More than 2,600 people will take to the streets and woodlands of Sheffield this weekend to take part in the Jan Kjellstr\u00f6m International Festival of Orienteering.<\/p>\n
The annual competition is the biggest orienteering event in the UK and takes place in different locations across the country, with runners from 140 clubs and 28 countries.<\/p>\n
It started in 1967 in memory of Swedish orienteer Jan Kjellstr\u00f6m who helped develop the sport in the UK.<\/p>\n
The event includes four races: a sprint race around Sheffield city centre, a middle distance race around Tankersley Woods, a long distance race around Wharncliffe Woods and a relay race in Middleton Park near Leeds.<\/p>\n
Jenny and Oli Johnson are an orienteering power couple. Today, neither of them are elite racers, but in 2007 they took home the respective men’s and women’s overall champion trophies.<\/p>\n
They are heavily involved in their local club, South Yorkshire Orienteering, which is hosting this year’s JK Competition.<\/p>\n
Jenny is publicity officer and Oli is setting the course for the long race around Wharncliffe Woods on Easter Sunday.<\/p>\n
Jenny is also coaching South Yorkshire’s female junior team and racing herself in the over 45 women’s class.<\/p>\n
“I have orienteered since I was really little,” she says.<\/p>\n
“My dad was a teacher so he was asked to help with a minibus of kids one weekend and he just really liked it, so when I was old enough he used to take me with him.<\/p>\n
“I won the British Schools Orienteering Championships when I was about 10 and I was hooked.<\/p>\n
“I came to Sheffield after uni because it’s the best city for it. We’ve got so much great terrain on our doorsteps.” <\/p>\n
Jenny and Oli even included an orienteering race on their wedding day 19 years ago.<\/p>\n
After the ceremony at Sheffield Town Hall they were each handed a map and completed a race around the Peace Gardens, which \u2013 in spite of a “massive” wedding dress, Jenny won.<\/p>\n
The Sheffield races will set the orienteers a number of challenges, with the city centre buzzing with people going to the World Snooker Championships this weekend.<\/p>\n
For the off-road races, Jenny says Tankersley Woods in particular will be difficult because of the ex-industrial landscape.<\/p>\n
“You’re given a map on a start line, you’ve got check points on that map that you have to visit in the order as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n
“Tankersley woods is all bell pits, so it’s really old mining. They’re hills that have hollows in them, so it’s really confusing on an orienteering map because you might have a checkpoint that you know is going to be in a hole but you have to run up a hill to get to it.”<\/p>\n
Despite Oli co-planning the course on Sunday \u2013 setting out 110 checkpoints in Wharncliffe Woods \u2013 the routes are shrouded in secrecy, even to Jenny.<\/p>\n
“We’ve not been allowed to go into the areas being used in the competition this weekend for two years,” she says.<\/p>\n
“So none of us have run in Wharncliffe, Tankersley or the city centre. Obviously we can go into the city centre but if anybody was seen running with a map they would be disqualified.”<\/p>\n
Orienteers are encouraged to visualise the terrain from the map as they run around the course, says Jenny \u2013 an issue if, like her, you struggle to visualise things.<\/p>\n
“You use the map to think what the ground will look like, and then you look at the ground and think where is that on the map?<\/p>\n
“I have aphantasia, where people can’t picture things in their head, but I was an elite orienteer, I ran for the British team.<\/p>\n
“Our coaches used to say ‘do not go into the checkpoint until you’ve got a picture in your head of what it will be like’ and I used to think ‘well, I can’t’ and I didn’t realise that some people can do that, but it didn’t matter \u2013 I could still be very good.<\/p>\n
“So don’t worry, if you want to have a go at orienteering and maps just seem like a different language that’s fine. Even if you can’t picture the ground from the map you can still do it. It’s like working out a puzzle.<\/p>\n
“That’s the danger, if you start orienteering you might not want to stop.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than 2,600 people will take to the streets and woodlands of Sheffield this weekend to take part…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":333520,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8817],"tags":[748,393,4884,1620,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-333519","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sheffield","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-sheffield","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115005311956095081","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/333520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}