Fame at Last

Wow, guess who made the front cover of CompassSport this month. I think Nick got a little carried away, since I'm on page 2 and page 16 as well. The photo was taken at the final control at the HH Burnham Beeches event in March.

The JK has come and gone, and was a fantastic four days. The Assembly Areas are now dominated by club banners, and nearly every club now has one. This adds a lot of colour and atmosphere, and made it feel like each day was something special. As I write this Helen is at a JK2008 progress meeting where they will be trying to work out how we can do even better next year. Four more days of warm sunshine would be a good start.

And finally the CHIG event last Sunday that was noticeable for two things. Firstly it used master maps, a concept I thought had died out. This was the first time I have had to copy down my course for over 18 months, and I had forgotten how annoying it was. Second, and more important, we had a new family double. I won the brown and James won the white. The target now is for three family victories at an event if Helen can get her act together!

Next stop the JK

Early tomorrow we'll be off to the JK. Last year we missed it and went to France instead, but this year I'm controlling the Sprint Race on Day 1. There are well over 900 entries, which will make it the biggest sprint race ever held in Great Britain. The venue is the University of the West of England near Bristol, which has proved to be perfect for sprint racing. I'd say it's nearly as good as the University of Surrey that was used for the World Cup in 2005. You'll need to beat over 200 runners to win the men's elite course. I guess GG must be favourite, but there are probably 10 men in with a real chance. It should be a really good way to start the weekend.

The other three days are in the Forest of Dean, which is an area I ran in regularly as a junior. It's hilly and green in places, but runnable and technical in others, and overall it should provide interesting orienteering. Helen is looking for top 15 on W45L, and I guess I should be aiming at top 20 on M40L. We'll see what happens. We both have pretty reasonable relay teams as well, so top 3 is an outside possibility for both of us. And James will be running M10B on his own for the first time at a big event. Entries are nearly up to 3000 which is quite encouraging even if not quite as high as the 5000 that Øystein Kvaal Østerbø suggested in the article he wrote.

The weather forecast for the weekend looks fantastic, with temperatures up to 20C and no sign of rain. Even if you can't be there you should be able to follow results as they happen on the Live-O site. Once it's all over you will be able to see what you missed since I've volunteered to set up Routegadget for each day. And if things really go well I hope to produce some videos of the event at a later stage.

It should be a great weekend. And then there will be under a year until JK2008 in the South East, where both Helen and I are heavily involved in the organisation.