Giving back has always been a big part of what drives me, and over the years the projects I’ve been involved with have continued to grow in magnitude. I helped organise my first orienteering event at the age of 15 as course planner for a local rogaine for 200 people, and since then I’ve worked my way through different sized events in orienteering. The Auckland World Masters Games held next month provided another step up, where my role as a course setter had me testing courses over a year ago, making it by far my biggest project I’ve been involved in as a volunteer. It’s incredible how many people have mobilised to make this happen. While we often celebrate the success of an event based on the enjoyment of competitors, I’ve also come to celebrate how projects like these grow those who commit their time and up their game to deliver the event. It’s clear in my case than my own growing up has much less to do with the educational system and more to do with taking on real world projects which threw me in the deep end far more regularly.
In the past few years I’ve led my club’s training, run an NZ Development Squad camp, and coached the New Zealand team at Junior World Champs, but course planning at World Masters Games has been the biggest undertaking. My role here contributes to orienteering on the international level, but the other important benefit, as eluded to above, is the experience of seeing how a larger group of volunteers with different skills can work to develop each other and come out with more proficiencies than they went in with. I think this is worth celebrating but often gets shadowed by the relief of completing such a project.
Although I’ve really enjoyed my involvement in these areas I definitely feel the urge to spend more time on my own projects, and to get the most out of myself it makes sense to follow the stronger motivations.
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I spent last weekend in Taupo racing at Katoa Po, otherwise known as all-night relays. This event is small, but an important display of club culture with 7-person teams featuring orienteers of all levels. It was great to see equal energy brought from the juniors as from the die-hard old timers, and this reassures me that the vibrant club culture will continue to thrive. It was great to defend our title and impressive to see all the juniors taking on the challenge of racing orienteering at night-time with such confidence and enthusiasm.
Icebug New Zealand and I had a great opportunity to give these energetic juniors something more to get excited about by giving away a whole bunch of shoes to future stars who provide a lot of positive energy to the club and we hope to see their progress as they move up through the grades. I have to thank Icebug for this great contribution to North West Orienteering Club, and for giving me another reason to engage these juniors in a running context where they could learn about different shoes and where best to use them. I also love to demonstrate why NWOC is the best club to be a member of, so a great success there too!
Another project I’ve had on the workbench for some time now is the AR Sandbox. I gave revision 1 a test last week and I’m now confident about realising my original idea of using this as an innovative tool for teaching certain aspects of navigation. It still needs to be properly calibrated, but the end is in sight.