Welsh..Irish..Welsh..Irish

Today it was Relay Day at the Junior Home Internationals held this year in Northern Ireland.  The juniors compete in teams of three made up of a 14, 16 and 18 year old.  The 16 year olds goes out in a mass start, run their courses and come back to hand over to their 14 year olds who do the same and hand over finally to the 18 year olds.  The courses are gaffled so the different teams may visit the same controls in different orders or they may visit similar controls, both to avoid following.

Sometimes youngsters may make navigation errors (especially as this weekend they were running on grassed sand dunes which is notoriously tricky) and their teams go backwards time-wise, so often at these events there is a mini mass start so any remaining runners can go out before their teammate comes in to handover.  My blip is of a mini-mass start between the remaining lads who were all out to get ahead of the rival country!  Here they have just been started and are punching the start control before heading out in to the dunes beyond.  There was much friendly rivalry and banter on the way!

After the prize giving we set off for the airport after what had been a great weekend due to the hospitality of the Northern Irish orienteers.  There we started going backwards ourselves as our plane was delayed which meant a crazy dash through Manchester airport at the other end to reach our train, then once in Leeds we had a replacement bus for our train as they are working on the line!  We were very glad to put the kettle on when we arrived home close to midnight.

Unfortunately the Scots pulled it out of the bag today and beat our team overall by five points, well deserved!