GHO Canada GHO presents OOA Inter-club Weekend Training

Below is an e-mail that was sent out to all orienteering clubs in southern Ontario a few weeks ago. The first session is at Ancaster Creek, see seperate entry, and we have several other training exercises ready to go within the next few weeks.
/Hans

Training is the best route to orienteering improvement!

That is the phrase that the GHO has been using the last few years since it kick started the GHO Canada GHO training group. We believe that while Southern Ontario has an active orienteering community and there are many events (B Meets, THOMASS, weeknight events, etc). We believe there is a gap to be filled when it comes to improving an individual’s technical skill. We think we do too much racing (THOMASS, B-meets), and training (weekday events) on, for many, familiar maps, in comparison to how much we practice orienteering. If you go overseas, the situation is the reverse. And, overseas runners still race much more than us.

This is why GHO has hosted informal weeknight and weekend training off and on the last few years. Many of you have joined us for these training sessions with the big camp in January last year as the best example.

GHO would like to expand these training opportunities to the entire Orienteering Ontario community this winter. In return for running in GHO’s weekend training sessions we are suggesting that each club, set up a training session(s) that runners from the other clubs can run. The organizing club will decide where and what exercise they will put on, but our coach, Hans Fransson, will be more than happy to assist with some suggestions of different types of training. Again, this idea is to keep this very low-key, no pressure whatsoever to organize this. We don’t want volunteers already doing tonnes of work feel that this is another thing they must do.

To accommodate people’s already busy schedule, we suggest that we have a “window” where the training will be accessible. For example, checkpoint are placed on out one weekend and not picked up until the following weekend. The organizer also determines if they want to use flags, ribbons, permanent controls, SI, etc. Pre-printed maps would be considered a luxury and not necessary.

The visiting clubs will decide whether they want to go at a specific time, within the window, or just let their members know there is a training available, and/or to use these sessions to coach their runners (this is something that has been asked for) on their own.

To advertise where the training is and when, and other information, we will use ghocanadagho.blogspot.com, which is a web site that is very easy to update, and it has comment function. The organizer would e-mail the info, and Hans Fransson will post it shortly after he received it.

When it comes to distributing the maps, we suggest that the organizer e-mails Jpeg version, or similar file format, to the contact persons for each club. That delegates the job to all clubs. When it comes to the cost, we would like to see this be free for all who are full members of a club in Orienteering Ontario.

Suggested schedule:
There are six clubs in Southern Ontario, if all clubs find this a good idea, and are willing to set up a training session; that would mean a minimum of six sessions, GHO will host more than one, and if we start in January, we could have this going on until April/May, before the “summer break”.