If you go down to the woods today ...

On Sunday 13th May, a number of WAOC's younger juniors had a chance to attend a training session organised by WAOC. It was absolutely lovely on the Sunday, one of the first few really summery days this year, so the session was hopefully made more enjoyable to the juniors and the waiting around for the parents.

At the start, learning what's in store

Blanka Sengerova, junior club captain, organised the training ...

The youngest juniors who came along to practice map reading, thumbing and other skills associated with running the white course made up a group of six (Jenny Watts, Caitlin Campbell, Jordan and Adam Taylor, Thomas Hemingway and Duncan Taylor) and were coached by Anne Duncumb and myself (Blanka Sengerova). To start with we practised map reading with a simple map represented on the ground by boxes and tins of tomatoes, which gave lots of scope for following a route on the map, orientating the map, locating specific places and marking them with a token, which had to be collected by the second person of a pair. This, although some of the juniors suggested something about being 'easy peasy', proved very helpful in recognising the importance of orientating the map correctly and being able to thumb along it, following the route taken, which we practised on a real course later on in the session. Next we went down to the lake, starting a type of star relay exercise at a central path junction location. This then allowed each of the pairs to take one map showing one of four controls put out in four different directions from this path junctions, following the type of route that would be appropriate for a white course (along paths, with the control being marked at the first decision point). We found that it was most important to put the map the right way round (orientate it), which makes it easier to start running in the right direction. We finished the session by walking around the white course, allowing each of the youngsters to lead the groups for a couple of course legs, meanwhile learning to recognise map features surrounding us throughout this exercise. Well done, all of you, I hope you've enjoyed the training.

Learning the basic techniques - easy peasy!	Preparing for the map exercise, near the lake

 

Ian discusses the lesson with the advanced class

Ian Jones, senior club captain, takes up the story

Lewis Hadler, Adam Smith, Philip Humphries and Jamie Taylor came along to the 'beyond yellow' training. I was assisted by Ian Smith. This was a great group with a spread of talent, who took to some of the more advanced skills of the sport very well. We started by calibrating our pace counting. 200m on the map gave from 50 to 80 double paces. We then went together on a line course hunting for controls. This demonstrated some other skills such as aiming off, rough direction checking from the compass and the sun and finally a recheck of our pace counting. Jamie won the pace counting competition, being only 2 or 3 metres from the relevant feature when he had done his paces. All of this group should race easily round a yellow and some could even tackle a light green course. Next time we should revise the pace counting and add use of attack features and compass work. We could also do a line course individually.

 

Ursula leading the "white-to-yellow" class

Back to Blanka ...

Ursula Oxburgh was working with the 'white juniors moving on to yellow'.

Alice Campbell, Katrin Sengerova and Catrina Taylor are all pretty confident on White courses so they formed the very enthusiastic 'White to Yellow' training group. Robert Campbell very kindly came along to help. Katy Woods hoped to get there but she was doing the Sawston Fun Run in the morning - well done, Katy.

We were amazingly fortunate with the weather and with our lovely bit of Fairlands Valley, in the South West corner, where the bluebells were truly spectacular; the drawback on this occasion was a group of teenage boys riding a motorised scooter along the paths, but we didn't let them spoil things for us.

On a White course you are supposed to find a control at each path junction, whereas on a Yellow one you have to be able to decide what to do when you come to a path junction. This means that you need to know at all times where you are on the map as well as on the ground, so we spend some time practising thumbing the map and moving round the map when you change direction. Then we did what I call a control picking exercise. This involved following a course marked on a map where there were more controls on the ground than on the map, and you had to decide which ones were your controls. This was no problem for anyone although it was just as well that we were using the new cheap paper controls, as the score was scooter riders -2, WAOC juniors +6.

 

Katrin, Alice and Catrina, enjoying junior training at its best

While White courses are all on paths, Yellow ones often use other line features as well, so we spent quite a lot of time finding good examples of these, both on the ground and on the map - the fences were very easy to spot but we got pretty good at earthbanks and ditches, which are not always so straightforward (but we even finished off by recovering one of the previously used controls on an earthbank, absolutely smothered in bluebells!).

Well, Alice, Katrin and Catrina, thank you for being such fun and working so hard. I hope you enjoyed the training as much as I did and that you will come back to the next WAOC junior training. Above all, keep those thumbs working and keep on running!

Photos and text by Blanka Sengerova, 24/5/01

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