Greetings North West members

You really know Winter has arrived when you orienteer in the South Island in June! A NWOC contingent found puffer jackets, thermals, and parkas were essential as we enjoyed the Queen’s Birthday races at Canterbury University and in the detailed sand-dune terrain of Woodend Beach forest. It was great to see that Gene Beveridge has overcome a persistent injury and is back in top form, placing 2^nd behind Matt Ogden in the M21E Long distance race, while Cameron de L’Isle placed in the top 5 in all 3 M21E races.
Fortunately the rain held off for our first rogaine in Riverhead Forest and around 300 participants enjoyed the newly extended map, the novelty lolly controls, the spot prizes, the mud and the challenges of a really well set course – many thanks to Tim and Maddie Longson, mapper Paul Ireland and all the helpers on the day.
Don’t forget to enter now for our second rogaine this Sunday 11 July in Woodhill Forest, with entry from Slater Road, South Head. Bring along your friends and family for a fun day!

In late June Annemarie Hogenbirk and Jan Jager ran a course for Sport Ident timing volunteers – very hands on and very practical. Helping out at registration and download at club events is not rocket science, so please don’t be shy about offering to help out.

Orienteering in New Zealand is underpinned by a strong culture of volunteerism. Working with clubs to reduce volunteer burnout is a key project for Orienteering New Zealand in 2021. The June CompassPoint newsletter has a link to a members’ survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/CS65J57

We are keen to help club orienteers – especially our newer members, gain experience and confidence in running forest courses. We plan to offer coaching for club members for a designated time period before the next Auckland Orienteering Series event, i.e. 9.30 - 10.30am. This will be the Auckland O Club event at Mushroom Road on 15 August. Keep an eye on club newsletters and Facebook for updates.

And finally, good luck to our club members competing in the NZ Schools Champs in Hawkes Bay in late July -may you spike all your controls!

Happy orienteering

Lisa Mead
President NWOC

Photos Riverhead Rogaine (Jenny Cade / Annemarie Hogenbirk)

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1. Events Calendar
2. Whangarei club event
3. What we did in June
4. Rogaine #2
5. Training – Digital Trail O
6. World Orienteering Champs 2021
7. Low-key training days
8. New members

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1. Events Calendar
 

July
Sun 11 NWOC Rogaine Slater Road/ Hedley Dunes, Woodhill Forest
Check out the website – enter now to ensure you get a map: https://entero.co.nz/evento.php?eventName=rogaine-2021.
Sun 18 Whangarei O Club Flyger Road – new map. See more details below
Fri 23- Sun 25 NZ Secondary School Champs in Hawkes Bay. Find all the information here:
Sat 31 OBOP Great Forest Rogaine Rotorua (3 and 6-hour Foot and MTBO options).. Pre-entry: https://entero.co.nz/evento.php?eventName=gfr-2021

August
Sun 08 Lactic Turkey TrailNav teams rogaine - Riverhead
Sun 15 AOC AOS 8 Mushroom Road (Woodhill Forest)
Sun 22 CMOC AOS 9 Waiuku Forest South
Sun 29 NWOC AOS 10 Hedley Dunes

September
Wed 01 AOC 7.00pm Night Street event, 25 Dexter Ave, Mt Eden. Event uses MapRun. Details can be found here: https://orienteeringauckland.org.nz/events/night-street-series/
Wed 08 AOC Night Street event 47: Harlston Rd, Mt Albert
Sun 12 CMOC Auckland Club relays at Botanical Gardens. FREE entry to all club members running for a NWOC team. Further details to come.
Wed 15 AOC Night Street event: TBC
Sun 19 AOC AOS 11 Grass Track Road, Muriwai (New map used once for the 2021 Auckland Secondary School Champs). This event will be the NWOC Club Champs.
Wed 22 AOC Night Street event: 10 Brilliant St, St Heliers

October
Sun 17 NWOC AOS Lake Kereta
Sat – Mon Labour Weekend: 23-25 October: Tuaraki Northern Region orienteering Champs Taupo/Rotorua. Recommended to book accommodation soon.
Event details: https://www.obop.org.nz/north-regional-champs.html

Check out the club website for details of other events in 2021: https://www.nwoc.org.nz/events/
AOS = Auckland Orienteering Series – events generally have 9 courses of varying lengths and difficulty.

2. Whangarei O Club event 18 July – new map!
Our friends at Whangarei Orienteering will premiere a new map about 25 minutes South of Whangarei at their event on 18 July. Running on new terrain is always a drawcard, so circle the date in your calendar and come along and support this event.

Location: 71 Flyger Road, south of Whangarei - an area of hilly open farmland, with patches of pine forest and lots of native bush, a lot of it clear and runnable.
Fantastic views from the top out to Whangarei Heads.
The map itself at the moment is of around 600 acres with room to expand. There is an out of bounds quarry in the middle of the map.

It's been mapped by NWOC club member, Daniel Monckton and he has also set the event with his father Nick having his first go as controller!!!

There are some challenging hill climbs which is reflected in the shorter length courses on offer.
Yellow - 2.7km - 185m
Orange - 4.1km - 290m
Red Short - 4.0km - 350m
Red Long - 5.0km - 440m

Registration from 9.30
Starts between 10-11.30
Course closure 1.00pm
Adults $10 / Juniors $7/ Family $25/ SI Hire $3

Registration will be available online from next weekend at: https://www.sporty.co.nz/whorienteering/

Images - Nick Monckton

3.June event reports
June kicked off with the Queen’s Birthday 3-day held in and around Christchurch. The sprints at the university campus were followed by two days in very complex sand dune forest with myriad small knolls and a confusing network of tracks. About 16 club members travelled South to enjoy a multi-day without all the hard work of Easter. There were plenty of podium places and smiles despite the bleak weather on the final day.
Club members, Liam Stolberger, Cameron Bonar and Jess Sewell enjoyed a special Turkish themed JWOC experience – sadly the “virtual” team will not be travelling to the Junior World O Champs in Turkey in September.

Photos Joolz Moore & Nic Gorman

Tim and Maddie Longson gave us bonus controls to hunt for at the Riverhead Rogaine on 20 June, and the newly extended map took us deeper into previously unexplored parts of the forest, clambering through supplejack and some denser valleys, but also on new tracks. Cameron D was the only person to visit every checkpoint but, no matter the scores, there were about 300 happy orienteers, enjoying the muddy day out, the great spot-prizes from Biviouac Outdoor and yummy fruit, as you can see from Annemarie’s images below.

Rogaine photos Jenny Cade / Annemarie Hogenbirk

A frosty morning saw us scraping the ice off the car windows as we headed off to the Waikato Rugged Rogaine at Naike last Sunday, some of us to team up for the 4-hour event and others opting for the 2-hour rogaine either in teams or solo. The event centre was notable for a quaint old wooden building and the Te Maire hot springs a few hundred metres away (down a muddy farm track). Rob and Marquita went to the trouble of wearing themselves out in a 6-hour adventure race on the Saturday, But most of us needed all our energy for scrambling across soft/ muddy terrain, over many fences (including 2 metre high deer fences) and through some native bush, all on one huge and very scenic farm. Chocolate bar awards went to Lisa and Geoff Mead for first Mixed team (2 hours) and to Andrew De L’Isle for an impressive overall win in the 2-hour rogaine.

Images - Annemarie Hogenbirk

4. North West Bivouac Outdoor Rogaine #2 – this Sunday 11 July
Just a reminder that the final event in this year's Bivouac Outdoor Rogaine Series is this Sunday, 11th July, at Slater Road near Helensville. On-line entries close Friday, so if you haven't already done so, head to the website or EnterO and get your entries in.

The area we are using is private forest, including some beautiful Woodhill Forest terrain, mostly open clean running and no mud to speak of. Dogs are permitted as long as they are well controlled. The event is followed by a lolly scramble, a short prize giving and spot prize draw with some great prizes from our sponsor Bivouac Outdoor
Have a look here for Geoff’s hints on rogaine planning – written in 2017 but still relevant.
Check out the NWOC rogaine website here.

Photos Slater Road forest - Renee Beveridge

5. Training from the Couch - Trail O or Virtual Orienteering (also known as eTempO)
When Covid 19 first impacted our ability to hold physical orienteering events, competition in terrain came to a standstill in many countries around the world. For technical training many orienteers have turned to electronic alternatives; eTempO, a virtual version of the speed-format in Trail Orienteering, in particular is proving a great hit. Since March, virtual TempO events have been organised in several nations and have attracted big participation numbers. The biggest of these has been the TORUS Cup – more about that below.
Virtual Trail orienteering is also a great option for Winter training, from the comfort of your own home…..

But what happens in virtual TempO? In each event there are several ‘control stations’, usually six but can be up to eight. Each station has a photo of some terrain seen from a fixed point – often parkland, or areas of paths and buildings are used – with 6 computer-generated O-flags superimposed on the photo at specific points. The area is mapped in detail at small scale, e.g. 1:4000.

When you key ‘Start’ and the first station has loaded, time starts ticking away. You see the photo with the flags for less than 5 seconds, then the first task is shown. There is a photo with the 6 flags, a segment of map with one circle on it and a pictorial control description, and buttons A, B, C, D, E, F and Z. You have to decide which flag, if any, is at the centre of the circle on the map. And as quickly as you can!

The flags are A to F from left to right, and you key Z if you decide there is no flag at this point on the map; that can occur quite often. Speed is of the essence, but beware – a mistake costs 30 seconds in time, and the eventual winner is the competitor with the lowest overall time taken – decision time plus mistakes.

No let-up!
You’ve made your first decision, but there’s no let-up: as soon as you’ve keyed your answer, Task 2 comes up on screen – a new map segment with circle. You try to get in the ‘flow’ – quick decision, but not too quick – trying to avoid a mistake. Each station has 5 or 6 tasks; once you have completed these, time stops and you can take a few deep breaths before embarking on Station 2 – a new venue with new photo and new map segments.

eTempO, like real TempO, is great for improving your map-reading skills, relating map to terrain and vice-versa, and developing an eye for the most important details on the map. When you start on a station, sometimes it’s quite hard to work out where you are, on the photo and map, and where the flags are. TempO planners are very clever and imaginative! Like in real orienteering, quite a lot of training and experience is needed to get really good. The top stars in eTempO are lightning fast.

A link to the Torus Cup can be found here.

Here are 2 samples: In each task, decide which flag, if any, is at the centre of the circle. Answers are at the bottom.

Answer # 1: B The camera position is on the island.( Article sourced from IOF website).

Answer # 2: Control 18 – answer is flag C. Try to identify all the trees on the map (you are looking south-eastwards).

6. World Orienteering Champs 2021
The World Orienteering Champs are being held this week in the Czech Republic. Orienteering New Zealand made a decision, based on the Covid 19 pandemic and associated difficulties in arranging international travel, not to send a team from New Zealand. However, two of our European-based athletes, Tim Robertson and Toby Scott, are representing NZ in the individual events – sprint, middle and long-distance races.

The Champs got off to a very exciting art with Tim racing superbly to take out the bronze Sprint medal at Terezin. On Tuesday both Tim and Toby battled their way through a very challenging, somewhat green, hilly and rock-strewn map to qualify for the middle-distance final – a great achievement. A measure of just how difficult the terrain (and course) in the final race was, is that both Kiwis ran 10-minute kilometer rates, but still placed 41 and 42^nd in a field of 58 starters.
The long-distance race takes place on Friday.

There is excellent coverage and detailed analysis of the splits and route choices on the WOC2021 website (https://woc2021.cz/) and on World of O (http://worldofo.com/). Worth having a look and seeing how you would tackle some of the course legs.

7. Woodhill Forest low-key orienteering training reminder
A reminder that Auckland and North West clubs have negotiated an agreement with the Woodhill Forest owners, Nga Maunga Whakahii O Kaipara Ngahere Limited, for improved access to the forest for training. The clubs pay the access fees. Generally, the training is self-directed and targeted at competent orienteers - there will not be actual control flags in the terrain.

The training activity access is:

• For small groups – initially it is envisaged no more than 20 people on any given day.
• Requires a permit. Each training day needs a person in charge to apply for the permit, to notify forest management of the number of people, entry time to forest and when all people have exited the forest.
• Is for blocks of forest that don’t require a gate key for forest access.
• Participants must be AOC or NWOC club members.

The objective of gaining the training access to Woodhill is to improve the opportunities for members to be able to train on quality orienteering terrain. This will typically be self-directed training, most participants are likely to have their own structured training plan focused on a significant orienteering goal (eg WOC selection, JWOC selection, Australia Schools challenge section, etc).
However, there is scope for other, reasonably fit orienteers to join the group or form their own training session in consultation with the group.

The training days are not targeted at large scale formal orienteering coaching sessions with coaches and prepared coaching activities at different levels of orienteering skill.

If you have an interest in using this forest access to develop your own orienteering skills, contact:
Cameron de L’Isle for NWOC members interested in the training access.
Cameron: 021 08252070 or email camerondelisle@gmail.com Future training dates: 17 July/ 08 and 21 August/ 4 September.

8. New Member
A warm welcome to Zachary Boss from Pinehurst School.