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Regulars at Pennant Hills Park know that it is steep, slow and very green.
Rookies, or summer series folk venturing off-track for the first time, found that out the hard way as MetrO League made a punishing start to 2018 in hot, humid conditions.
Three quarters of participants took more than hour for courses that by straight line measured no more than 2.3-3.8km.
Slippery rocky tracks added to the difficulty. The key was to maximise the track network then carefully pick your entry point to the scrub and identify a simple route back to the track.
Setter Wayne Pepper invited people to bush bash shorter legs, while offering longer, safer options. Congratulations to the young KNOX team in Division 5 for finishing their courses and winning their match in tough conditions.
All the day's results and scores can be found on our ML web page. Thanks Wayne, thanks Bennelong Northside.
Round 2 is at Mitchell Park on Sunday April 15 and entries are already open. Please consider car pooling as there is an $8 National Parks entry fee.
Newcastle's Glen Charlton is gearing up for another big year of MTBO after a strong second placing in the Victorian MTBO Sprint champs on Sunday.
Glen was just a minute behind visiting Swiss Adrian Jäggi as less than four minutes separated the top seven riders in the men's Elite class at Creswick Golf Resort.
There was further success for Newcastle as Carolyn Matthews comfortably won W50A, and Rob Vincent took out M60A from clubmate Malcolm Roberts.
Sadly, the Middle and Long Distance Champs were cancelled due to the extreme fire risk, and hope to be rescheduled. It left Orienteering Australia with some tough decisions as the events were meant to be the Australian selection trials for this year's world champs.
In the M40 age class, Garingal's Michael Ridley-Smith and Uringa's Ori Gudes were disqualified for going through an out-of-bounds area.
To Michael's chagrin, he had followed Ori - and neither of them heard Kiwi Ed Steenbergen calling out to warn them they were going through OOB. Upon being informed after finishing, both immediately self-reported out of fairness.
Michael had recorded the fastest time and Ori second quickest.
The offending area (marked in red on the map insert) was a 12m section of forest mapped as white that lay between parallel bike tracks (in MTBO, off-track riding is forbidden). Ori mistakenly assumed it was an unmarked track and took what turned out to be a painful shortcut.
"Don't follow anyone" is a point we always stress with newcomers for various reasons, and yet pretty much everyone of us has probably been drawn into doing so at some stage. Another coaching point reinforced is to read the map carefully. Lessons learnt.
Michael at least made the most of the 48-hour cancellation notice to drop into Collector for Foot O State League 1 on Saturday afternoon where he placed fourth in the competitive M50A age class. Thus he competed in two formats inside 24 hours and travelled through three states!
Diehards will tell you that the orienteering season only really starts with the first State League of the year - and, boy, was that the case at the weekend when we travelled east of Canberra for a cracking double header.
ACT club Bushflyers hosted us on Saturday at Collector; a map not used since the 2010 Easter carnival. Pretty much the entire map was strewn with dead wood, making the going tough and slow. On the plus side there was wildlife galore: hundreds of kangaroos, a large red fox, a deer, and even a shingleback ambling its way through the assembly area.
The course difficulty was reflected in 56 people mispunching or not finishing, and temps that reached the high 20s but thankfully not the 33C predicted. Kudos to teenagers Andra Leung (Garingal) and Niamh Cassar (WHO) for completing their first Hard courses. Quite a baptism of fire and congratulations to them.
Thanks to ACT junior Patrick Miller for setting a great challenge for everyone. It certainly sharpened us for the next day.
Sunday's event was on Big Foot's awesome Snows Hill map between Bungendore and Braidwood. This is a huge area of forest with very few guiding features - just thousands of accurately mapped termite mounds which meant you could 'pinball' among them en route to each control.
With temps again forecast to hit 34C, and strong winds, competitors were allowed to start early and soon found themselves on typical Long courses, with few controls and lots of complex navigation providing a true test. Expertly set by Simon George and controlled by Cath Chalmers.
Newcastle prodigy Alvin Craig bounced back from an mp on Saturday to blitz Sunday's 5.5km Hard 5 course in just 42m43s - that's a km rate of under 8. Wow!
All the weekend results, Winsplits and Routegadget can be found on our SL web page. Please fill out the very brief Course Setter survey for Sunday, and you can provide feedback on Saturday's ACT courses here.
One of the highlights of our year is the annual regional and NSW schools orienteering championships. These events are a terrific promotion of our sport.
In 2018 we will be putting on a record 12 regional champs and gala days, plus the two-day state schools championships which this year are in Sydney's Hills District on September 1-2.
You can view the schedule here and download the flyers.
Last year we hosted almost 2,500 students across these days, run by our member clubs and partner organisation Bold Horizons.
The Sydney West primary champs are so big we'll be conducting two days for them - after last year we had 600+ entries!
We rely on a small army to conduct these days - and with up to 400 students at each event, plenty of help is needed and appreciated!
Volunteers assist with putting out and collecting controls, introductory level coaching, SPORTident timing, traffic and course marshalling as well as start and finish help. If you have some time during the week preceding or after the event but not on the day, you may also be able to assist with timing stick sorting and equipment collection.
Events and dates that we would appreciate help for are:
June 20 - Sydney West Primary Schools day 1 at Castle Hill
June 21 - Sydney West Primary Schools day 2 at Castle Hill
June 27 - Sydney South West Primary Schools at Camden
June 29 - Sydney West Secondary Schools at Castle Hill
August 13 - Sydney North Schools at St Ives
If you are able to help, can you please save the dates and let Barbara Hill (
