By Jonathan Leask  June 18 2011

The travel concerns that threatened the National secondary school cross country championship at the Tinwald Domain subsided yesterday as competitors turned out to analyse the course.

After the ash cloud threw competitors' travels plans in jeopardy the airlines were back flying yesterday allowing the participating schools to make it down.
A majority of the schools made it time for yesterday afternoon's course viewing where they could suss out the tricky parts of the Tinwald Domain and go over the course route.
Some North Island schools, especially from the farther reaches, had made emergency travel arrangements coming down by bus while some had the luxury of being able to hold out long enough to still make their flights.
One such school was Wellington's Scots College, which had in place a contingency plan to use the ferry crossing, but was able to make its flight yesterday and was out inspecting the course.
"It's pretty dry and looks flat and fast," Scots College senior boy's entrant Kieron McDonald said.
"All we had heard before we got here was that it was flat but had a water jump."
Coming from the hills of Wellington, the flat Tinwald Domain course will be a different test for the Scots College athletes and a few others as well.
"We didn't do any out of the ordinary training.
"We just kept to our usual programme, we had a few runs on the flat but that was just a normal part of the training," McDonald said.
All the training will be tested tomorrow when over 1000 athletes take to the course chasing national titles across the seven grades.

Pictured: Checking out the course yesterday were Scots College athletes James Preston, Nicholas Pointon, James Fletcher and Kieron McDonald.