Owen Means

Profiled Feb 2016

Owen was awarded the North West Shield for the Most Valuable Service to the Club. Owen does an incredible amount of work behind the scenes for the club and it was fantastic to be able to acknowledge this with this award.

Number of years orienteering?
Around 12 years

How were you introduced to orienteering?
I discovered summer series and decided that it would be a good fun challenge. My first event was at Mt Eden and it took well over 10 minutes to find the first control which was all of 50m away (it was a tricky one!). Fortunately Phil Wood was at hand to give a few pointers. I've managed to improve a little bit since then.

Key orienteering achievements to date?
Not that many actually however I did manage to sneak in a 3rd place in the M40A Middle at Nationals in the Waiuku forest a few years back

Current orienteering project or goal?
Nothing more than being able to run well and enjoy the forest

Favourite map and why?
Think it's got to be Kooyoora although I've only had a training run there. Lots of rock features make this a rather challenging place especially first time in Australia when you have to learn the different mapping style

Orienteering hero?
It's got to be the juniors in our club. It's really impressive seeing how well they run and navigate and how quickly they improve.

Day job?
Software engineer at Orion Health

Other interests?
Trail running and the occasional ultra-marathon. And I've been spending a bit of time (OK, a lot of time) recently getting the enterO online entry system in shape for Oceania 2017.

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