Goldseekers and Bennelong Northside were the hosts for State Leagues 12&13 held over the weekend near Orange. Two top quality maps were lined up for the 2012 NSW Middle and Long Distance Championships providing a treat of runnable eucalypt and granite outcroppings. Saturday’s Middle Distance event at Kahli’s rocks was well planned, and highly enjoyable. Cold winds made for a chilly start to the race which began in an area of paddocks and open runnable forest before competitors plunged into a ridge of complex granite. Winning times were around 30-40 minutes showing that planner Jean Baldwin had judged the difficulty and terrain pretty much perfectly for the Middle Distance courses. Course printing caused some problems for competitors unused to the IOF standard Purple. Purple is used to prevent those suffering from colour blindness from being disadvantaged but where control circles are in granite terrain (bare rock (grey) and rock features (Black), control circles and numbers in (IOF standard) purple can be difficult to see, which resulted in some missed punching.
NSW Head Coach, Nick Dent, described Long Distance map Gumble Pinnacles as ‘one of the top maps in Australia for elite orienteering’ and it certainly posed a fair set of difficult navigational questions to the field. Of those who did conquer the terrain, over a 1/3 of the non-elites were out on the course for longer than planned. Josh Blatchford (Newcastle) won the M21A (Hard 1) with Australian international Grace Crane (Australopers) winning W21A and topping the Hard 3 course in 77:12. Jock Davis of Big Foot won M35A (Hard 2), Graham Turner (Red Roos) M45A (Hard 4), Michael Burton M50A (Big Foot) (Hard 5) with Eoin Rothery (Big Foot) having a fantastic run winning M55A and Hard 6 in a mere 50:47. Steve Flick of Bennelong showed many a runner younger than himself on Hard 7 how it should be done to win his class M65A and the course. Newcastle President Andrew Power took the honours in M45AS and Course Hard 8 while Barry Hanlon M75A (Western Hills) topped the last of the hard courses, Course 9, to win in 55: 26. Amongst the female winners was ACT Red Roos star Anita Scherrer W40A, Michele Dawson (Garingal) W18A and Gayle Quantock (Newcastle) W50A who were within a minute of each other on course Hard 7 and new Garingal member and Finnish national Paula Savolainen who won W45A in 70:02.
