Our very own Rob Hickling helped Scotland to second place down in Wales over the weekend.
I haven’t had a chance to read the results in detail but did spot him doing very well in the individual M60 competition on Saturday chasing down fellow Scot and big rival Eddie Harwood to score 7 and 8 points respectively (top of the class basically!)
Full results can be found on the Mid Wales Orienteers website.
Maybe Rob will post a comment to this telling us all about how they mustered enough energy to run after an epic journey to reach the far side of Mid Wales?
GRAMPIAN ORIENTEERS 
The VHI is a focus event for me, so I try to prepare well for it. I had a good Six-Days, and no current injuries, so was fairly confident. We also ran on the area (Llynoedd Teifi) twice during the Welsh multi-day event in 2012. It’s a good area, but not intimidatingly hard (except perhaps in mist, which we were spared).
Both Eddie and I drove to the central belt, then got lifts in other people’s cars down to Wales, so we arrived in good shape. Our joint target was to achieve a 1-2 in M60, as we did in 2014. I started well then lost over 2 mins at no.5 when I didn’t spot the flag lower down the re-entrant, and overshot it. Angry with myself, I ran hard to no.6 and had a fast split. Another small error at the penultimate control (also too high) cost me 15 secs but other than that, it was a solid run. I expected Eddie to beat me because of my error at no.5 and he duly did, by 1 min. The good news was I held off the top Englishman, James Crawford, by 7 seconds.
The Saturday evening was spent in the pub with the other teams, re-hydrating as we watched the rugby internationals.
In the relay I was first leg in the Scottish “third team” in the Man-Woman-Man class. I had a clean run and came in 5th out of 16, first M60 and just beaten by M55s (including John Tullie and Martin Dean, our runners in Scotland’s first and second teams). The relay went well and we finished 1st, 3rd and 5th teams (my team 5th) to win the class.
Unfortunately our women’s team was weakened by several injury withdrawals, and some of our best women weren’t available. So despite having the winning team in the Woman-Man-Woman relay class too, overall we were beaten by England. If we can get a full strength team together in Scotland next year, and people perform up to expectations, we stand a good chance of taking at least one of the trophies.