Technical Team

Orienteering and CUS (Centro Universitario Sportivo – University Sports Center) Bologna are two large forces that have been meeting in the shadows of the twin towers for 25 years. One of these is the sports center of the University of Bologna, which was one of the first to be organized after the second world war to promote sport among students, while the other is orienteering, a sport that has long been popular sport in Nordic countries and now counts over 3 million practitioners and is becoming increasingly popular in our country.

When the orienteering section of the CUS Bologna was formed in 1983 this duo proved to be of top quality right from the start, with a special focus on the elite level as a way to promote a sport that still had to be discovered in our country! Big names have created the history of the section: the first Italian champions were Dario Beltramba and Verena Troi, who have been passing on their technical skills and experience, including at the international level, to subsequent generations since the 1990s, spawning three national caliber athletes, four university athletes and many more on youth teams during the last few seasons. The red and white jackets have established themselves with growing consistency at the national competitive level during the last few seasons. Marco Seppi and Michela Guizzardi are by now two fixed reference points for the commissioners of the federation and other younger athletes such as Michele Caraglio are gaining the confidence to don the “maglia azzurra” (blue shirt worn by Italian national teams) with every race. A team spirit that is crystallized in the Italian National Championships to determine the best national team and which the CUS Bologna has won several times, latterly in 2006.

Since the latest season in 2008, the management of the Orienteering section of CUS Bologna has set itself more ambitious goals aimed at improving the technical level of both the athletes, making their representatives stronger so that they can achieve excellence at the international level, and the team, by creating new orienteering maps, organizing training camps overseas to exchange technical experience between the most skilled and the youngest athletes, and specifically promoting orienteering to bring greater visibility to this discipline. This is how two large projects for 2009 came into being, with the goal of making CUS Bologna Orienteering a high level team on all fronts, namely the Jukola Relay project, in which the team will participate in the famous seven-man relay which is held each year in Finland and attended by 15,000 athletes from around the world, and the mapping project, which will create at least five new maps during the next three years to be able to host national or international events.

In fact, the strength of this team and the key for the competitive improvement of the athletes is hidden behind the section’s technical activities: producing maps of the provincial and regional territory, promoting and conducting activities with schools and organizing important competitions (such as the 2008 Italian Championships), are the means for transmitting and also improving the technical skills of each athlete and the staff and to increase the visibility of a sport practiced in many schools in Italy.

Marco Seppi: born in Trieste on 13/01/1980, has been living and training for a few years between Ferrara, where he works as a researcher, and Bologna. As a junior he ran for the Polisportiva le Volpi team in Trieste, but he has been running for CUS Bologna for 8 years now. He was recently able to transfer to Lyons for 6 months for work and training reasons, coming often into contact with the strong athletes from the other side of the Alps, including the multiple time world champion Thierry Gueorgiou. He has been involved in Orienteering since middle school and for several years divided his passion between running through the woods and volleyball, but since the start of his career at the elite level he has dedicated all his efforts toward improving in the sport with compass. He has a degree in Mechanical Engineering and is enrolled in the Applied Mechanical Engineering doctorate program at Bologna University (photo: courtesy of World of Runners).

His best results are as follows:

* Until 2000: 4 Italian Junior titles over different distances
* 2002-2005: Participated in over 10 stages in the Park World Tour
* 2000-2006: Participated in four University World Championships (best result 22nd place)
* 2004: Finalist at the European Championships in Denmark
* 2005: Finalist at the World Cup in Italy
* 2006: Finalist (29th) in the sprint distance at the World Championships in Denmark
* 2006 and 2008: Italian Champion in the middle distance
* 2007: 12th place in the relay at the World Championships in Ukraine
* 2008: 41st in the middle distance at the World Championships in Norway

What do you like about Orienteering?
Two things have always appealed to me: the completeness of this sport, in which the technical and physical aspects are tightly connected, and the contact with nature. I have now run in nearly all the European countries where Orienteering is more popular (you could say that Scandinavia is its birthplace), I think I am only missing two or three. I was also able to participate in an international race tour in China. I am always looking for new challenges over new terrain! And every place I run, every wood, forest, trail or marsh is a new discovery for me: running in nature gives me a sense of freedom and also control that has no equal.

Is it more important for you to run strongly or read the map well?
Neither one is more important than the other, but you need to be well prepared for both. Many people say that the ideal orienteer has an excellent grasp of all three skills, the technical (ability to navigate quickly with a map), running and mental. You can’t ignore the mental conditioning because in orienteering you are challenging yourself, moving within your own abilities and limits: finishing a “clean” race, running strongly and navigating efficiently without mistakes, it is a difficult undertaking but it is very satisfying.

How do you organize your training?
I run with a map in my hands any time I can. Constantly reading the map and adapting to new terrain are very important factors. Obviously it is not easy to do this all the time, so I try to be in the best shape physically by doing specific training each day (usually resistance and strength training, often twice a day), and also taking care of the technical preparation by training for longer or shorter periods. For this part I do both shorter sessions, maybe in the evenings, in more accessible places, and sessions of specific training in the woods at the weekends when I don’t have competitions, or by attending long training camps (about 10 days) at least 2-3 times during the season.

Which of the three specialties do you prefer?
I have always tried to prepare myself as well as possible for all the specialties because I believe that map reading skills are important in all situations. However, you need to specialize if you want to obtain good results, especially at the international level. During the last few years I have focused my preparation mainly on the sprint and middle distances, which are better suited to my physical capabilities. During the last few years I have obtained the best results in the sprint distance abroad and in the middle distance in Italy. I think I have plenty of room for improvement, especially athletically in the sprint distance and technically in the middle distance. I also like relays where you compete more directly with your opponents.

What are your competitive goals?
My goal is to bring together all the experience that I have acquired over the last few years and make another leap in quality. In order for me to compete at a high level internationally, I must be technically more confident and improve my running skills in the woods, especially when the terrain is unyielding and hard to run.

Michela Guizzardi: born in Bologna on 17/04/1982, lives and trains in Sasso Marconi (BO). After competing in track, she took up at orienteering during high school when she won the national title in the Student Sports Games three years in a row. She initially competed for the Polisportiva Masi di Casalecchio team in Reno, and then climbed through the ranks of the CUS in Bologna where she started her elite career. She is studying architectural-building engineering at the University of Bologna (photo: courtesy of World of Runners).

Her best results are as follows:

* 2002 Italian Junior title in the long distance
* 2005 4th in the first stage of the Park World Tour in Otranto and 5th in the fourth stage in China
* 2006 Finalist in the sprint distance at the World Championships in Denmark
* 2006 Bronze medal in the sprint distance at the University World Championships
* 2008 Italian champion in the sprint and middle distances
* 2008 Finalist (31st) in the sprint distance at the European Championships
* 2008 36th in the ultra-long distance at the World Cup in Norway

What made you try orienteering?
I started competing at school more as a joke and enjoyed it because in finding the checkpoints I am mainly challenging myself. Then after being used to competing on the track or road, I was very excited to be able to go into the woods, deciding by myself which trail to take and finding all the details to help me understand where to go.

What does an orienteering race mean to you?
It is always like a little adventure! Even though I am more familiar with it and confident now, there are still times, especially in the longer races, when I set the direction with the compass and go ahead for hundreds of meters in places that I have never seen and don’t know anything about except what I see on the map and I feel more in control of the world surrounding me. I have much more confidence in myself since I started orienteering.
Then there is the competitive aspect and the psychological preparation is essential in order to do your best when it counts, especially in the big races. This is a technical sport that requires maximum concentration plus a huge physical effort.

Which of the three specialties do you prefer?
Well, there is no doubt that I am better at the sprint races. I have had my best results in those races and by specializing in them I can also do well at the international level. Luckily I can compete in all three specialties, and so even the long races where you can run for a couple of hours in the middle of woods, often far from the trails, and it seems as if no-one has ever been there before. I have had some great experiences when I have run these types of races in our mountains and in the forests in Scandinavia. During the last few years I have also started to do a few night races in Italy and I enjoyed them very much. Usually our woods are not too far from civilization and so I have never been frightened. In some countries they do very long races in the dark and far from the city and paved roads. To be honest, I am still a bit frightened but knowing that there is no danger due to the work done by the organizers, I’d like to try a few during the next few months.

What are your competitive goals?
I feel that I can and should still improve a lot technically and athletically. I certainly need to work more on my technical skills considering that I started orienteering rather late, but if I want to do better internationally then I need to also improve my physical level, especially running in the woods because I am still much slower than foreign athletes when I am far off the trails, running among branches, rocks and dense vegetation: it is mainly a question of familiarity and specific preparation.

Michele Caraglio: born in Cuneo 11/02/1983, lives and trains in Chiusa Pesio (CN). He started orienteering in high school when he participated in the student world games in Israel. He started participating in his first competitive races for the Oricuneo team and then after moving up to the elite category he now competes for CUS di Bologna. He is studying theoretical physics at Turin University.

His best results are as follows:

* 2004 2nd at the Italian relay championships
* 2006 46th in the long distance at the University World Games in Slovakia
* 2006 36th in the middle distance at the World Games in Slovakia
* 2007 3rd in the Italian relay championships
* 2008 Participated in the European Championships in Latvia

What made you try Orienteering?
Who, rather than what. It was my physical education teacher in high school who passed on his passion for this sport. I initially participated in school races and trained at school, then as I improved my technical skills I started to enjoy it more and finally decided to participate at a competitive level. Once I started it was easy to continue: my most important motivation at first was the many friendships I made on the race course, then gradually I also became motivated by the competitions.

What does an orienteering race mean to you?
Good question… and I would divide the answer into three parts.
FIRST. In the days and hours before a race, an orienteering race is no different than any other type of sporting competition: you think about your potential results, you gather your physical energy, and you prepare yourself mentally for what’s ahead of you…
DURING. Things change during the competition though: your performance no longer depends only on how much you have trained or your physical shape; it is your ability to focus to be in control and to determine your end result. All orienteers have experienced “being in the zone” in some race situation: your concentration reaches such levels that you only think about your surroundings and the map representing them; you do not think about the result and you are not afraid of making mistakes, some people say that you don’t even feel tired from the physical effort but this, at least in my case, seems a bit exaggerated. Let’s say that fatigue is partly diminished by the pleasure that you feel in running with the awareness of knowing where I am going, despite the fact that I am in a place where I have never been before.
AFTER. When you finally cross over the finish line you can relax. Since it is a sport with a starting line, you often have to wait until all the competitors have finished the race to know what your actual results are in your classification and you often wait impatiently for the final results to be published. But this is not what distinguishes our sport: once you have finished the race, another phase starts when you start to critique your performance and compare yourself to the other athletes and there is nothing like this in other disciplines. You talk for hours with your friends/opponents about the decisions you made and, unless you ran a perfect race, you think about your mistakes for days…but you know that the perfect race does not exist.

Which of the three specialties do you prefer?
I don’t have a preference, I love all three (sprint, middle and long distance) each for different reasons. The SPRINT is a very fast race in which every second counts and you pay dearly for any tiny mistake: I like it because even though you don’t need to carefully read the map, you must make your decisions carefully and most importantly you must make them before you face them physically so that you are never unprepared. The MIDDLE distance is by definition a technical race: you must be very good at map reading and also be able to maintain your concentration to run a good race. The LONG distance is usually a bit less technical and allows you to “relax” and “enjoy” the pleasure of running in nature for a few moments, but being able to focus again at the right time is not always easy, especially when physical fatigue starts to set in.
I also like the night races because the approach to orientation is quite different than during the day.

What are your competitive goals?
Having started orienteering quite late I have been constantly improving technically and when I started training seriously, so I can more or less say the same thing as the other athletes and I think there is still a fair bit of room for improvement. Technical and physical growth is my main goal at the moment but sooner or later I should be able to reap the rewards of what I have sown thus far.