Blue Lightning Wagga Wagga training camp

Sunday, 17 April 2016

Blue Lightning held a very successful 4 day training camp at Wagga Wagga in the first week of the school holidays. Eighteen juniors and 8 adults from the ACT, NSW and WA attended.

Coach Rohan Hyslop, with support from Anita Scherrer and Oliver Mill, set challenging training exercises on the Burngoogee and Connorton maps. The exercises included a map walk, star relay, relocation, “tennis toolbox”, route choice and simplification/contours. Day 3 even included live tracking on the complex Connorton map, thanks to Barb Hill from Bold Horizons. The tracking can be viewed here.

Warm-ups for running varied each day, from Anita’s “7 minute workout” to Tara’s hall sprints. Evening sessions included looking at competition maps, night compass bearing races (looking for stands with no flags), Rohan’s map jigsaw and identification puzzle and reviewing the routes of runners who were wearing trackers during training.

We stayed at the Borambola Sport and Recreation Camp, which not only provided catering and friendly staff, but excellent facilities such as a sport hall with basketball hoops and soccer nets for warming up, ping pong tables for winding down and a recovery ice bath (very cold swimming pool). 

Camp Champs were run in sprint format at Borambola, on a brand new map created by Duncan Currie and Zac Needham over two days at the camp! The new map will also be a resource for Borambola to use in their outdoor education camps in the future.

Many people contributed to the success of the camp, in particular the coaches Rohan and Anita, and the parents who attended. Many thanks to the Waggaroos for use of their maps, Oliver Mill for setting training exercises, Barb Hill for live tracking, Tate Needham for help with mapping and Bob Allison for the base map of Borambola.

Photos from the camp are on the OACT Facebook page.

Ana Herceg
Blue Lightning Manager