Steffen – Orienteering Schwaben

Season opening

The “4-Löwen Pokal” (4 lions cup) marked this years season opening for 4 German states. The competition consist of 4 races other 2 days. First race was a forest competition that also served as our regional long distance championship. The forest was open and with good runability but the course has less to do with a long distance. Unfortunately this is a quite common issue with long distance course in Germany nowadays. In the championship Jakob finished 4^th and Steffen finished 7^th in M 19.
Second race was a night sprint in Külsheim. A very tricky course including controls in and around the local castle.
Final day has a sprint and sprint relay in the medieval city of Wertheim. Both races include a climb to local castle that has some tricky passages. The sprint relay has a good route choice up to the castle that splits the trams very well.
You can find the results here.
The maps are visible in our map archive.

Happy New Orienteering Year

Are you ready for 2024 season? I have a few plans, even I still wait for my vacation days to be confirmed. My plans are the 3 Lions Cup in the North of Baden-Württemberg at the first weekend of March.
https://www.sckoenigstein.de/4loewen
The Bavarian Forest 5 Days. Germany’s only annual multiday event. This year it will take place from 6^th to 10^th July.
https://www.bf5days.com
Next race will be the WMOC in Turku from 2^nd to 9^th August. I will to race for any medals (or in the A final), but a high class event in Finland will always be worth to travel.
https://wmoc2024.fi
And finally the Hungaria Kupa. It will take place in Vértes from 15^th to 20^th August and will be the EOC spectator race. It’s close to the terrain of WMOC 2021 and I will be happy to come back.
https://hungariakupa.tajfutas.hu/en/
So maybe we will meet at any of the events.

Merry Christmas

End of season / start of season

Last weekend we had the last two orienteering races of our regional season. The races were moved from beginning of October so we had a very late season end. I was on training rake from mid October and only back in training for one week so for me it was more the start of season.
We had a double sprint race at Saturday in the city of Wannweil. The sprint were Ok but my speed was still very slow. Sunday were our regional long distance champs. They took place in the nearby mountains were there was already snow. Running didn´t worked well for me so I end the race after 4^th control, what w2as the last chance to shortened the race. For me it would have been better to skip the races and focus on winter training.

ArgeAlp 2023

Mid October was the date for the traditional ArgeAlp (Alpine countries working group) orienteering competition. Going through the member regions, Trentino was this years host region. In the nice mountains around Folgaria we had a relay race at Saturday and a individual race at Sunday. At the relay I ran last leg in the open category. I ran 3^rd best time on the leg and get our team in a final 5^th place. At Sundays individual race I ran M40 and finished in 7^th place. I made a bad route choice so probably 5^th place would have been possible.

Rats Runners OCR Kupferzell

After being alone at the Rats Runners events in 2021 and 2022 we were back with a team. Nico joint Jakob and me so we had a competitive team again. Last year the event in Kupferzell was mid June and really hot. This year it was still warm but much more likeable conditions. His year they were able to update the course and the course had a nice amount of trail and forest track running. Obstacles at the rats runners series are not too extreme or strange and often fit orienteers demands very well. So I could recommend orienteers to try such event. Not only for training effect but also to annoy established OCR runners a little. We had quite good results. Nico finished 2^nd in Young and Wild (youth), Jakob 3^rd in Rats (men’s main) and I was 6th in silver boy (men’s 40+). Together we finished 2^nd in the team competition (Rat Pack), so everybody has a trophy to tacke home.
You can find the results here and pictures here.

World Maze Race 2023

This year my club hostet a event for the World Maze Race for the first time. The concept is easy. One identical maze all other the world to find the world fastest maze runner. Building the maze was quite easy and surprisingly faster than setting controls on an orienteering map.
I tried two of the training courses and the race course by myself and it was really tricky cause you need to make fast decisions. Looks like most competitors had fun but also trouble to follow the course. Maze running is a quite easy way to introduce people into orienteering and my club will use it definitely more often now.
You can find the world wide results here.

Swiss Sprint Champs or playing with the big boys

Without Jakob but with one junior we train I´ve be at the Swiss Sprint Champs in Laufen. Laufen was the host city of the 3^rd round of orienteering world cup 2019. The map has been used for sprint and knock out sprint at that time. Course was super tricky and wasn´t really able to plan ahead the whole course and didn´t always take the best route. My time was 22:07, 08:54 min behind winner Joey Hadorn who run the course in for me unbelievable 13:13. You can find the course with some tracks on Livelox.

World Maze Race

World Maze Race is coming. This year in conjunction with World Orienteering Day. So why not host a World Maze Race at your World Orienteering Day activity. My club will do so this year. You will find a list of registered events on the World Maze Race website.

Gaildorfer Kocherlauf

Saturday I was on a local street race with my companies running team. In the last editions we´ve been quite good in the team ranking that counts the overall finished kilometres. So I chosen the half marathon. Just than figured out that we had small team and did not compete for the team ranking. The course is relative flat so can go faster times. Muscular issues prevent me from training very well the last weeks so I has some trouble to find the right pace. Second half becomes hard for me but also for some fellow runners so that I was able to overtake one on the last kilometre and nearly close the gap to another one. My time of 1:38:06 min was OK. Better were my results as I finished 5^th overall and 3^rd in M40.