JROS Lagganlia summer 2025Tour report from Fay Thomas
This summer I got selected for the JROS tour Lagganlia, in Scotland. It runs for a week and is for M/W 14s. It was a very enjoyable time where I made lots of new friends and learned some valuable skills about different terrains and navigating techniques, including contouring, simplification, and much more. Throughout the week we did 4 training days, and a rest day (although we didn’t do much resting!) and a tour championship on the last day. There was a range of terrains including forest, urban, open land etc. The training was quite hard, most days were TD5 courses, but we were encouraged to take our time as it was not about speed and more about technique. When I first arrived, I was very nervous as I didn’t know anyone who was going, but I quickly got to know the juniors and became more confident throughout the week. There were two houses, one for the northerners and one for the southerners, grouping people together who might know each other. In the evenings we had lots of free time to go outside, bond, and have a break from the training. We were split into coaching groups that each had 3 or 4 juniors, a senior coach and a junior coach which we stayed with during the week. The coaches would help us with what we struggled on and encouraged us on the races and things we were good at. Each training day we had a map with 6-8 focused activities, and we had to be shadowed for at least one of them. We also did some talk-o in our groups and had a different relay or race at the end of every session. My favourite day was the third training day at Roseisle, which I enjoyed because of all the spurs and large depressions that you could use to navigate. During the ‘rest’ day, we did two sprint races at Aviemore and Glenmore Lodge and a night-o at Spey Valley Golf Course which had three courses to complete. The urban races had lots of OOB areas added to make it harder and it was easy to make mistakes. After the sprint races we went to Loch Morlich and swam in the water, which was surprisingly warm, then we went into Aviemore to look round and buy some souvenirs. The night-o was very relaxed, and we went round in groups of 2 or 3, most of us playing music from our phones and speakers to up the vibe. We were very tired that night. My favourite race of the week was the peg race at Loch Vaa, which was hard but extremely fun. On day six we had the tour champs at Culbin forest, which was a very intimidating area, with large sections of thick undergrowth and steep hills, although there were some obvious features to relocate. The coaches worked hard to make sure everything was perfect for the 23 juniors, including hanging kites, cooking delicious food and going over every course at the end of the day. I am delighted that I was given the opportunity for this incredible experience as I made lots of amazing friends and would like to go on more JROS tours in the future. I truly recommend this for anybody thinking of going as I’m sure they will have a great time.
