News

June 2019 News

Published Sun 23 Jun 2019

Club Members have been active in the last month with a few coaching sessions being held. Around 20 of us embraced a day in Riverhead Forest grappling with reading contours and route choice. This was followed up with an indoor coaching evening involving both theory and practice. We got to craft contours in sand seeking to match maps and vice versa ie draw maps matching what had been crafted in sand. Not an easy task but great learning and we had some good laughs! And yes Renee, we will remember that a compass is not a control detector!

Last weekend the Club offered coaching in Sport Ident and Olynx. One objective was to increase the technical capability amongst Club members so these essential roles required to run events can be shared. I'm told the participants were quick to understand the process and the software used and are now keen to use their new skills and knowledge helping at events.

As a club we want to be responsive to Members' needs and be inclusive. Coaching is one way of doing this and I'm grateful to Club Coach Renee Beveridge for leading the orienteering skills training courses and to Annemarie Hogenbirk and Jan Jager for organising the technical sessions. And to the Members who volunteered their time to assist at each event - thank you.

In the month ahead, several North West Members are off to compete in events in Europe - European Youth Champs, Junior World Champs, World Mountain Bike Champs, World Champs, Oringen and more. For those of us staying in NZ, it will mean several late nights 'watching dots' as we follow GPS live tracking and cheer our friends on! Best of luck to all!

Jenny Cade
North West President

In this issue:

Upcoming Events
Congratulation on NZSS Selection
Club Member Profile
Coaching Corner
JWOC and WOC - Details on how to follow.
Welcome to New Members
NZ Secondary Schools Champs - Information and Call for Volunteers
Jukola
SI Training
History of Orienteering
Need an Excuse to Visit Nepal?
Events Out of Auckland

1. Upcoming Events

30 June: AOS 5, Temu Road, Woodhill

14 July: AOS 6, Urban Middle, Kristin School

18 August: AOS 7, Hedley Dunes North

23-25 August: NZ Secondary School Champs (including public races) Details below.

2. Congratulations NZSS Team Selection

Congratulations to the following North West Juniors named in the NZ Secondary Schools Teams for 2019. For the first time, there are two NZ teams invited to compete officially in the Australian Schools Championships in September/October.

Senior Boys - Cameron Bonar and Liam Stolberger
Senior Girls - Cara Bradding and Jess Sewell
Junior Boys - Luke Farrand
Junior Girls (reserve) - Pippa Plummer

We wish you all as you compete for the Southern Cross Trophy against the six Australian states and the ACT.

3. Club Member Profile - Lesley Stone

It is always an absolute privilege to get to know some of our more long-standing members. This newsletter we are profiling Lesley Stone who has been a member since the late 70’s. Over the years she has done it all - Club President (first female president), Course Setting, Newsletter, NZ Rep…
She was in the NZ team competing against Australia and has also competed in USA and Canada. She donated the NWOC trophy for Most Outstanding Performance, even painting the picture that was part of the trophy initially (until it ran out of room for names!).
She took the time to answer our questions and put together the following.

Our family was introduced to Orienteering at a promotion event at Rangitoto College in 1978. Soon after we joined the club and became hooked.

Of all the hundreds of maps I have run on my favourites would have to be all the white clean running maps in Woodhill Forest...Whites Line, Puketapu Rd, Otakanini Topu etc. I hate pushing through rubbish terrain and climbing mountains.

I used to enjoy course setting and loved being out in the forest all day with just deer for company. Overprinting the maps with the large purple stamp pad and bagging them up for competition was very satisfying. Unfortunately technology ruined it for me...computers leave me cold!

Some of the most memorable runs for me was NZ beating the Aussies in 1987; and Judy Martin, Lorri O'Brien and me winning the Aussie Club Relays in 1990. The less said about some of my other runs the better.

The person I have always admired is Trish Aspin; so fast, so accurate and impossible to beat.

I was surprised and humbled when I was elected as the first female President of the club in 1989. The membership was so supportive and I was able to step down after three years happy with the health of the club.

Orienteering has given me experiences I would never have imagined. Travelling the world and competing in all sorts of places. It has been a large part of my life for over 40 years, and the people in our sport are amazing. I feel blessed to have made lifelong friends along the way.

Now with bulging discs in my back and knees that don't work I can only watch and wish I were competitive again. Make the most of it you lucky people.

Finish chute - World Masters Games, 2017

4. Coaching Corner - Renee Beveridge

Reflecting on my Reflections

After introducing NWOC specific training days last year I have had really good feedback and hopefully we will start to see people improve.

The trainings have been focusing mostly on our adults who came to Orienteering later in life and have been struggling at the red difficulty level, which is their ‘normal’ age grade. As the trainings went on, a number of younger trainees joined in and we now have quite a few trainees in every difficulty group (yellow, orange, red).

So far we have had 3 physical outdoor trainings, but as a number of us are heading overseas soon there was no time to organise a 4^th outdoor training, so I decided to host an indoor session.

Success?

I believe the indoor training was just as successful. It took up less time and worked well with my shift work as we can have it on week days. It involved hot drinks, biscuits, pizza (which Jula kindly drove to pick up), Q+A, 2 powerpoint presentations, and some interesting GPS/Live tracking replays from previous World Champs.

In this training session we again focused on contours and decreasing people’s reliance on compass bearings. We discussed different issues people have, and trainees contributed their own thoughts and asked questions.

The benefit of the indoor training is that we were all together. In the outdoor trainings each group is separate from each other for most of the time, and we don’t really get to have a good debrief afterwards. When preparing the presentation for the indoor training, I had considerable time to reflect on the biggest issues I saw, speak to other coaches, and include visual examples into the powerpoint slide.

Even within the first hour a few people stated they had already learnt things, such as what the symbols were for erosion gulleys, vegetation boundaries, broken ground, and even elongated knolls. A lot of this was quite surprising to most coaches, as these symbols are on most maps so most of us assumed that anyone Orienteering consistenly for at least a year would have understood what these symbols were already.

But this just showed me how important it is to have these indoor trainings, as people get to chance to ask questions there and then and we can then solve it for them straight away.

After the first presentation we then played with sand. I provided a number of map images for trainees to represent in the sand and paper for people to draw on after making their own creation in the sand.

We then did another powerpoint presentation which involved myself and other coaches talking about courses, terrain, and issues they’ve had in the past. It was interesting to listen to other people’s experiences and I am sure it was nice for the trainees to listen to someone other than me talking. So thank you Jula, Pip, Tegan, and Jess; it’s often traumatising to look back through our most hated mistakes. A nice way to end the evening was looking at several GPS replays of past World Champs events, showing that even the best in the world can make huge blunders.

To the future!

After a number of us return from Europe I will be planning our next outdoor and indoor training.

I think an indoor training is more beneficial after we have another outdoor training so that we have more things to discuss.

The next training I want to hold would be in Hedley Dunes, which is the map used for WMOC 2017, New Zealand Champs Long distance 2018, Queens Bday 2018, and the last rogaine of 2019. The bottom half is also being use for NZSS Champs 2019 in August and the top half is being used by Auckland Club for an AOS the weekend before NZSS Champs.

Hedley Dunes provides the normal luxury of very open forest that is relatively flat and easy to run through. The contours are obvious and abrupt, making it useful for people wanting to improve their contour reading. The contour detail is really complicated in some areas which will be good for people to walk through and understand that all the crazy brown squiggles, dots, and U depressions are actually there and can be seen!

So planning this training for September.

-Renee

5. JWOC, WOC - Europe beckons.

All the best to our NWOC members travelling overseas to compete in Europe representing NZ:

JWOC (Denmark 6-12 July)

Daniel Monckton
Max Griffiths
Tegan Knightbridge

JWOC MTBO (Denmark, 28 July - 3 August)

Tegan Knightbridge

WOC (Norway, 12-17 August)

Gene Beveridge
Cameron de l’Isle

For those who will be armchair spectators from NZ, check out the official websites for viewing information.

JWOC https://www.jwoc2019.dk/
JWOC MTBO http://wmtboc2019.dk/
WOC https://www.woc2019.no/en/

6. Welcome to New Members

We welcome the following who have recently joined NWOC. We look forward to getting to know you at events this year:

Victoria and Georgia Thorpe
Jamie Hrstich

7. NZ Secondary Schools Champs - Information and a Call for Volunteers

In August, AOC and NWOC jointly host the New Zealand Secondary School Championship for 2019. The Relay and Long distance races will be held on the new map of Hedley Dunes South on Friday 23/8 and Saturday 24/8 respectively, with the Sprint on Sunday 25/8 at an as yet undisclosed location.

Year 7-13 students: Get your orienteering school friends together, talk to your school sport coordinator and register for this exciting event on the NZSSOC2019 website. Deadline for registration is Friday, 9 August.

Orienteers: the Long and Sprint will be open to the public after the students have started their race, by pre-registration, either on the NZSSOC2019 website, or the NWOC website. Deadline for registration is Friday, 9 August.

Volunteers: As with any orienteering event, this event can not run without the help of many, many helping hands. If you have any time to spare, especially on one or more of the event days, please let us know by e-mailing nzssoc2019@gmail.com. Besides being part of a great team, you will be able to take part in the public races for free!

8. Jukola

Jukola – the largest orienteering relay in the world was even larger this year – 21,500 is a record number of competitors for the men’s relay Jukola and the women’s relay Venla!

This year, NWOC's Matt Ogden ran leg 7 for 59 OK Linne 2

If you want to take a look at his leg here is the Leg 7 map with GPS tracking www.tulospalvelu.fi/gps/2019juk7/

The men’s relay has seven legs and goes through the night with a total winning time of 7+ hours. For more information go to http://news.worldofo.com/2019/06/16/jukola-2019/

For a video of the start https://twitter.com/i/status/1139987097790689280

9. SI Training

A big 'THANK YOU' to Allan, Johan, Georgie, and Vic who participated in the recent SI & O-Lynx training. By increasing the pool of people with knowledge about the technical set-up of an event and with more helping hands during registration and downloading, it becomes easier to organise the technical side of our club events. With the added technology of using radio controls, events come alive, especially for spectators and participants who have already finished, watching the TV screen at the event centre.

If you are interested in helping out with all aspects of timing and would like to know more, let us know via the general e-mail address, northwestorienteering@gmail.com.

10. History of Orienteering

We thought we would draw your attention to a fascinating account of the History of Orienteering in NZ which is on the ONZ site. This e-Book marking the 40th Anniversary of the NZOF was written by Stuart Payne.

https://www.orienteering.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/A_40th_anniversary_history_of_orienteering_in_New_Zealand.pdf

11. Need an excuse to visit Nepal?

Here is a letter recently received from Nepal Orienteering Federation

“Hello. On Behalf of NOF, I would like to inform you all that Nepal is preparing itself for an international orienteering competition here in Nepal for the first time. We are planning for the last week of December this year. So we would like to welcome all of you here in Nepal for orienteering practice on the lap of the Himalayas. We are planning for three races along with white water rafting, cultural tour and some other exciting activities during your visit. Nepal is celebrating Visit Nepal Year 2020, so it’s an opportunity for us to organize this event. We are planning for this event with the advice of international mappers and trainers. They have visited some exciting places in Kathmandu and they were pretty confident with the geographical condition. Details of the competition and other things will be sent as soon as possible.We are also in consult with International Orienteering Federation for this. Thank you very much. We are trying to explore Nepal as one of the finest destination for Global Orienteering and High Altitude Training.

Thank you very much

Sincerely
Radheshyam Dahal
Secretary General
Nepal Orienteering Federation”

12. Events out of Auckland

Great Forest Rogaine

GREAT FOREST ROGAINE - WHAKAREWAREWA FOREST, ROTORUA - SATURDAY 27th JULY

Orienteering BOP has its annual Great Forest Rogaine on Saturday 27th July.

This event has 3 and 6 hour Foot and MTB rogaine options. This year we are offering an e-bike category for the MTB.

Get together a team for a great adventure exploring in Whakarewarewa Forest, Rotorua. This event is great adventure race training. You can go as easy or as hard as you like, visiting as many controls as you can in the time allowed.

For all the info and to enter check out www.obop.org.nz. Complimentary pizza afterwards is included in your entry fee. This year we will also make a donation for every entry to the Rotorua Trails Trust and the Rotorua MTB Club First Response Unit.