Paul’s
Orienteering Blog
Tuesday 19 June 2007
SLOW Trail Challenge – Richmond, Surrey
It had been over a
year since I had run in one of these races, which are mass-start
technically-easy orienteering races, designed to encourage road and
cross-country runners to try a bit of orienteering, but which also provide
regular orienteers with some good fun head-to-head racing at a much faster pace
than we are used to with normal orienteering.
This event was hosted from the Ranelagh Harriers clubhouse in Petersham,
which was a good venue with a nice pub next door for afterwards. The race used SLOW’s Ham Riverside map, which
I had run on countless times before – an interesting area which combines
parkland around the Thames towpath with the urban streets of Ham, as well as a
few bits of woodland and the western edge of Richmond Park.
I started the race too
quickly for my own good, trying to stay with the leaders from the start, only
to realise after 10 minutes that I wouldn’t be able to stay at their pace (my
Splitsbrowser graph shows quite a dip after the first 2 controls). I then made a few stupid mistakes, losing 45
seconds through a poor loss of concentration from 2-3, and over a minute from
5-6 when I took a very convoluted route through a housing estate. So much for coping with the
“technically-easy” navigation!
The weather was
also pretty poor, and we had a good 5 or 10 minutes of very torrential rain
half-way through the race, which probably slowed me down a bit more (I don’t
like the rain). I was completely
shattered by the end, not helped by some cruel planning which took us up and
down the hill in Richmond Park twice over the last few controls! My overall result was still reasonably
respectable, although a long 9 minutes behind Nick Barrable’s win.
Saturday
16 June 2007
North Downs Way Relay – Puttenham to Farnham, Surrey
This race is an
annual relay along the length of the North Downs Way, 123 miles from Dover
through to Farnham, which was the brainchild of my Dad about 30 years ago when
he founded the race! He is pleased to
see that the race is still going today, although there are not many teams
competing these days, with just 4 full teams (SLOW, Guildford, Saxons and
Canterbury Harriers), plus another second-half team from SLOW.
The race starts at
5:30am from Dover, and comprises a total of 16 legs of between 8km and 17km in
length. I was busy for the rest of the
day, so declared that I could only do one of the last few legs, which I meant I
was tasked with the final leg 16, a fairly short 10.6km leg from Puttenham
through to Farnham, due to start at around 6pm.
I had recce’d the leg in advance to make sure I knew where I was going –
the North Downs Way is generally fairly well signposted, but it certainly helps
to know the route – which was a good job
in the end as I hadn’t anticipated how much would be riding on the final
leg. The race was not a true relay, to
avoid having teams spread out over long distances towards the end of the race,
so many legs – including my one – were done as mass starts, with everyone
starting when the leader on the previous leg arrives. I knew when I set off that SLOW were trailing
Guildford by around 3 minutes at the end of leg 14, but that deficit would also
be extended by the extent Guildford’s Pete Nicholls (who came home in the lead
on leg 15) had beaten SLOW’s Pete Huzan on that leg. Guildford had Kath Denton running on the last
leg – although I was confident of running well on the leg, I wasn’t sure how
much I could beat her by over 10km.
I quickly ran out of sight
of the other 4 runners on the leg, and spent the rest of the time running on my
own as hard as I could. However I got a
bit of a shock when half-way through on a road section a car pulled up beside
me, with Andy Robinson telling me I needed to beat Guildford by 14 minutes on
the leg. The SLOW entourage also
contained Pete & Heather in another car, helpfully handing me a bottle of
water and encouraging me on. I thought
14 minutes would probably be far too much time to gain, but I kept going as
strongly as I could to the end, and finished in a good time of 44 minutes, with
a good crowd at the end to cheer me in.
A few people were muttering that I might have beaten the all-time leg
record – I even received a round of applause for doing so – but it turned out
later that I had actually missed it by just 8 seconds! A bit disappointing – I’ll have to come back
next year and put that right.
The time ticked by
at the finish waiting for Kath, and it was a long time before even the second
placed runner on the leg appeared. It
had just got to the stage where I thought we were actually going to win it,
when Kath appeared, finally crossing the line with just 40 seconds to
spare. Guildford’s winning time for the
full 123 miles was 16 hours 33 minutes 41 seconds, and SLOW had finished just
40 seconds behind! Although we were
quite unlucky to lose by such a close margin in the end, Guildford probably
deserved their win, having been in the lead all the way from the very first
leg.
We finished with
the usual post race social in the Good Intent pub in Puttenham, where Jeremy
and the GO team finally got their hands on the race trophy. We’ll have it back next year!
Leg 16 – 10.6km
Result: 44:33 – 1st out of 5
Team result: 16:34:21 (winners 16:33:41)
– 2nd out of 4 Full results here
Saturday
9 / Sunday 10 June 2007
Lowe Alpine Mountain Marathon – Glen Lochay, Stirling
After many years
of thinking about trying a mountain marathon, I finally attempted my first one
last weekend, competing in the Lowe Alpine Mountain Marathon (LAMM) in Scotland
with Simon Evans on the C class. Simon had completed 3 previous mountain
marathons, so was experienced enough to guide me through - I've not even done
that much camping before, so was certainly a novice in many respects to the
strange world of mountain marathons. I had previously been put off doing
them by a number of things - mainly that I had never quite fancied the idea of
running for 2 full days with a rucksack full of kit on my back, alongside all
the stories of the overnight camping in torrential weather. This was one
of the reasons why I decided the LAMM would be a good event to try, as being
held in June the chances of good weather were much better than the OMM in
October. And I certainly wasn't disappointed in that respect - the
weather was very warm indeed, and I got a bit sunburnt on the first day!
In the end I found running
with a rucksack was fine, having got the weight down as low as possible, helped
by borrowing various bits of lightweight kit. Pete Huzan kindly lent us
his tent (along with a few other bits) - probably the smallest tent I have ever
seen, with just about enough room to slide into and not quite enough to sit up
in when inside. Made for a cosy night with Simon, so it's a good job
we're good friends! Ian also lent me his lightweight sleeping bag - not
the down material which is ideal for cold weather conditions, this had a
"comfort temperature" rating of 12-16 degrees. Thankfully this was
about the temperature we had, and I was perfectly warm enough overnight, though
I'm not sure how warm this bag would be in the winter.
Our problems started at Glasgow airport on the Friday night, when having waited
for a long time at the baggage reclaim, we finally realised Simon's bag wasn't
going to appear! This contained our base
camp tent, and all of Simon's running kit/shoes etc. We spoke to the BMI
lost baggage desk, who told us that the unfortunately the bag hadn't made it
onto the flight, but would be sent on the next flight up later in the evening -
but too late for us with the event coach leaving soon after. However they promised that they would courier
it to us that evening to wherever we needed it to go. We wrote down a
convoluted set of directions on how to reach our field in the middle of
nowhere, but were still very sceptical about the chances of the bag actually
making it there. But thankfully, after a few phone calls to check
progress and give more directions, a man finally arrived in a little white van
at the LAMM campsite at about 11pm with Simon's bag - and there was still just
enough light to put up the tent without using torches.
After that it pretty much
all went smoothly. We were woken by a 6am alarm call provided by a
bagpiper walking round the campsite - very loud when he walked past our
tent! After a nice cooked breakfast from Wilf's, we were bussed 10
minutes around the edge of the area to the NW side of the map. I was a
bit disappointed that we had to mark the courses onto our maps (in competition
time), being given a list of grid references – I can't remember the last time I
didn't have an overprinted map in orienteering – but we probably actually
gained time over other teams on this section. At least we marked
everything in the right place, unlike one of the leading Elite teams who wasted
40 minutes looking for a control in the wrong grid square!
We lost a small amount of time on number 1, which was a 1 km climb and then
long contouring leg to a stream. I took a lot of getting used to the map
here - we probably crossed about 10 streams before reaching the right one, none
of which were marked on the map (but all of which would have been on an orienteering
map), and we were starting to worry we had missed the control, although when we
finally saw it down below us the actual marked stream was much bigger. It
also took me a while to adjust to the 1:40,000 scale of the map – it looked
like a relatively very short leg on what was an enormous map, but took us
around 40 minutes to get there.
I gradually got used to the style and scale of the map, and enjoyed the next
leg which was about 8 km long - the split of 85 minutes I think is a new record
for me. The navigation was made a lot easier by the long line of teams
ahead of us all going the same way, who we gradually picked off. In particular, on leg 2-3 we could see the
whole leg marked out with people ahead of us. We went a very different
way to the planner's chosen routes (see link below) on a few legs, choosing to
go round the hills rather than over them (mainly on 1-2 where we went up Coire
Daingean, and on 4-5 went long way round via the loch – very happy with both of
these routes).
Our only major time loss on
the first day was having to stop for a few minutes to put a Compeed plaster on
Simon's toe which was blistering – and having then got running again, Simon
realised after a few hundred metres that he no longer had his compass! Thankfully he went back and found it very
quickly on the ground where we had stopped so didn't lose too much extra
time. We lost a bit more time at the penultimate control, which we were
both convinced was too high up the slope and not really on a spur (which was
the given description). We were both very tired by the end, but thought
we had done quite well as we were only just over the 5 hour estimated winning
time. We were 7th out of about 25 when
we finished, but ended up holding onto 7th position (out of 145 finishers) by
the end, as we had been one of the latest starters – we probably overtook
almost 100 teams during the race.
The overnight campsite was good, a very large flat area with nice big stream
which was good for soaking the aching muscles in. It was also good to
catch up with some of the other teams – there were a couple of other SLOW
runners competing (Owen Lindsell, who finished a few places behind us on the C,
and Andy Jones a bit further back, as well as Caroline & Tim Court running
the D), as well as a number of other orienteering friends from around the
country.
Dinner consisted of 4 pot noodles and a cup of custard – light to carry and
full of energy. It made a pleasant change from the Mars bars and energy
bars/gels I had been eating during the race! I had also quickly got used
to drinking water out of streams on the run – I had been quite sceptical about
this beforehand, but in the end the mountain spring water tasted better than
the stuff I get out of my tap at home! (though perhaps any water would taste
good when you're feeling very thirsty after walking up a mountain).
We got up at about 5.45am on Sunday morning, to give us plenty of time for our
7.15am start (beating the bagpiper out of bed this time). Day 2 was a
Chasing Start, with race position numbers having to be worn front & back,
which made it a very different race to the previous day, with the pressure
really on. Also there was no long line
of slower people to follow this time!
Again we lost time on number
1, along with a few other teams, looking far too high up the slope (we were
convinced the flag was too low), and we reached it together with the 6th &
8th placed teams. We then made a snap decision to go back down the hill
for a 1km track run before climbing all the way to number 2 – not a good
decision, and we reckon we lost up 5 minutes on this leg (the 6th team beat us
by 6 minutes on that split, although I'm not sure we'd have kept up with
them).
After that we did
what turned out to be the planner's chosen route pretty much all the way. We
did re-overtake the 8th placed team on the way to number 3, and eventually
managed to get away from them. I found leg 3-4 very tough traversing round the
large hill, and my feet were really hurting by this stage – the 10th placed team
overtook us on the climb near the end of this leg. Leg 4-5 was very
tough, a horrible long climb up through rough terrain, which was made confusing
by lots of unmapped fences, although we just kept climbing and used the
contours to find the control.
I felt like I was on the verge of collapse by this stage, but Simon managed to
push me on through the last downhill leg. We were nearly at the bottom of
the hill when Simon shouted back at me that there was a team behind us closing
in - looking round they were probably only 200m behind and moving
quickly. That gave me a new lease of life, and we managed to run hard the
last 5 minutes for home to beat the other team by around 30 seconds (who it
turned out were the overnight 5th placed team we had just overtaken, by them
making a mistake on the penultimate control).
We were very surprised to be
told at download we had finished in 5th place, having seen 1 team overtake us,
but it turned out that the leading 2 teams were both disqualified for missing
out number 4 (having convinced each other that the control must be missing as
they were sure they had found the right place). So with prizes given out
for the top 6 teams we had managed to finish on the podium! - and won ourselves
a thermal base layer top each for our efforts.
I was glad that we
chose to run the C class, although if the course distances are to be believed
then our speed would have meant that we would have won the B class by around 40
minutes! I’m sure that wouldn’t have happened
in reality, but it shows that we must have been going pretty well.
My legs are still feeling very tired now, shoulders aching from carrying the
rucksack for 2 days, and a few blisters between us (nothing too bad for me
thankfully - my new Innov8 Mudclaw 270's held out very well), but very pleased
with the weekend's efforts. So I certainly did enjoy my first mountain
marathon experience, though I’m not convinced yet whether I will become a
regular - not sure I'd have enjoyed it quite so much if the weather hadn't been
as nice!
Monday
28 May 2007
SLOW Surrey Hills Race – The Nower / Leith Hill / Holmbury Hill / Pitch Hill,
Surrey
Having completed a
few long runs recently, I decided I would be up for having another go at the
full 18 mile/30 km Surrey Hills Race course, two years after my only previous
attempt at the full distance. Last year
I had run the B course, which is slightly further than half of the full A
course distance at 16km. The full A
course is a wonderful route through the beautiful Surrey Hills, starting at the
Nower in Dorking, before running all the way up to Leith Hill (at which point
the B course heads home), then onto Holmbury Hill, followed by Pitch Hill, then
back across the Holmbury Hill area before going back to the northern part of
the Leith Hill area and finally back to the Nower. I reckon the course takes in about 700m of
climb, so not quite on the same scale as last weekend’s fell race in the Lakes,
but still fairly hilly for the south of England, and distance-wise this is the
longest race I have ever done barring two marathons.
The weather today
was foul – the rain was quite heavy and didn’t stop all day, and was
particularly cold as well. I was pleased
to have been able to borrow a cagoule from Don (having forgotten my own!) which
I ran in as was very grateful for. This
weather was still probably better than having conditions which were too hot,
but it did seem to keep the numbers slightly down from previous years which was
a shame.
Two years ago I had
completed the A course in 2 hours 41 minutes, although this had included a
3-minute navigational error – so I was really aiming to beat 2:38 to show some
improvement from then. I started fairly
steadily although made a small route choice mistake on the way from 2 to 3 by
blindly following the 3 people in front who took a slightly wrong route –
probably cost me 30 seconds or so. After
that my navigation was pretty much flawless – but then I had run the course
before and was almost exclusively around tracks! I found leg 3-4 a bit of a struggle as I
always do, the first real climb of the race, and on the way from 4-5 I felt
really tired and was wondering if I would manage to go the distance. However I enjoyed this leg up to Leith Hill –
helped by following Pete Nicholls on a useful short-cut which I had heard about
but never used before – and was rejuvenated by the first drinks point at Leith
Hill tower and then the long downhill after that.
I had to walk for
the first time on the way up to Holmbury Hill (number 6 on the map) – a very
steep climb up from the road to the trig point – and I was certainly flagging a
bit by this stage. However the next
drinks point at the school on the way up to Pitch Hill (number 7) included a
very welcome handful of jelly babies from Steve Allen who was manning it, which
gave me a vital energy boost (at least mentally). I did walk a bit again up to Pitch Hill (at
which point Ed Catmur passed me coming down, about 7 minutes ahead), but was pleased
to reach the top and start heading back for home. By this time I was running with two other
runners, who I stayed with for most of the rest of the race.
The next leg
across Holmbury is fairly nice, with not much climb other than a short sharp
slope in the middle of the leg (which I did struggle with), and then the long
leg back onto the Leith Hill area was tough with a hard climb in the middle of
the leg. Having reached number 9 though
it was mostly downhill from there on, other than a tough little climb back up
to the monument on the Nower – I walked most of the way up to that, but then
enjoyed the downhill run-in on which I recorded the fastest split on the A
course (although beaten by a few B course runners).
I had no idea of
my time, so was very pleased to find I had got round in 2 hours 29 minutes,
knocking over 12 minutes off my previous race time – I really didn’t think I
had gone that much faster than last time, as it felt like I had done more
walking, but I must have been running significantly faster which was very
pleasing. I was very happy to finish in
4th place overall, and less than 1 minute behind 2nd place (who was Peter
Forester who had won my course yesterday beating me by 7 minutes), although a
long way behind Ed’s convincing win. My
legs are very stiff now though – I think I might struggle to walk tomorrow!
Sunday
27 May 2007
SAX District event – Ightham, Kent
With many
orienteers up at the 3-day Shropshire event, the only orienteering in the
south-east on Sunday was this Saxon’s event at Ightham. This is a fairly pleasant runnable area (at
least for Kent!) which I had been to quite a few times before – my last visit
was exactly a year ago, where I had managed my first ever win on a Brown
course, so brought back good memories.
The longest course today was
the Blue, although at 7.2km it was only 300m less than last year’s Brown course
– so a different shade of effectively the same course. The weather was poor all day, although I
managed to miss the worst of the rain with a fairly late start. We were given the map beforehand at
registration – very unusual to get the chance to plan routes beforehand, but I
only spent a couple of minutes looking at the map in order to realise that
there wasn’t really any route choice that required thinking about, so I don’t
think it was an issue at this event – but I wouldn’t like to see that approach
becoming more common.
My run today certainly
wasn’t as clean as a year ago, and my time loss totalled around 5½ minutes,
spread over 7 different controls. The
biggest time loss was 2 minutes on number 13 (pictured) – a platform which
ended up being a lot lower down the slope than I was expecting. A few other people I spoke to had similar
problems here and the splits show a lot of people lost time on this leg, so
perhaps it was lower down that actually marked.
Other than this
leg I was just fairly scrappy in a number of places, and finished in a time 3
minutes slower than a year ago, despite the slightly shorter course. This meant I had to settle for 3rd place
today, some 7 minutes behind the winner.
Blue course – 7.2 km / 150 m
Result: 58:33 (winner 51:35) – 3rd out of 41 Full
results here Splitsbrowser
Sunday
20 May 2007
LOC National event – Caw, Cumbria
Today’s event was just down
the road from the previous day’s fell race, and we were drinking at a pub right
in the shadow of Caw on Saturday night (the pub appeared on the northern end of
the old map of the area, from when I had last run here in 1994). Today’s course was almost as hilly and epic
as yesterday’s, with 615m of climb in just under 12km, and the area certainly
felt tough and hilly – and my legs weren’t feeling quite up to it after
yesterday’s exertions.
I
really enjoyed the orienteering however – this was really good technical terrain and I
really enjoyed it. It’s not too often I
get to orienteer in terrain like this, where you actually have to map read all
the time and can’t just burn around the paths. I navigated reasonably
well for me considering there were pretty much no paths at all, although made a
few little blips early on, but once I’d got into the map and the style of
orienteering required then I really started to enjoy it. Looking at Splitsbrowser now still suggests I
had about 8 minutes of mistakes, but at 7% of total running time that’s better
than a lot of other races I’ve had this year.
There were a few good long
route choice legs, particularly 15-16, for which I saw 4 quite different routes
when discussing afterwards – but for once I think mine was actually about the
best and I had a reasonable split for it at just over 17 minutes!. Splitsbrowser backs this up by giving me a
“gain” of 2:54 for this leg, suggesting it should have taken me over 20
minutes! (although perhaps this is also due to other people losing time on it,
as it was a fairly tricky control site).
It wasn’t a great result
overall, but I was quite shattered by the end, and was happy just to still be
running for the last few controls. It
was also good to beat Niall by a minute or so, after he’d beaten me by 23
minutes the day before!
Saturday 19
May 2007
Fairfield Horseshoe Fell Race – Rydal, Cumbria
My brother Ian got
into fell racing a couple of years ago, and these days does far more fell
racing than orienteering, all over the Yorkshire Dales, Lake District and
beyond – he finds the standard of competition much better in fell races than in
orienteering. I did fail to see the
attraction to start with, when each of these races sounded like a horrendous
slog up the side of a mountain. However,
after Ian recommended that I read Feet
In The Clouds, a truly wonderful book about the joys and madness of fell
running, I started to think that maybe at least I would like to give it a
go. So after much persuasion, many
months ago I agreed to come up for a week in the Lake District combining one of
the classic English fell races with a National orienteering event the next day.
True to form
however, Ian managed to get himself injured a few months before the race and
was still not up to running by the time of the weekend, so he didn’t even
compete in the races! However I still
went along and had a great weekend, travelling up to the Lakes from Leeds with
Niall Bourke and staying the night at a remote hut owned by Leeds University
with a great mixture of Irish orienteers and Yorkshirian cross country runners,
full of tales of epic training runs which made me realise just how mad you have
to be to be a serious fell runner.
We were given a
free map at registration, which stated that the race distance was 16 km with a
massive 900m of climb – almost all in the first half of the race! There was no set route marked out (apart from
on the way to number 1 to avoid Nab Scar), just 5 controls which had to be
visited, although the route was fairly obvious and straightforward (follow the
paths!).
Thankfully the
torrential rainstorm stopped about 10 minutes before the race started, just when
I was wondering what the hell I was doing about to try and run up the imposing
mountain in front of us. One thing I
wasn’t used to was carrying a bum bag with compulsory kit (waterproof top and
trousers, plus map/compass etc) which I didn’t find too comfortable to run
with. However I didn’t really do a whole
lot of running for the first hour of the race.
The first 5 minutes was a steady climb along tracks, which gradually just
got steeper and steeper as we headed onto the moor. Within 10 minutes I was struggling to walk,
along with most others around me – I had been worried that everyone else would
be charging up the hill at full steam leaving me behind, but it was pleasing to
see that walking large portions of the uphill was perfectly expected, at least
at my position in the field (the 
leaders quickly ran out of
sight at the front).
After finally
reaching the first control, the climb became a lot less severe, and I managed
to run a fair bit of the route to 2, albeit very slowly up the hills, before
staggering up to the highest point of the course, Fairfield, at number 3. A real sense of achievement making it up to
here! I’d thought it was downhill all
the way from here, but there was still a fair climb up to Dove Cragg at which
point I had very little energy left.
However, from here on it really was downhill all the way – going from 4
to 5 was so much fun, a fantastic 5 km leg just going down and down, and I
really got what felt like a fast pace going – this is what I imagined fell
racing to be all about. There was a
nasty slightly uphill finish, but it was with great satisfaction that I finally
completed the race in 1 hour 55 minutes, just beating the 2 hour target which I
had set myself – but still 40 minutes behind the winner!
So it was a very enjoyable
experience overall, and although the first half of the race was very painful
the second half made up for that. Not
sure I’ll be rushing up north to do many more fell races though – a bit too far
to travel on a regular basis – but at least I might give Box Hill a go for the
first time next year!
Fell race – 16.0km / 900 m
Result: 115:01 (winner 75:13) – 294th out of 454 Full results here
A few other orienteering
blogs: