The New Year is sprint time for orienteering - and 2014 offers more than ever.
As well as the regular Sydney Sprint Series, which runs from early January to early March, a new holiday carnival will be staged in Canberra just before school goes back.
Sprint Canberra will run from Jan 23-27 in locations across the capital's northern suburbs and is aiming to raise funds for Orienteering Australia's new High Performance Plan.
The first round of the 2014 National League is a sprint weekend in Brisbane on Feb 22-23.
Across the Tasman, the Sprint the Bay weekend from Feb 7-9 in the Napier-Hastings-Hawkes Bay area is growing in popularity and attracting a fair share of top European competitors.
'Sprint' is the newest format of our sport. Think of it as the T20 of orienteering. At the elite level it is meant to be fast and furious, where an error of even 10 seconds could cost you several places. Courses are short (2.5-3.5km), with lots of controls and lots of changes of direction, and held mainly in urban environments (uni campuses, former hospital sites, sporting complexes etc).
The scale of sprint maps is usually 1:5000 or 1:4000, but can be even as big as 1:1000. Features come up far sooner than on a bush map, so it's easy to overshoot the control or attackpoint.
More features are deemed uncrossable / out of bounds (often walls, high fences, garden beds etc). And at world championship level they have even erected temporary fencing / barriers to make route choice much more complicated than it otherwise would be.
At the top level it's very fast. For your average participant it's just more problem solving at your wn pace in nice surroundings.
And stay tuned for details of some awesome sprint orienteering as part of the Xmas 5-days in Sydney at the end of 2014.
