Sylvester Belgian 5-days: 3 days to register

The Sylvester 5 days is a nice orienteering competition organised every year between Christmas and New Year in the northern part of Belgium. It is an organization from different Flemish clubs together with 1 Dutch club. The 5th day will be the last world ranking event in 2008 (on a new map).

With the Scandinavians training in the snow, there will probably be no snow for this event. Some years we have had a little bit snow, but never enough to keep the runners out of the forest! You can’t expect extremely technical maps in an area like Flanders, but the high running speeds combined with a lot of paths, little relief and open areas will still be a challenge. The sylvester2008 will include more tricky maps compared with the past editions (map samples).

Day 4: Klein Schietveld Part1 (route choices: Jan Gilot at the Belgian champ long distance 2007 - Part2)

The races will be fast definitely, with the elites probably running under 5min/km some days, so it's for sure a good speed-training! Last year's M21elite field was made up of 48 runners (won by Nick Barrable). Up to now more than 40 foreign athletes registered for the sylvester 5-days (List of foreign runners). But ofcourse most of the participants at the Sylvester are Belgian athletes. We saw on the clubwesites some strong (national team) runners who will fight for the victory this edition. But we will still write a more detailed preview (about the favourits in H/D21elite) on this website when we have the final list with all the participants.

Sylvester 5days website
Reports, Results and Maps edition 2007: (preview - day1 - day2 - day3 - day4 - day5WRE)
Results 2006
More information about sylvester 5days and orienteering in Belgium