orienteering – 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.

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.

German championships and WRE

Last weekend we travelled to Willebadessen for the German championships over the middle distance and the World ranking event the day after. Before the races we took the chance an did the model event to get a feeling for the map, the course there was nice to run and you had the chance to avoid the green areas.

Because of the bad weather of the last days the start had to be postponed by 1 hour so everybody had enough time to walk the much longer way to the competition center in time. The weather however was very sunny and warm, maybe a bit too warm. For the race we had just a few good to run controls in the first part and then it was mostly climbing, running through rough terrain and undergrowth forest. So the running speed was quite limited and it was more of a stumbling than real running. In the end I finished in 20th place and Steffen in 46th.

For Sunday we hoped for a good long distance with route choices around the rough areas, but there were a lot of routes through the rough terrain again, which was debilitating. Unfortunately I forgot to take an energy gel with me and so I suffered a lot in the end. After more than 2 hours I ended up in 19th place and Steffen finished in 31th place.

Jakob on the way to the finish after the long distance

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.

Rammert Run

The Season this year is coming to an end and we took the opportunity to do an orienteering competition that’s a little bit different than we’re used to. At the Rammert Run you have to run as a pair together and do a score-o in 3 hours. You have to run the entire race together an cannot split up the controls. The controls aren’t the white orange ones you know from orienteering, there are just small white papers sticked to trees with codes on them. The map was just a topographical map with a scale of 1:21500. Our start time was around 10:30 and the fog was still there. We decided quickly for a direction we wanted to go and see then how many controls we could get in time. At the beginning it was a lot of road and path running so we made up a rough plan that we wanted to check after around half the time. After the first control wer decided to go more directly and cut the long distances of the paths and trails. The first half of our race was much up and down so we had to climb a lot and we did it cross-country. After the fog started to clear up we had some nice views with still some fog over the trees. Just a little after an hour in the race we checked out timing and decided how the race would continue for us. Later we decided to risk something and try to get an extra control with the option to let one go in the end. But in the end we had some time left so it were quite enjoyable last meters to the finish. After mir than 21k and 750m climb we finished in first place with just one control more than the second team. We had a lot of fun and a good long training.