Junior Jabberwaoc April 2002

Something from the Junior Jabber editor (Blanka Sengerova)…

Hello and welcome back to the Spring… Well, so it seems on some days. It was great to see so many of you at the WAOC AGM at the beginning of March - it was also nice to see so many of you being rewarded for you colour coded awards that you have got in the past year, especially some of the youngest juniors who only started running on the white very recently.

Congratulations also to Helen Gardner, who was selected, alongside two other East Anglian Juniors, to run in the World Schools Orienteering Championships, which will take place in Portugal in mid-April. You may have noticed a cake stall at WAOC's Bush Heath Woods colour coded event, which was put on in order to help raise money to support Helen's orienteering trip to Portugal. Thank you to all those who did support Helen - clearly, these were not only juniors, but I would like to mention Katrina Taylor here who supported Helen Taylor and Pauline Humphries for a great part of the morning in manning the stall.

As for some of our recent junior results…

• At the TVOC Chiltern Challenge (3rd February), well done to Simon Gardner who won the M14A class and Helen Gardner who, running up on W18A, came 2nd.
• At the Burnham Beeches National event (10th February) Alice Campbell was 2nd on the W10B course, just 40 seconds after the winner. Meanwhile, Edward Louth was 4th on M14A, only missing the gold standard by less than a minute.
• On the weekend of 23rd/24th February some of our junior took part in an East Anglian Junior Squad training weekend in Cannock Chase - the weekend when rather extreme weather conditions prevailed (personally I noticed the hail when cycling through the centre of Cambridge but the juniors will have been training hard at the time…). On the Sunday, they took part in the Rawnsley and Brereton badge event - well done to Edward Louth who came 3rd on M12A, just 3 minutes after the winner, Jamie Taylor 3rd and Simon Gardner 5th on the M14A and Peter Gardner 4th on M18A. Of course, not forgetting the girls, Helen Gardner won the W16A.
• We've also had some great junior result at the recent Compass Sport Cup EA round - Martin Humphries came 5th on the F course, Jamie Taylor 2nd on the G course, closely followed by Edward Louth in 4th and Simon Gardner in 6th position, Peter Gardner was 2nd on C, and Helen Gardner came back with a great 6th on Women's Open. And I've also noticed many of the younger juniors having a go at the yellow course with some brilliant WAOC placings in many of the top positions - well done!
• Well done to all the successful East Anglian champions from Sheringham (17th March) - Sophie Louth won W10A, Clare Woods won W14A, and Edward Louth (M12A) and Martin Humphries (M16A) were both the fastest East Anglian runners on their respective courses.

And finally, I'm wondering what you would want to have in future Junior Jabber editions. What would you like it to look like? Would any of you juniors be willing to write a regular column, send in interesting tidbits of information, jokes, drawings or anything like that to be included? If you send me pictures, I can try and scan them in and see what happens, but it would be really great if more of you could try and get involved by sending me 'stuff' to include - after all, it is your newsletter for you but also about you  (You can email me on bs296@cam.ac.uk or send things to my postal address as given in the membership list).

Colour coded awards

Many of you have been running very successfully in recent events, collecting colour-coded awards (knowingly or unknowingly) in the process. Congratulations to the juniors who have managed to obtain the following awards… 

Can I also remind you that many of you may have also already achieved their badge standards (either Bronze, Silver, Gold or Championships) by running three badge events at a particular level. If this is your case, you can apply for an award provided by BOF - see an earlier edition of Junior Jabber where I explained the application procedure in detail or email (bs296@cam.ac.uk) or write to me if you have any queries and I will try to explain.

• Thomas Louth, Duncan Taylor and Alex Minshall all got their white badge
• Sophie Louth and Katy Woods both managed to obtain the yellow standard
• Edward Louth now has his orange badge
• Clare Woods, Martin Humphries and Lewis Hadler are now all competent light green runners

Geographical guess-game…

…for most of the time we tend to orienteer on the British Isles, so I thought that in looking for puzzles, I might just venture a bit further, crossing some seas/oceans on the way. Also as the title suggests, geographical feature would be a little too vague so I added some clues just in case you're at a bit of a loss. You might consider asking to have a look at some of your parents' control description sheets, especially from the bigger events, and ask them what some of them meant. Enjoy! (I will put the answers in the next edition of Junior Jabber) HINT: Numbers 1-5 work slightly differently to numbers 6-8. Also an atlas might help…A prize for the 1st correct answer (to Jabberwaoc Editor, Hally Hardie,) opened on 30 April. Blanka

1.  D (I haven't travelled too far from Britain just yet…and another hint, look in this edition of Junior Jabber for some hints…)
2.   (clearing) R      (…and I'm still about in the region of the eternally risen sun…I've only travelled across the border from the place given in number 1)
3.  (small depression)    (gully, or an upside down pit) (…to get to this point, I did have to get on the plane - unless I really wanted to spend ages travelling here…and the name given by this puzzle is really an abbreviation…)
4.  AL (tower)    (…now just having moved to a specific part of number 3…any of you watch some of the winter Olympics this year?)
5.    S  (…OK, since I've already travelled this far and am in this region, I might actually go and climb Mt. McKinley…I think this is the hardest one but it is inside number 3 and not too far from number 4)

I hope you're not bored with travelling just yet. Now these last three questions are in no way related and I'd say that you would have to have a totally different set of equipment for going to each of these three places.
6.   4807m (It might be staring to get cold at the moment…look at record peaks and the spot height might ring a bell…)
7.     (…OK, OK, I've certainly stopped complaining about the cold now - it might help to think of camels!!)
8.     (Dimensions being: very, very long, possibly the longest in the world…Oh, and I'm still quite warm, you know.)

Swedish orienteering

Well, seeing as I always get you people to write something on orienteering training weekends, events, competitions and other trips, I thought I could share my own experience of Swedish orienteering with you. In fact, I have only just returned from the Varsity Match (the annual Cambridge vs. Oxford University Match), which due to the organising efforts of an ex-Oxford University member, took place in Swedish terrain in the Stockholm area.

A group of about forty Cambridge and Oxford orienteers flew out to Sweden's Skavsta airport, which could well be described as a hut in the middle of nowhere from what I saw from the plane when we were approaching, on Thursday afternoon and then were bussed directly to the club hut of OK Ravinen, the orienteering club whose home terrain we ran on during the weekend and whose hospitality we were able to take advantage of. I don't know whether it was the end-of-the-university-term accumulation of lack of sleep or general tiredness, but I noticed a large majority of the travellers drifting off to dreamland during the journey. Or maybe it's just that bus journeys make you really tired… Nevertheless, on arrival at the hut, we found OK Ravinen members in midst of their training sessions and soon (after waking up at lest to some extent, I think) joined in with our own jog/run in the area, many of us using a lit up track in the forest. We then finished off the evening by eating lots of pasta for our dinner.

Friday found us getting used to the Hellasgarden area by making up our own training courses around several controls that have been put out for that reason. I noted that you certainly needed to use a compass if you weren't to get awfully lost - when running on East Anglian terrain it is very easy to say 'OK, I'll just head roughly in this direction and then hit a path etc…', but those of you who have run in more difficult terrain, like that often found in Sweden or places like Scotland, will agree with me that in technical terrain this is not a particularly clever approach. I also tested whether the frozen marshes would break if I stood on them - some didn't - and found they were surprisingly useful to navigate by. Well, sometimes…

On Saturday, the individual race, through which the Varsity Match is scored, was run. As for myself, I must admit that despite my mental preparation and my aim to keep in touch with the map above all else, I must admit that I experienced the 'I think I'm in a totally different universe' type of lost at one stage. Sometimes it was difficult to keep on a straight bearing because of the difficulty of getting through the terrain, nevertheless it was really the only possible approach alongside trying to use the contour features to some extent. Similar terrain was experienced in the relay race on Sunday when, however, it was much colder - whilst looking for my first two controls, I felt quite frozen out after waiting for my first leg runner to come in.

Overall, despite my orienteering not being particularly amazing, it was a brilliant weekend, both in orienteering and social terms. It was the first time I'd ever orienteered in Scandinavia before and the advice I'd give to any other juniors planning to try is definitely keeping in touch with the map at all times - I didn't quite manage that one… Oh, and Cambridge won the Varsity Match if you were interested…

Excellent news…. Ed.

JK News

Through lack of space and incomplete details on the Web full news on the recent JK will appear in the next edition.   Limited information has been incorporated into the main newsletter.