Launceston Sprint Orienteering Weekend

Tuesday, 13 June 2017

We've just had a super-fun weekend in Launceston.  Not one, not two, but 6 orienteering events in three days including 2 hilariously fun night events.  I love these shorter format events - they are generally held in parks or around school campuses and each race features lots (20-25) of controls, so your mind is kept absolutely immersed in this high speed challenge as you turn left or right, run up stairs, down ramps and around buildings and flowerbeds. It's great fun. 

And whilst I had a great time,  the best thing about the weekend was that Zali and Jett loved it also.  They made a few mistakes (like everyone else), but generally ran really well on their medium courses - 1.5-2.5k each.  (Jon and I ran the Long courses which were between 2.5-3.3k).  One of the night events was a score event - which means  you don't have to visit the controls in a particular order like normal orienteering, you score points by visiting as many as you can in a set amount of time. If you go over-time you are penalised some of your hard earned points!  Zali and Jett ran so well together through the dark of the Prospect Golf Course that they got a higher score than absolutely everyone else in their division, as well as everyone in my division, and half the people in Jon's  (we all had the same amount of time for this race so the results are comparable) - and that's even with Jett bumping into someone so hard at the start that he got a bleeding nose. With only 20 minutes running time there was no time to attend to it until after the race! They are also really getting to know the other orienteering kids so they are having a nice social time as they hang out before and after the events.   It makes me so happy that we can all enjoy orienteering together - I can't think of many other sports where the whole family, in fact in some case 3 or 4 generations of the same family could drive to the same venue and all compete at the same time.  Orienteering is such a great sport.