Summer JROS Tours

Bar of chocolate on offer for the winner and suddenly Stan is fastest!
Credit: Mike Edwards

This summer some of our juniors were selected to attend JROS summer training camps. See below for a report from Scarlet on the Deeside tour and some pictures from Stan's time in Stockholm

Deeside 2016 - Scarlet

This year I was lucky enough to be selected to attend the JROS training camp on Deeside (surprisingly set in the heart of Royal Deeside in Scotland). This camp offers a variety of technical and physical training to both lower and upper year M/W16’s. Unfortunately, I managed to injure my ankle on the way to #1 on the first day, so that eliminated the physical challenge, posing a great opportunity to focus on the technical side of orienteering.

On the first day we travelled to Shooting Greens, a steep slope littered with intricate contours and rock detail (and gorse, the particularly spikey variety). After a morning with my ankle in the air I sent a poor coach (Phil Vokes) out on the course with a walkie-talkie and no map telling him I’d direct him round … what’s the worst that could happen!? Post running, we went for an ice bath in the River Dee, splashing round in the IronBru coloured water.

Day two and three consisted of a day at Balmedie dunes and a day at Scolty. Balmedie is an area full of tricky contours and thanks to Iain Embrey these were the only features we had on our maps! My ankle held up for a slow walk meaning I could complete a couple of the shorter courses. This day was rounded off with races up dunes, prizes for the ‘most stylish team ascent and decent’ of the biggest dune the coaches could find (almost vertical) and an hour singing to seals in the sea, we were obviously very musical as we managed to see 3 seals!

The day at Scolty commenced with a long uphill 2k walk, compensated with the copious amounts of bilberries that resulted in us all turning up at the start with blue mouths. The walk was well worth it as the eastern part of Scolty is extremely technical, fairly runnable and littered with intricate rock detail. After completing some tricky corridor and window exercises we ventured to Crathes for the tour night champs.

Day four (the rest day) included a Norwegian map memory exercise at Potarch in the morning and a visit to the local heated pool (a bit of a change from the icy plunges we’d been having earlier in the week) and a visit to an ice cream shop in the afternoon.

The last two days of the tour were probably my favourite as the areas were extremely nice and my orienteering was improving as I had been focusing strongly on the technical part. Day five we visited Torphantric (the area that was used for British Relay Championships 2018). After a morning of head to head exercises we proceeded to do a relay in teams of 4, but it wasn’t any old relay it was a ‘top swapping relay’. This consisted of two of the four runners going out onto their course whilst the remaining athletes ran out into the forest to tag the runners meaning they had to stop and swap shirts. As you can imagine this caused a lot of patriotism and laughter as the Scots ended up in English tops and some of the larger coaches wore tightly fitting t-shirts. I ended up in an orange t-shirt that came down to my knees!

The last day of the week was the Tour Champs on Glen Dye, a superb area with mixed contour detail, steep rocky slopes and open runnable forest. With a taped ankle and an improvised control description holder (extra hairbands come in handy!) I set out into the tick-laden heather. The courses were tactically named ‘Bill’ and ‘Berry’ and the boys was 6.2k whereas the girls was 4.7k. Ending the last day with a Scrabble-O relay (very complicated) and a fun night wandering around Templars Park in the dark was an excellent end to the jam packed week.

I wouldn’t have been able to do this camp and get as many ticks as I did (more than 100!) if it wasn’t for the financial support of my club SO and the SEOA. Thank you very, very much. I had a fantastic week and learnt loads.

Photos from Stockholm