At the Connaught Championships Helena Jones won the W10 class and Deirdre O'Neill came second in the W21 Long class. Erika Jones was actually second in the W10 but they wouldn't give her a medal because there were only 2 in the class. A great way to encourage juniors !
The electronic punching allowed good use to be made of the runnable forest, with lots of controls and changes of direction keeping us off the roads. The top two courses were 13 K and 11 K but the third course was a bit short at 5.6 k, considering there was no climb at all. This was probably because W35 and M50s were on it however the M40 course the last time I was there was 7.5 K which wasn't excessive at all.

Feargal Bourke's name appeared in the Ballyhoury 3-day results in "de paper". Any other details ?

The Night-O event in the Curragh was very enjoyable. The Curragh is a great place for Night-O. The northern part of the map doesn't usually present a great challenge in day-light but it was a totally different experience in the dark. I don't believe I've ever relied as much on my compass. There was a great sociable atmosphere in the pitch-and-put club afterwards, with soup, chips, and sandwiches, and cheap pints. It would be great if it could be open to us on a Sunday also.

The event in Glendalough was better than last year. At least I didn't get lost in the mist on top of Derrybawn again. The courses were more of a physical challenge than a technical challenge. I'm not sure what the 'combo' format is supposed to add to the challenge. For the Blue course at least there wasn't much thinking required to pick what controls to punch in the selection group. Perhaps a full score event would be better, or, to avoid the hassle of computing score results, a scatter event where e.g., the black must collect 25 controls, the brown 22, the blue 18, etc., in any order.

Very enjoyable mass-start / butterfly event in Saggart last Sunday. It seemed pretty incredible to be starting along with almost eighty others on the BLUE/GREEN course. We were all bunched together for the first 3 controls but the crowd spread out after that. It was a pretty good course to get out of a forest that's little more than 1 square kilometer. Martin Flynn's new map was excellent. There are suspicions of problems with the results though. There were no results on the day. There are provisional results on the Ajax web site, of which I have a couple of queries.

We're trying to recruit him.

Happy New Year, New Century, New Millenium to all. Hopefully we'll see you all out at events in the coming months.

The Inter-Club challenge was held at Trooperstown last Sunday. I left before the results were completed, so I don't know what position Fingal ended up in. Does anyone know ? The weather was fine, although the air was quite cold up high on the hill. Mick Kellet's courses were pretty good over mostly very runnable terrain. They were a bit on the long side, particularly the D course at over 4K considering it was catering for M/W 10s and 12s. The W21s should probably not have been put on the A course either.