20/3/04: Lipica Open - the hole picture:
Oli and I arrived in Trieste around lunch-time on Friday and we were running in sunshine (with patches of snow on the ground!) around karst terrain in Slovenia within 3 hours. Staying in the Lipica hotel (site of the famous Lipica horse stables) we were on an orienteering map and a very short drive from the 2002 areas. The terrain was pretty rocky around there and amazed us as it was our first experience of karst holes.

Saturday was the World Ranking Event with a middle distance course for both of us. After taking a while to get into the map I had a good run and finished 2nd behind Ida Wikstrom-Holmgren (SWE) while Oli ran clean but steady to finish 4th, Marco Seppi (ITA) taking the victory.

The following day was the classic offering me a chance to make up for the previous day and win the prize of a weekend in the hotel (so we could come back next year). Unfortunately it wasn’t to be and I finished just 19 seconds down overall – we’re definitely going to try to fit it into our schedule for next year though and we’ve been promised no snow for our return! Full results and graphs are here.

Thanks to Roman Volcic for all his help and if any of you get a chance to go orienteering in Slovenia we strongly recommend it. Click here for Oli’s routes from Day 1

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