Nopesport

It's been a pretty good year for everyone involved with the British Teams this year, what with JWOC and JEC medals for the Juniors, countless top 10s and relay medals at the World Students, and strong performances accross the board at WOC. The traditional "Inaugural" weekend provides an opportunity for the squad to get together, celebrate the past year and look forward to plan the strategy for the next year.

Moved from its usual home in the north Lakes, the inaugural was this year based in the South East, staying at Langley Lines weekend training centre, a stones throw from Longmoor. And it was on Longmoor that the physical quota of saturdays line up was held, a 2.5 hour orienteering-adventure race. Featuring a train race, sprint relay, Harris relay and middle distance courses, as well as more unorthodox pursuits such as an Army obstacle course, memory games and archery the teams had to work together to get round with the lowest hadicap and in the quickest time.

Meetings and presentations made up the bulk of the weekend. Saturday saw a planning session on how to prepare for WOC next year in Japan, with Oli and Jenny reporting from their trip there last month. After that were some presentations on physical training. Andy Kitchin and Dan Martson described their training philosophies and Jenny Peel (nee James) added some other ideas. Finally Heather Monro described how she hopes to progress physically next year, by radically changing her training. We hope to bring you more info on this soon!

Meanwhile the junior squad were having similar discussions about Switzerland and also learning about the joys of using exercise balls.

Saturday evening was the traditional squad Christmas dinner, with a Japanese and Swiss theme - think sushi, chopsticks and cheese! After this were a number of speeches in celebration of the years achievements and awards were presented - see next news story for details! Then the tables were cleared away and the night was boogied away to the tunes of DJ McCarthy.

Sunday witnessed a presentation on squad fundraising by Martin Hyman, who highlighted the plans by Scott Fraser to break the world 10km record with help from Murray and Graeme, and also kicked into action the idea of compiling a 'Good Run Guide'

The days physical activity was a trip up the road to participate in the OK Nuts trophy, a mass start loop race, comfortably won by Matt Crane and Heather Monro. It was then back to the classroom for a session focussing on the upcoming World Cup races in the South-East of England, before everyone said their farewells and departed for their respective corners of the country and continent.