NI Junior Squad Returns from JIRCs
By your travelling East Anglia correspondent, Stephanie Pruzina.
The annual Junior Inter-Regional Championships took place last weekend in sunny East Anglia, hosted by Essex Stragglers Orienteering Society. Our intrepid squad willingly left their beds at silly-o’clock on Saturday morning for the early flight to Stansted…super exciting for the first-time fliers among us!
The event took its usual format of individual event on Saturday and relay on the Sunday, with fun and frolics at the Essex Outdoors Event Centre and a hot and sweaty Ceilidh in the evening to make sure they all sleep….no need for our team as they had all put themselves to bed by 9!
Individual Competition
The individual races in Writtle Forest were challenging as ever and I think the zoom session we had pre-event was probably helpful. As expected, the forest was open and runnable but contour detail was vague and after the hot English summer, water features were also hard to spot. Compass and distance estimation were the vital skills for the day. Top NI result went to Nat Kerr who finished 6th in the M14 race, and Chloé Campbell also had a super run to come 17th in W14. Full results and maps are available on SOS Routegadget.
Scouting skills were handy for the new flag.
Relay Competition
The relays took place in Hatfield Forest which is adjacent to Stansted. This provided nice open runnable parkland and forest with a few impenetrable walls of bramble which they were well warned about. As usual there was some early gaffling on the courses and a spectator control gave a great view of the athletes running through with 2.4 k to go.
Thanks to James Ewart and Nat Kerr who each ran up an age category we had three boys’ relay teams this year, and they did well to finish in 10th place for the boys’ relay competition. However, our three first-year 14 girls all ran on n/c ad-hoc teams so we still had no scores on the girls’ side.
On the plus side, there were no mis-punches this year and on the minus side the prize for teams with no mis-punches seems to have disappeared. To make up for this disappointment one athlete consumed vast quantities of Haribo on the flight back to Belfast but he wasn’t in my car so I didn’t care!
Huge thanks once again to Angie and Paul Graham for being fantastic leaders, helping and motivating the group and ferrying them all around. Capitalising on the wave of enthusiasm watch out for lots more Junior Squad Activity, starting with our Skills Training.
Have a look at full results from the weekend arnd the JIRCs points table.