WOC Sprint

Yesterday the Sprint in the World Orienteering Championship in France was arranged. My performance was far from as good as I had expected, and my result in the Final was only an 11th place.

In the Qualification in Aix-les-Bains in the morning I was not pushing maximum, and also lost some time on my route choice to the 8th and 11th control, but qualified easily for the Final after a 6th place in heat A. Results and splits

In the afternoons Final in Chambery I never got a good flow in my running. I took the wrong route choice and hesitated several places. To both the 1st, 5th, 12th, and 14th control I lost around 10 seconds, and my result was a 11th place, 1.06 behind Daniel Hubmann. Results, splits, GPS tracking and video from the whole race on SVT Play.

Last year I came on 4th place, only 3 seconds behind the winner. This year I felt better prepared, and thought I had a good chance for a medal. I was only 10 seconds from a top 6 position, and 36 seconds from a medal. But that does not help anything for my result, and I am at the moment really disappointed with not performing better in the most important race of the year.

Norsk nedtur i orienterings-VM, NRK (Only possible to watch in Norway.)
Kvaal Østerbø på etterskudd i VM-sprinten, Orientering.no
Liten feil i starten stoppet Egseth, Orientering.no
Norsk skuffelse på VM-sprinten, Aftenposten

Ready for WOC Sprint

Last weekend the World Orienteering Championship in France started with Qualification races for Long and Middle distance. Tomorrow the WOC are also starting for me, when the Sprint will be arranged in Aix-les-Bains and Chambery.

The last three weeks before I travelled to France I spent in Trondheim. My Norwegian club Wing OK helped me with great preparations, and arranged two relevant sprint trainings with high intensity every week. Most of them were on maps from WOC last year. It was nice be some weeks in my hometown Trondheim, and both see my family and other friends.

In the end of last week I travelled to France, and Saturday I had my last training with high intensity when I was running four orienteering intervals in Annecy. Today we were running the Model event in Chambery. Tomorrows Sprint will have Qualification in Aix-les-Bains in the morning and Final in Chambery in the evening. My preparations have gone as planed, and I am now starting to be really excites and looking forward to the competition.

You can follow the race on the organizers live page. The men’s Final can be watched live on the main Norwegian television channel NRK1 from 16.15, and women’s race in replay afterwards. The Swedish channel SVT Play will send both Final’s live from 14.55, and should be possible to watch in all countries.

Med gull i siktet, Adressa
Sin egen VM-sjef, Adressa
Klar til kamp om VM-medalje, Orientering.no
Gode forberedelser skal gi Egseth VM-medalje, Orientering.no

Hittaut.nu/Lidingo

During the summer I have not only been training for WOC. Most of the time I have spent working with the project hittaut.nu/lidingo, which I am responsibly for on Lidingö. The goal for the project is to make a big orienteering map with 90 permanent controls. In the middle of September it will be distributed for free to all the 40.000 inhabitants on Lidingö and all the 40.000 participants in the world largest cross country race Lidingöloppet. A virtual map will also be available on the website hittaut.nu/lidingo.

My main work has been to make the map covering the whole Lidingö island. 75 % of the island has previously been covered by 3 big orienteering maps. 4 sprint maps are also covering some smaller parts, but I had to convert them from 1:4000 maps with 2 m contour interval to normal orienteering maps, with not too many details. For the rest of the area I had to make a new map. The work with the map has mainly been done in Ocad, since I had good base maps and aerial photographs, but I have also done some fieldwork.

Several competent persons in the club have helped me with different parts the project, as for example getting sponsors, put out the controls and have contact with media, but I have also done parts of the work with designing the printed map, including text, pictures and advertisements. The last weeks we have completed the final version of the map, and it will be sent to printing this week. So the coming week I will have full focus on WOC.

Summer in Stockholm

After the WOC training camp in France in beginning of July I went back to Stockholm and Lidingö, where I started my last training period to be in top shape for the World Championship. In that period I have been training less hours then earlier this year, but more and tougher sessions with high speed.

On Lidingö we have several good sprint maps, but the best training was probably in Gamla Stan, on the map from Nordic Tour last year. I guess this is the most relevant area for the WOC sprint you can find in Scandinavia, with a lot of narrow streets, like it is in Chambery.

In the middle of July I was also running a nice two day sprint competition in Norrtälje called Skärgårdssprint. The first race was mostly in forest. I did no big mistakes, but lost some seconds on several legs and came 3rd, some seconds behind Josef Nordlund and Gustav Bergman. The second race was mainly in streets. I did a good performance, and was able to win both the race and overall in front of Gustav Bergman. Result from race 1, race 2 and overall

Last WOC training in France

July has not been a typical holiday month for me, and I have been busy with both training and working. The coming days I will try to make a short summary of what I have been doing, and I start with first week of July, which I spent in France on the last WOC training camp with the Norwegian team.

During the one week long camp we simulated all the WOC distances, and I was running full speed on the Sprint and the Relay trainings. The trainings went well, and in the Relay training I managed for the first time to run a full speed training in forest without any bigger mistakes, and was only beaten in time by Anders Nordberg. In my DOMA you can find maps from all the trainings (Category: Training)

On my birthday the 7th July I got an unexpected present from the team; paragliding over Lake Annecy. A great gift, and some of my team mates were also trying. As you can se on the pictures it was quite airy.

The coming days I will write more about what I am doing the last period before WOC.