Mountain Bike Orienteering, or MTBO has been around as long as foot O, in countries like Finland and Sweden where the roots of our sport are, theres all sorts of random mass participation events like Ski Orienteering and more, dont just believe me check out this video.
Jukola Start 2015 – Paimio, Finland from KopterCam on Vimeo.
In 2012 a joint team of WSX and WIM Orienteers me included did this event the JUKOLA that involves a night relay- in the Finnish forest. Great fun to do something new.
Back on topic to more local action, todays post about my weekend work the Mountain Bike Orienteering try out we held at Moors Valley. Happy to say we had nearly a hundred bike riders taking the challenge of a 15 control linear course that came in at 3 miles long. My colleague Marc Thompson, Wimborne Orienteers and I ran this days activity which changed from a participation event to a pretty serious competition between the keenest riders. Simple concept- navigate around a course in the correct order, visiting controls and aiming to put in the fastest time for doing so. Biking at speed though tends to result in overshoots and so the foot orienteering technique becomes that much harder at speed, competitive decision making of the speed needed in Urban events. Everyone who comes to Moors Valley has good times and it was great to involve so many families in this biking challenge too, from all backgrounds and from lots of different places we set up people with the S.I electronic kit to provide a post ride analysis and the forest provided enough space to do this at speed.We set up 46 competitors with S.I ,some of those being families of 3/4 so nearly a hundred and we do hope to see you again at our events. Beautiful day.
Its monday and busy week for me with Bikeability and Schools visiting the track for their Summer term adventures, so a shorter post with more pictures. Theres another one of these events in August and as always drop me a message if you want more info on getting involved.
