training who got the chance to practice basic O techniques on a cones exercise, learning to keep the map set, and symbols game prior to going on a map walk with a short course at the end. They were all excellent and very enthusiastic. We hope to see them all next time.

Meelmore Contour Training

The junior squad, as well as a number of adults, took to the hills at Meelmore to practice the use of contours as a navigation aid. It was a great sunny day but snow still lay on the ground as well as a lot of ice. The rivers were cold as well if you fell in!!. This was an excellent opportunity to get those cobwebs blown away after the festive season. It was also ideal training for the Lisburn O Festival in May as the races there will include Slieve Croob.