Review of the Year...

This weekend’s Spring Cup in Denmark marks the start of the international orienteering season and this seems a relevant time to reflect on Active Canaria’s first ‘winter season’.

How it all began

The idea for Active Canaria was thought up nearly 1 year ago while I (Allan) was sharing a flat with co-founder Gordon (and an annoying cat called Trousers). We started out with the idea that we wanted create warm weather training camps for runners in Gran Canaria. However with several other companies offering similar camps on the island we needed to stand out from the crowd. Our unique selling point would be that we would be the only company that is actually based on the island and with both Gordon and me being competitive runners we would be able to offer athletes inside knowledge on the training and racing scene here in Gran Canaria. So we set about writing our mission statement, with its main premise being that our camps had to be good value for money.

Getting Started

It wasn’t until the end of November 2009 that we were ready to launch Active Canaria. We made a few t-shirts and held a party and that was the start of Active Canaria. At this stage all we had was a web-page that our friend Phil and made for us, and a lot of ideas. I set up a Facebook group and we started sending links to our web-page to everyone that we knew who were even remotely interested in sport, asking them to forward the link to their friends. It wasn’t long before we started to get our first enquiries, however most of these seemed to be from orienteers.

First Clients

On the 13^th of January our first clients arrived, Øystein Kvaal Østerbø and his coach Per Arne Troset. The Norwegian pair decided to split their week here between Maspalomas in the South of the Island and Las Palmas in the North (something which several clients have done this year). Although Øystein was predominantly interested in running training during his time in Gran Canaria he also found time to train on all of Active Canaria´s new maps. You can read about Øystein´s trip on his web-page.

Top Orienteers Galore

Once the news of Øystein’s training trip to Gran Canaria was mentioned on his web-page we started to get alot of interest/ enquiries and soon we had new orienteers arriving each week to train.

Our next clients were Swedish brothers Emil and Linus Lauri who decided to spend most of their time in Las Palmas, and even took up body boarding while here.

The former veteran World Champions Hans Huseby from Halden Skiiklubb arrived for a week with his wife Hanne. They were interested in combining some orienteering training with time spent on the beach.

Our first British clients were orienteers Rob and Claire Baker from Sheffield. Rob is in training for the London Marathon, made use of the 8 lane track in Maspalomas and did his longer runs on some of the quiet roads in the south of the island.

Switzerland’s Matthias Müller and Karin Leonhardt from Austria were our next clients. The highlight of their time in Gran Canaria was winning their respective classes in a race of the Gran Canaria Orienteering League.

Then Erik Thorsson (an ex team mate from Halden) came for a week. Erik spent his week training mostly in Las Palmas and was very pleased with his sun tan when he left.

And finally we rounded the year off in style with Swedish orienteering star, Johan Nasman. Johan came with his family and stayed in Playa del Ingles, he trained on Active Canaria’s two new maps in Maspalomas and spent time in the pool with his daughter.

Let not forgot the runners...

Although we have had mainly orienteers this year, lets not forgot the people the company was originally aimed at, RUNNERS. We have had several runners this winter season, including Ruth Mein from Ireland who came to run the Las Palmas 5km and to train for the Belfast Marathon. Our most recent runners were Finnish sisters Mari and Susanna Raulio who came to prepare for the Stockholm Marathon.

And finally...

We would like to wish all our clients the best of luck in all of their upcoming races and we hope to see them all back in Gran Canaria very soon.