Our new plan with the older orienteers at UVHS is to have some race training for the very keen athletes and some ordinary orienteering for those who aren’t so keen but like to get out in the forest. Technical training will be available on Saturday mornings for those that want it.
The first session of this type was at Subberthwaite. We only had 7, mainly very keen, runners due to poor weather as school kicked out. We used control placing to warm-up. The runners were divided into 3 groups and sent out on one of the two loops in “trains”, i.e. about 30 seconds after each other. They were told to race! This worked very well. From our vantage point we could see much of the loops and there was some serious racing happening.
One girl was less experienced and didn’t get much out of her run. She would have been better to run the loops whilst being shadowed.
Warm down was control collecting, done with the normal enthusiasm of teenagers.