Thursday, December 20, 2007

British Schools Orienteering Championships 2007

Liam Taylor, Alex Willis, Stephen Horrocks and Jack Heyworth are the Year 12 Boys British Schools Orienteering Champions. They completed a wet and windy challenging course over the British Army’s Tank Training ground at Bovington, Dorset in November.

B.R.G.S. was placed 3rd as a School in the Large Secondary Schools section. Sophie Horrocks Alex Willis and Liam Taylor were amongst the nine runners counting towards this place.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Tockholes Training Day





The aim of the training day was to provide training for all abilities within the PFO membership. Alex and Stephen (with some parental help) started planning the day in October. Due to the wide range of ability and experience within the club the challenge was to provide a wide enough range of training courses to be of interest to everyone.


The training was split into three groups, novice, intermediate and experienced. Within each group they planned three courses. The planning involved visiting Tockholes, several planning sessions and numerous hours at the computer using mapping software to plan the courses. All this on top of their normal schoolwork and other commitments.


On the day around 35 people (including a large number of juniors) turned up despite the cold damp November weather. The courses they did ranged from Scandinavian style training to micro courses.

All those who attended seemd to enjoy themselves and hopefully gained something from the day.

Feedback comments recieved included:-


"Thanks so much for yesterday's training- really appreciated all your efforts and I certainly gained experience from the varied courses that you had set up.
If you do have any time for coaching young people, you are always welcome at my school, Northern Primary in Bacup"



"Thank you for all the hard work you put in to today's event. I know the CTK children got a lot out of it and enjoyed the stream too. I enjoyed being able to do some of it on my own too. Well done to you all, and hope there is another similar day again very soon"


"Fantastic day out! It was apparent just how much effort the organisers had put in; really appreciated by all. It was good to see people from a variety of skill levels training together. It was a valuable experience for everybody training on the day."


"On behalf of the BRGS 'little-uns', thanks for all the time and effort you put into the training day. It was a great success; the minibus was a cacophony of chatter all the way back to Rawtenstall . Thanks Again"


Alex and Stephen gained valuable experience which hopefully they can use again, maybe for another club training day in 2008!

Hamish + Kate Willis










Saturday, November 3, 2007

Club Training Day


On 10th November myself and Stephen are planning a training day for the all club members including those juniors at affiliated schools. This will follow on from a similar day we organised over the summer for a group of primary school children from CTK in Burnley.

This was done as part of our Orienteering Young Leaders Award completed as part of our Silver Duke of Edinburgh's award. The November training day is designed for adults and children and for all ranges of ability so that they can improve their skills and hopefully become better orienteers as a result of the day. The other aim of the day is for a social feel with members engaging over a packed lunch in the woods.


On offer on the day will be a total of 10 different courses, all aiming to challenge a different skill needed for orienteering from teamwork (somtimes useful when lost) to planning ahead of yourself and picking out the very minor details in the map.

We have been planning the day for the last month with several visits to the area and a few planning meetings in the comfort of our own homes (plus an e-mail conference)

Watch this space for a full report on the day.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Yvette Baker Trophy, Sunday 21st October

On sunday the 21st october, a team of 10 pfo juniors went up to caldbeck to represent the club in the annual yvette baker trophy event, for club juniors. it is an interclub event, where juniors from each club race against juniors from half a dozen other clubs.
this year, on a whole, we did not do as well as previously, and may miss out on the national final. the main reason for this was the relative inexperience of some of the newer runbeers, and also the fact that many of the team members had been away on a physically draining north west junior squad training day on saturday.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Injury :(




Since the training weekend detailed below I have had pain in my right knee. It wasn't too painful, so I rested it by not training at all for a week. The following weekend was the British School's Score Championships. My knee had settled down a bit after a weeks rest so I ran at the Score Champs (coming 4th in Boy's Year 12/13). BRGS Upper School Boy's Team won the trophy :) (best 6 scores from years 10-13 counting).


However after the minibus journey home from Sussex my knee was painful again. So I rested it again and went to see a physiotherapist. She diagnosed that my knee cap was rubbing, as it was not moving correctly up and down its groove in my femur. This was due to the fact that my quads were overdeveloped on the outside of my thigh and underdeveloped on the inside. This caused my knee cap to be pulled diagonally to the outside as opposed to the inside.


To counteract this I have to do squats on one leg and weights in the gym to build up the inside of my thigh as well as resting from training/running for two weeks. At the moment my right leg diameter measures one inch less than my left both above and below my knee. By the time I go back for a check with my physio in two weeks I need to have built up the muscle mass and have equal diameters on both legs!


I'm doing all the prescribed exercises and hoping to be fit again for the next NWJS training weekend and Delamere Forest event early in November.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Fundraising

The North West Junior Squad try to raise money throughout the year. They do this mainly by having cake stalls at major orienteering events in the North West Region. Juniors (or their parents and grandparents!) bake cakes, buns and biscuits and bring them to the events to be sold. The juniors also help to man the cake stall and sell the cakes before and after their runs. There is usually a hungry crowd of people wanting to buy cakes after they have run their courses. Some buy cakes to take home as well. Home made jams and chutney are also sold at certain times of year.

The cake stall money is used for many of the North West Junior Squad expenses. Part of it is used to help subside the Norway trip and helps towards the cost of Norway Tour Tops.

From September 2005 to August 2006 the cake stalls raised £1999. From Sept 2006 to August 2007 they raised £1694.

This year the squad is having a stall at a Dickensian Christmas Market in the Lake District to sell home made mince pies etc. A stall at a similar market in 2005 raised £937 from the sale of cakes, jams etc.

Fund raising for the Norway tour helps to reduce the cost to each squad member going. Some of the other ways the squad are raising money for Norway 2008 are :-selling quiz sheets, bag packing at local supermarkets, selling cake recipe books, selling home made Christmas cakes .

Monday, October 1, 2007

NWJS weekend 29/30th September (2)

Saturday:
The training is detailed in Alex's contribution but I would like to add that for me aswell the time trial was very wierd on that map, also I developed a syndrome of getting to right on top of the flag and then not being able to see it for a minute or so and as this happened on 3 controls I wasted approximately 2 and a half minutes (out of 11:19), the fact that we were using training flags placed on the floor and not full size flags was most of the problem.
The rest of the training was good though and the two techniques of simplification and attack points were reinforced by well planned routes to get the most out of the terrain.

Sunday:
On Sunday the whole club attended the BL Regional Event located at HIgh Pike in the Lakes. The location was great and the open fell land gave way to fast times and there was also a good network of paths but fine details close to the controls needed particular attention meaning that the Saturdays training was put into good practice. The weather was good and although not the brightest or hottest day, there was no rain and gave some extremely good conditions to run in.
I ran the JM5L course and found that it was extremely fast running, mistakes cost a large amount of time as you could run straight past a control hidden in a dip, or not run far enough and hit a wrong parrallel (sp?) feature. I only made a single mistake over the whole 8.1km of the course and this was on control 15 were I found an unmarked marsh in a re-entrant almost the same as my control just 100m ahead.
The enjoyable part of this race was the fact that for once I got to stretch out my legs for large sections and as such completed the course in just over an hour only just behind the leader (54mins approx). I believe that I could have run faster I think if it hadn't have been for the trouble of getting to sleep the night before with some of the younger members of the club thinking it funny to annoy everyone else instead of going to sleep, resulting in me being very tired for the event.
Overall this should be a gold standard leaving me just one more to get before the end of the year.

Liam

Sunday, September 30, 2007

NWJS weekend 29/30th September




















Saturday:
Saturday was on the sand dunes near Haverigg in the south lakes. These are grassy as well as sandy (unlike the wooded dunes found in Scotland) so an added challenge was actually running up some of the sandier slopes. With 3 separate exercises to get through (a time trial, simplification exercise and attack points exercise) the pace was steady (more so for some than others) yet purposeful. For me the time trial was a nightmare of a first exercise on a strange scale (1:7500 with 2.5m contours). After that I began to get used to the rapidly changing terrain (flat to dunes and back again) so the other two exercises went well.
The 'serious' exercises were followed by a clock relay (see attached map) in pairs with a novelty item. Each runner goes out to the control, picks up the item and moves it round a control before coming back to tig their partner who does the same. There was some bending/changing of the rules whereby each runner simply drops the item a bit further round a rough circle in view of the next runner.

Sunday:
Sunday incorporated the BL regional event at High Pike which for me meant my final run on JM5Medium. The course was open and fast (depending on how well the climb in the first half of the course was tackled) as the second half was entirely downhill running. 49 minutes for 6.2km wasn't bad but a few small errors could have been cut out to get closer to the winner's time (around 44 minutes).

Monday, September 24, 2007

23rd September - JM5L race

This was the first proper race back in the season for me and as such i was slightly apprehensive. The event was at Ainsdale dunes over near Southport and it was on sand and thick and low vegetation, which is one of my least favourite terrain types. Also I hadn't been feeling well up till then and had spent Saturday in bed instead of helping run an event. Now that my excuses are out of the way...
The course I was on was JM5L and was 6.8km, climb unspecified.
The start of the race was a complete nightmare, I got my angle from the start wrong and ended up going to control 2 instead of control 1, however from here I knew where I was and could work my way back. Having already been to number 2 that was pretty easy but then number 3 proved to be another problem. This first section was over extremely complex and slow terrain and probably cost me about 10 minutes in total.
The next section of controls, number 4 to 16 was over quicker terrain in the southern area of the map and here I felt more at home with quick running between large attack points and then careful navigation nearer to the control being the main feature of the running, I felt confident over this section and was quickly able to settle into a nice and consistent runnign speed, something which i have been working on over the summer whilst training.
The last section of the course went back into the complex section at the north of the map and this time i faired much better and made only slight navigational errors with the last two controls being comparative flyers.
Overall posistion 4/5 in JM5L, time of 66 mins. The winner achieved 48 but 2nd place was 62. As a result I am overall happy with this race.

Liam