Schwaben – 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.

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.

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.

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.

Season start

Yesterday we had our season start. OK, we had a local trainings series and I´ve been to a night sprint event before but this was more for training reasons. Our regional season starts with the regional middle distance championships, so it was already one of the serious events. Competition was held in Zizenhausen near Lake Constance. We haven’t been there since 2021 so it was nice to come back. Start of the course were not so difficult (even some runner lost a lot of time) followed with some technical controls and a compass bearing part. For me it started quite well until I made some bad bearings. Jakob finished first taking the gold medal but challenged by still M18 Nico who we train in the regional squad. I finished in 8^th place with already a big gap to Jakob. Most probably I would have won a medal in my age class M35 but would have missed the competition.

Nikolauslauf Tübingen

After 3 years we decided to run the Nikolauslauf again. This was our traditional last race of the season. I was not very good in shape and thought about a time of 1:40 to 1:45 for the half marathon with more than 300 meters to climb, Steffen also wanted to run about 1:45.
The temperatures was a bit cold but with 2 degrees not the coldest Nikolauslauf we participated in. About the first 2,5k we were about the same pace and on the first bigger climb I was a bit faster than Steffen and so we lost each other and we both did our own race. The course was slightly different than the last we time participated, which resulted in less trail running. We both were faster than we expected in the beginning, Steffen finished just under 1:40 and was less than a minute slower as in 2019 and I managed to get a time of 1:33 only 2 minutes slower than 3 years ago. So we both were happy with our results.

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.

World Orienteering Day

World Orienteering Day is coming. Only 10 days left till the start of this years World Orienteering Day. I´m ready to go. What´s about you? Have you already planed and registered an event? You can find the flyer for my event here.