Discussion: WOC Danish Dynamite!

So Denmark dominated the sprint relay. Alm dominated again today. What is the story of Denmark's success? I guess participants of the Calgary camp this autumn will find out when Bobach and Bobach present ( http://albertaatletes.wix.com/calgarycamp2015 ) but I'm curious to know what they have done differently (if anything) in the last decade or so.

I think the Danish coaching staff are fantastic. One factor for sure, perhaps only a part of the story though.

Lars Lindstrom. Great head coach.

So fun to watch them!

Great history of Dane relay success to build on.

After years of studying this and similar questions (eg: what makes the Swiss, Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, and so on so good) I do have the answer. The secret to their success is having a simple cross in their flag.

I think Alm is very fast. I am not sure what her 5k time is but I herd that she is able to make the Danish track and field team for distances races. Again this may be rumor but I think in the last couple years she spent a lot of time working on her running and speed. Even in the splits it looks like she is just running faster than all the girls. She won most of the splits. I have not looked at the GPS but I am guessing navigationally she is pretty equal on many of the legs but her speed is faster. Combined with good coaches and a good head makes for impressive results. Not so sure what the guys do.

having a simple cross in their flag

It's true. Your fancy maple leaf thingie has no aerodynamic efficiency whatsoever.

5000 hours just answered my question...

Cant sleep. 10 years. ~5000h of training. Ups and downs. 24/7/365/10=3,8km in 13:32.5 Well done champ
#killerdolphin pic.twitter.com/dnaVT37MNY

— Lars Lindstrøm (@doflandshold) August 3, 2015

Here are Lars' thoughts on Denmark's success.

Good stuff!

Well I'd say that is an excellent answer to my original question. Thanks for sharing the link Charlotte.

Great article! Thanks for Sharing!

Everything makes sense except I think the whole Team Spirit is a bit overrated in most sports. Also I find it interesting that there's little mention of Denmark's starting point as a country with great Orienteering history and fairly recent gold at WOC (Jørgensen and all...)

I wouldn't discount team spirit in individual sports. Pretty well proven that you'll run/ski/fight harder when it's for people you love. Pretty important to keep fighting if it's something like a relay. Another success story - US women's skiing in the last few years - big emphasis on team, and look at the results.

I agree with acjospe, and think that team spirit is underappreciated in so-called individual sports. It helps you do the best training you can every time you go out, and your mood/attitude at the peak event will be that much better.

Not sure team spirit is quite the thing.

I've been in a number of O and running clubs, and observed many others. Some good, some not so good, some with great team spirit, some without. I don't see a link between team spirit and achievement.
What I do see, is that the top runners in pretty much every club all reach the same level, and that that level is different between clubs.

So the team thing is important, but what it does is set the expectation of the team members. Here's where the Danes set their expectations...
"we would only support athletes who we believed had the potential to become World Champions. Other athletes were no longer supported by the national team"

So I think that's the thing that did it. Some people would call it team spirit, others call it peer pressure. I won't speculate on whether its a good thing...

This "team spirit" thing seems to be breaking down by gender. I'm not sure what that means.
However, I also think "team spirit" is seriously overrated in general, even in some, but not all, team sports.
In individual sports, there might even be a negative correlation, but it sure seems to make many people feel good, especially peripheral people.
I can't quantify this belief, but I'll offer up the US men's O team over the last 40 years as my best example.

To the extent it exists,"team spirit" strikes me as more the "effect" of people doing the right things, than the "cause" of doing the right things, and when people try to reverse this, the result is at least delayed function, if not serious dysfunction. Over the last few years, I've had the opportunity to closely witness this dynamic in a women's team sport situation.

I sense that the recently successful US women's O team members might have a contrary opinion, which I generally respect, but I'll first give credit to the individual efforts in at least two out of three cases.

Thanks to Nev-Monster for taking a chance on this possibly socially incorrect perspective.

I strongly disagree with this, or maybe I don't understand it.

First, I never thought the US Team, particularly the men's team, had anything resembling team spirit. In my experience, it was always a disjointed assemblage of individuals who rarely, and reluctantly would bend their wills to a team ethos. If this team featured a bunch of superstars, geniuses, that generated results and knew better than everyone else, you may go with it, but I really don't think that is the case. And even if there were these mutants that came along randomly, there would be no rhyme nor reason, and no process by which you would expect recurrence.

If you want sustained excellence you need a program and a process. You can't count on random chance or geniuses to come along. In an ideal world you get that thorough "culture"; in a flawed world, maybe you have to get by with the economy version, which in my estimation is called "spirit."

Anyway, I still don't see how the US Team has been held back by too much spirit; I have seen very little, and haven't heard of much historically. If there is more spirit recently, I see that as a good thing, which may incrementally contribute to a sustained enthusiasm, and perhaps one day, start to build a culture.

So the Danish team came to Race the Castles last year. The prologue had some weird borderline-unfair terrain, and its fair the say they didn't shine. (e.g. Bobach 48th, Klingenberg 58th)
http://results.racethecastles.com/prologue/open_me...
http://results.racethecastles.com/prologue/course_...

But my main point is: straight afterwards they formed a huddle with frantic discussion in Danish. Then they went off, together, to check out what happened. No sulking or skulking By the time of the World Ranking event, in a world class field, Alm and Klingenburg were 1-2 and Bobach and Boesen 1-3. Whether it helps or not, it was clear they had a genuine strong team spirit.

After listening to Coach K on team vision (perhaps a better word -direction is involved, not just positive team energy) on bringing together the all-star pros who won gold at the Olympics, little doubt in my mind this can be quite powerful. Ditto for the Seahawks the year they won the Super Bowl. Things didn't start out so well with respect to personal conduct and winning on the field. A practice that was diverted to talking about what it meant to be a Seahawk was a catalyst for a complete turnaround. It's hard to bring all-stars together in any sport to sharpen each other. But when you succeed, it's amazing.

You can have all the spirit in the world, but if your selection pool doesn't have the genes, then you won't have a chance of winning medals. Seems to me discussion of team spirit is premature if a country isn't recruiting potential elite performers.

If it helps, I'll define my meaning of "team spirit" as the emphasis of social aspects of team member interaction.

The Danish activity described by Graeme does not fall under this definition, but sounds like simply focused, committed, fundamental O work, the #1 job for coaches and athletes, and they did it very well.

I agree social aspects have a role, but not to the point where they dilute or distract from the O work.

The Danish story reminds me of a post WOC89 bus ride with the then-novice and unsuccessful Italian team, who were noticeably subdued compared to the joking US Team and some bubbly Brits, but to a man I noticed their faces buried in the maps, which marked the beginning of a lower level, but very respectable trajectory.

TheInvisibleLog is saying that you can't polish a turd.

No you can't polish a turd. You can spray it with hairspray to make it look shiny. :P

I was saying that it might be more important to focus on talent spotting and pathways to elite competition as the first priority. That seems to be the much more useful side of the information coming from the coaching conference.

EricW, the focused work that the Danes did they did together. They seem all committed to getting better as a group, and genuinely thrilled when their teammates perform well. They collaborate when they do sprint map preparations, they are happy to share their efforts with each other. And I'm going to guess that they push each other in training harder than they would be able to do on their own. Shall we call this team unity & drive rather than team spirit?

It's true that there are some athletes that can perform at the very top without this kind of team effort, but I think those are exceptional individuals. Others wouldn't be able to make it to the top without the push of a group working together to be really good.

But yeah, all the team unity and drive in the universe isn't going to create world champions out of mediocre athletes.

Has anyone mentioned funding as part of the Danish success? ;-) I have heard the figure of $4M as the Danish OF's annual budget. Whether that's accurate or not I'm pretty sure that magnitude of funding helps the elite team a little bit. By comparison, the budget for Canada's OF is around $100K (OF - Orienteering Federation, so not all the money goes to athlete funding)

Funding + athletes with a lot of drive and potential to be World Champions + full-time coaching + training environment designed for success and collaboration. We have basically none of those in North America...

Remarkable. This could be relevant over on that other thread.

Ha! I stand corrected. (But note it was an incredibly labour intensive process). Now to redefine the level of polish required to make an elite athlete shiny enough to earn a medal.

I gather too that NZ have a very supportive network, particularly in the north island for Sprint training, though not restricted to that regime. They consistently perform highly, given the population, and at Junior level. One of the similarities is that the respective countries (Denmark and NZ) are fairly small (geographically) and the runners can be concentrated and work together on training activities without long distance travel. Aus had the germ of that idea with a lot of our junior elites seemingly heading (for various reasons) to ACT - great access to varied maps, lots of potential. Not saying it should/could be within the Institute, just an amalgamation of talent, ease of getting a training buddy, impromptu training - consistently.

Maybe of topic for not being high performance Danish dynamite thing, but around here most of the O is made within 35min drive from ones home if not straight from front door. And there is two type of maps, those close to where people live and those remote wilderness areas. Ratio is about 1 remote map / 10 nearby maps. Orienteering seems to be popular in places with both nice runnable areas near people live and those also being mapped and maps updated. And those places with with no nice runnable forests or nice nearby areas not mapped (but possibly very cool mapped areas 1+ h drive away) are places with no too much O going on. Chicken or the egg? Anyway, without chicken there will be no eggs.

So I'd say around here it is essential to have nice areas allowed to map and use right where people live, not 1+ h drive away. And there needs to be nearby maps. One can't drive 1+h out and back every day to get some O done on daily basis. In addition it looks it' may more quite effective to get most playgrounds mapped 1:1000 so 6+ year old's can play treasure hunt type O with their parents or at club recruiting events, at least it is what it comes to making O more popular and more known. Sometimes kids are not hooked but parents became regulars. And it there is O going on and maps get updated it is possible to have a high performance center.

As Jagge pointed out - the presence of nearby maps is another vital factor that is necessary for "getting there"...
Unfortunately that´s an area where most of US and Canada are at a disadvantage compared to other smaller countries.

I also think the idea that there is training time and social time and nothing that happens during training time contributes to team spirit is way too simple a model. Social interactions happen anytime two or more people are together. It seems obvious to me that an athlete with training partners they like, support and feel supported by is going to have an easier time completing the training required to be a world champion than someone without training partners or someone who doesn't get along with their training partners.

Then coaching, nearby maps, and the time and money to go on three week training camps also seem extremely helpful.

@gruver: you mean 'to fork or not to fork'? :-)

What I find interesting is they don't do really long runs, instead opting for two sessions a day some days.

Re team spirit: interested to see what happens when there are newcomers pushing for selection. A big problem with some sporting teams (eg Australia's cricket team) is that they and the coach/selectors become so close through 'team spirit' that there is insufficient opportunity for outsiders to be selected.

Aaaaaamen to that!!

@AZ. Regarding budget, Lars wrote...
We decided that we would only support athletes who we believed had the potential to become World Champions. Other athletes were no longer supported by the national team. This decision was partly due to budget cuts, the Danish coach explains.

No doubt their budget is in a different league to yours, but they were nudged in the right direction by a cut, not an increase.
The GB team has had a big cut in recent years as the government focuses on olympic sports. Annoying, but its not clear the team is doing any worse.

Cristina, all the Danish group stuff you mention is wonderful. All your proposed terms seem fine, but I don't see the need to call this anything. Is this the result of a special term, jargon, or agenda item needed to make this happen? It certainly sounds similar to the French effort, and other top O club efforts, heck other sports projects and non sport projects as well.

It seems to me that we have some already committed and talented people, taking advantage of an opportunity, and doing the job with common sense collaboration, and doing it very well.

The job was to develop O performance, not to work on group dynamics and see if that helped O performance. The heightened group spirit, naturally flows from all the invested effort, and of course some success. It doesn't need to be imposed. It probably took some trials and drama along the way to maintain the effort, but that is just normal life problem solving.

And by the way, I don't have dreams of turning US orienteers into World Champions, but I still hope to see a stronger tradition of a few more people performing up to their potential at WOC rather than WMOC.

I think this great dynamic that they have is a result of a really supportive environment. The reason to call it something is because if this doesn't develop in your environment then it's worth looking at why not. Oftentimes it's worth looking at the top.

@EricW: Maybe you should have a dream of turning US orienteers into World Champions, that's the first step on the way...

Cristina, I partly agree, but caution against idolizing any model too much. This one comes with thorns as well, as already noted above.

Jan, I absolutely had the dream, but about 30 years ago I started dealing with reality.
No, you don't go from crawling to running by dreaming about it. You do it by taking the realistic next step, walking, and the hard part is in the doing, not theorizing from the sidelines like we are here.

I say this with full awareness that the French almost deserve credit for this (crawl to run), and that we (US) had a recent brush with the medals (which actually supports the rugged individual approach).

Still, I hope others take up your encouragement. I know it's well intended

I don't know what the appropriate next step is for the US, but I'm doing my bit here to prevent those who might envision a next step from looking through rose colored glasses.

Anyone who has a teenage daughter can guarantee you that team spirit matters. Team spirit (or camaraderie, or social interaction, whatever you want to call it) can be the difference between loving a sport and not wanting to do it at all. No, "team spirit" on its own does not create World Champions. But, it is an element that certainly can help.

My 15 year-old daughter came back from ski practice on Thursday (one that involved zone-3 semi-continuous hill-bounding intervals as the meat of the work-out), raving about how fun it was. Doing hard things with other like-minded individuals is fun; doing it on your own, not so much.

Personally, I would argue that North American national orienteering teams (whether Canadian or US) have relatively little "team spirit" and have had, relatively little, high-level success. Now, clearly, it is tough to build "team spirit" when the members of a team live in far-flung locations all across an enormous continent (many, many times the size of Denmark, for example).

We are relying mostly on a model where individuals rise in relative isolation. I think the real potential for improvement is at the club level. There are clubs with spirit (e.g., CSU and probably others), but it would be nice to see many more with the critical mass to have thriving competitive programs.

Unfortunately, in Canada at least, our highest-level development seems to include the top orienteers living in Europe. It's hard to argue that this isn't the best for their individual development (and I don't fault any of them for choosing this route), but it does relatively little for those of us on this continent.

I don't know what the appropriate next step is for the US

Personally, I think that the fundamental issue in the development of competitive orienteers in North America is what is going on at the club level. Canada has a national High Performance Program, but there is no way to have high-performance at a national level without high performance at the club level. Even the great things that Erin Schirm is doing with the juniors in the US is futile if it doesn't trickle down to the local level.

What should clubs be doing?
1) Treating athlete development as a serious priority. Far too many orienteering clubs are simply event organizers. Putting on events is important, but it isn't the only thing that needs to be done to generate high-performance athletes.
2) Offer junior programs. Training sessions 2 to 3 times per week for half the year. Organized group travel to events. Team clothing. Don't focus solely on navigation - it's Ok to have training sessions that are only physical - intervals, speed-work, agility, etc.
3) Offer a training program for adults. Separate from the kids/junior programs, ideally.

Basically, clubs need to put energy into athlete development if we as nations are to have any real hope of improvement.

I should note that some clubs get it. In Canada, Yukon has probably the best history with focusing serious energy on athlete development, Hamilton's ARX program is currently generating the next breed and Calgary, Ottawa, Edmonton, also have some good things going on.

Couldn't agree more Brian :D

Team spirit plays a role but isn't critical at the high performance level. At a junior level however.... maybe critical is a bit strong but it's not far off if we want to keep far great numbers in the sport.

This is for sure an interesting thread to follow. Much is speculated and some of it is close to how things are.

Here is a clarfication of some facts on Funding. Danish Orienteering has a total budget of 1.5-1.6 mio USD. 666.000 USD is spend on elite sports from age 15 to World class.

When speaking of Team Spirit Christina is not too far of. For most orienteers Team Spirit is about social aspects of how a team works. For us Team Spirit and Team Values are about setting a direction and making the team work together, harder and more focussed. Yes we have fun and a great social enviroment within the team, but it is all based on why we are there: "To win medals at WOC and EOC".

If anyone wants to learn more, I would be happy to go to US or Canada Again. Unfortunately my calender didn't allow me to join Ida and Søren in October.

P.S. Both the US and Canada have great possibilities to improve dramatically in performance at WOC. You "just" have to find your way and keep dreaming.

I think if you combine bmay's excellent points and Jagge's point about mapping areas then you have the place where the USA can make the most impact on future orienteers.

I can drive 30mins - 90 mins to some of the best terrain in the world from my house here in Connecticut. But I also drive past hundreds of perfectly adequate areas to get there, ones which I might prefer to go to on days when I wanted to do something other than orienteer, or if I was a young person that wanted to fit in college workloads and a couple of other extra curriculars on top of my main sport. I'm not going to drive to Huntington on a Tuesday night, but there's plenty of places I would drive to if I knew there would be 10-15 other people there to orienteer with me.

This is the biggest difference I notice between the USA and the UK - back in the UK, we map any old piece of c**p, and you can always figure out something fun to do there. This means local orienteering opportunities are much easier to come by.

So much privately owned land in the US restricts usage of otherwise perfect orienteering terrain.

This private beagle club looks like it would be a fun place to train!

(near 10-15 Beagle Club Way, Nassau, NY 12123)

http://goo.gl/maps/IuoHw

And much publicly owned land in the US increasingly charges high fees that restrict usage of otherwise perfect orienteering terrain.

BMay nails it in his posts above. Too much NorAm club focus on hosting races and not enough developing athletes. Also his comment about the need for team spirit for juniors is absolutely essential. Great posts Brian!


@lindstrom"If anyone wants to learn more, I would be happy to go to US or Canada Again"

Yes please. :-)

@hammer: If you find a suitable time and place, then I ready. My contact details can be found on the Danish Orienteering-Federation website: http://landshold.do-f.dk/elite/org/trnere.asp

How about inviting LL during the NAOC in 2016.

publicly owned land high fees

ymmv - our local parks said if we have low numbers (ha!), eg. <1.5 dozen, and we give a heads up, we can run trainings with flags for free.

@dcady
That would be a great opportunity! Lars, what is your schedule Sept. 23 – 25, 2016 ? Any chance that you could come and bring some of the elite athletes as well? That would certainly make NAOC 2016 very distinct.
http://www.naoc2016.us/

Essentially all maps my club has are of private forests (except be some small school maps I believe). Typically area consists of several land owners, like this one, see property borders.

Even if here a singe citizen has legal right to access and run with maps in these private forest, we are not allowed to arrange anything without land owner's permission. And without that permission there is no point making any maps. In practice O here depends on land owners letting us make maps, and arrange trainings and races to fund mapping. Without such landowners and club taking good care of relations to land owners O would soon come to the end, or turning more or less to street O. Without club members knowing land owners, belonging to same hunting clubs and O being well known activity and long tradition and it all would be quite a lot more difficult. In practice private landowners are much easier to negotiate arranging races on private land than what it seems to be on public lands. Interesting public lands are often national parks and nature preserves, trying to get permission to arrange something for 1000 participants may be dead end. For example maps of a largest national park near Helsinki was not updated for two decades because arranging anything there became impossible. Now it is again somewhat possible and maps are getting updated. About 5 years ago city of Helsinki had plans to ban arranging orienteering events in it forest parklands (several maps would have ended up useless), luckily that never got through. Similar trend seems to be going on is Sweden. So essentially my club (not near Helsinki) is lucky to have mostly only private owned forest nearby and not have to deal with that much, easier to negotiate with private landowners and help them scare deer away from eating newly planted trees by running around there regularly and also reporting is there something suspicious going on.

In the USA, when you own private land, it means you can shoot people who ask permission to go there.

Are Corn Maze O events arranged on public lands or is access based on negotiations?

Private lands. Not all operators are willing, but it is a special case, since they have already dealt with the issue of letting people come on their property, specifically getting insurance. The flip side is that if somebody comes on your land and you don't shoot them, then they can fall down and sue you.

dcaby & Bugaboospire >> If you are interested my contact details can be found in the link above.
I will need some vacation at the same time as NAOC, so could be possible.

Wow! Lars, if you can come to NAOC, that would be fantastic. It will be great to have some really top level international competitors at NAOC.

There are many limiting factors for a North American to be top 15 in the world. I really doubt that US private land ownership rights are that high.

Very much agree with BMay on the importance of team spirit in the context of retaining athletes as the pool of top juniors is so small individual athletes changing sports can be a huge loss. Especially in Canada.

@Nev-Monster:
The problem of top juniors leaving the sport in Canada goes well beyond just the team spirit, although the team spirit is one of the big factors. Different mindset in the leadership is one of the leading ones.

You can't generate team spirit unless the juniors meet and train regularly together. This is where lots of low level hyper local meets and training sessions come in.

Who are you Bugaboospire?

Robert Svoboda - Michael's dad.

In the 90's I was one of a few coaches of probably one of North America's top elite junior teams. The Ontario Junior Team comprised a large percentage of Canada's JWOC team and while a few junior women in that group did run a few World Cups and a WOC or two for the most part the 12-15 strong team fell apart when the juniors started to attend university.

20 years later I'm once again involved with a large (and generally successful) junior program. We are adopting some of the ideas that Becks' father uses in the UK Junior Squads system. Yet I worry that unless changes are made to our U23 youth racing structure and product that many of our juniors will (once again) quit the sport when they leave to attend university. In contrast to the North American Uni O scene I see a strong University club and racing system in the UK. I suspect the team spirit is a big factor in keeping those Uni clubs strong.

^^ What Hammer said ^^

"I suspect the team spirit is a big factor in keeping those Uni clubs strong."

Definitely.

If you could get American/Canadian juniors to meet up monthly from the age of 14 for training or racing then by the time they reach university they might have met each other 50 times and formed some good friendships.

If you can't get them to meet up physically why not set them the same interval session to complete on a set date and then get them to use "social media" to tell each other about the experience and develop some spirit that way.

What struck me listening to the announcer at WOC was the mention of many/most/all? of the GBR athletes being a product of either the Sheffield or Edinburgh Uni clubs. Were those schools chosen to be 'training centres' or did it just work out that way?

Back in 2006 when Holger and Sandy Hott visited Hamilton for a camp I made a presentation arguing that Canada needed to develop one or two training centres in University towns. Orienteering Canada put this in their strategic plan. In a Canadian context there really isn't many places to choose from that offer all that you need. We have Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa or Hamilton. A few years ago my club approached OC about forming a training centre in Hamilton. But when the discussions to potential juniors went out it was clear there wasn't interest or enough of a critical mass. But with relatively large (from a Cdn context) junior programs in Calgary and Hamilton thinking about the next step for these juniors is going to be important.

....or the kids could just go to the UK though we don't get special Commonwealth fees anymore. Damn EU. ;-)

There's a long history of Edinburgh and Sheffield being universities where many orienteers go. I chose to go Edinburgh in the late 90's - and then worked out what I would study, but there was already a long history back then.
I'm sure people more involved recently can comment on changes since then (I think there have been spells with more formal training going on?)

There was a period when both places were actively funded as centers of excellence. I think this has run out, but Edinburgh still gets a lot of support from the University. They are still both seen as the places to go to orienteer, but there are other clubs too that are very active on a more local basis.

Edit: Most of the current team passed through these Unis during that period of funding.

GBR sent 17 people to WOC, 16 of whom have studied or are studying in either Edinburgh (9) or Sheffield (7). Both have some support available on an individual athlete basis and Edinburgh also has a coach.

Who was the lone ranger? Respect.

In Colorado, permission for private camps can be easier than public lands... camps often ask us to make O maps, for their programs and let us organize events there in exchange. I'm making two such maps this year. The camps are very eager and helpful.

The University of Edinburgh is still a Centre of Excellence for orienteering, operating on an annual budget in excess of approximately £75,000.

We are one of two National Performance Center's funded by Winning Students, the Scottish student sport funding body. They provide well over £50,000pa in form of scholarships to the athletes on the programme. Some of this money is top-sliced to par for services such as coaching, physio, S&C, training camps. The remainder is given directly to the athletes to spend as the wish. The University of Edinburgh contributes over £20,000pa for the same services.

We are very fortunate to have a funding council and university who are willing to put this amount of money into orienteering.

This year our performance team is going to have something like 20 athletes, nearly all of whom will be British Orienteering's performance programme as well. Over 1/3rd (12/34) of GBR's Talent Programme (i.e. junior squad) will be at Edinburgh University next year.

During semester we have 6 team training sessions per week, and go on technical training weekends twice a month.

Our performance athletes get unlimited free physio therapy, with reserved sessions so they never have to wait long for an appointment. They have a professional orienteering coach. Dedicated S&C sessions. Access to further funding to pay for any GBR representation. They can submit a request for academic dispensation if an important camp or competition clashes with coursework or exams.

For freshers, we have access to student apartments. This is especially useful for locals, who are not guaranteed accommodation in halls of residence. We also have a direct line of communication with admissions so that performance athletes are considered for an offer if they meet the standards for their course (the uni has a 37% offer rate and 10% admission rate).

Mark Nixon
Head of Performance Orienteering, The University of Edinburgh

Just spent the last week of the festival in Edinburgh - no wonder the place is so crowded, it's not the festival but all the orienteers! :-)

Oh, and if I didn't go to Edinburgh I would have gone to Sheffield.

Mark - any thoughts on trying to see if the University would consider people taking longer to complete their degrees? It's definitely not the way of thinking within UK universities (I'm not even sure our students at Leicester can get dispensation with respect to clashes), but it seems to me one of the good things of some of the Scandi systems, and if anywhere is going to do it Edinburgh's as good a chance.

It all sounds really good anyway,