Paul’s
Orienteering Blog
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Saturday 25 – Sunday 26 August 2007
EBOR White Rose – Pickering Forest, North Yorkshire
The White Rose doesn't have the best
reputation for great orienteering, with the forests renowned for being thick,
steep, grotty and generally not very runnable. I'm pleased to say that
this year was no exception. I'm probably old enough to know better, as
this was my 14th White Rose in total since becoming hooked after winning a
prize as an M10 in 1988. However, the main reason I come back year after
year is for an excuse to visit my grandfather who lives in nearby
Middlesbrough, who we don't get to see much for the rest of the year. If
it wasn't for that, I might 
have given up on the White Rose long
ago...
At least this was a new forest for
me, having last been used for the White Rose in 1983. The first day's
M21L course was only 7.4km, one of the shortest ("long distance")
M21L courses I have ever done. As expected, there was a reason for this,
and the winning time at 65 minutes wasn't much too quicker than the guidelines
suggest. I had one of my worst runs of the year, however - primarily
caused by losing huge amounts of time on the first two controls.
The first part of the course was in a
flat, relatively featureless, fairly thick section of "white" forest
and we had four point-feature controls in here which were very difficult to
find with nothing to go on on the map (the vegetation mapping was somewhat
dubious) - very much an example of what I believe are known as "bingo
controls". I have rarely seen so many people wandering around
aimlessly around my first control asking each other "have you found it
yet?!". Eventually I did find number 1, having approached it from
the nearest attack point for the 3rd time, but it was very well hidden.
"Bingo!" I shouted.
Unfortunately I carried on in the
same vein, and lost another large amount of time at number 2, again wandering
around aimlessly fairly near to the control site, but convinced I must have
gone too far into the light green section of the map beyond the control, given
how thick the forest was. As it turned out I was in the white section all
along, and had undershot by 50m or so. So, 750m into the course and 18
minutes down, I lost a bit of motivation, although carried on around the rest
of the course as best I could. It was a very hot day, there was some
pretty horrible steep grotty forest to get through, and I made a number of
other mistakes through tiredness later on in the course. I finished some
40 minutes behind the winner, a pretty disastrous result overall.
I found day 2 much more enjoyable,
however. Although the assembly area was in the same place, we had a long
walk to the start and the first two-thirds of the course were in a different
part of the forest to the day before. Although some of this was still
quite thick and tough, there were some interesting sections with tricky
navigation where you really had to slow down to keep in touch with the
map. I thought it was a very good course with some interesting legs, and
I managed to navigate a lot better - having decided to slow down a bit more
today to make sure I attacked every control properly.
Nick Barrable (who finished 2nd
overall) had started 12 minutes behind me, and had managed to overtake me
without me seeing him from 15-16. I was very please to then catch him up
again on the way to number 21 where he had lost a few minutes, and we then ran
round the last short section of the course together (ok, me just behind).
Although this section from number 20 to the finish only took me 13 minutes, the
splits show that my position improved from 14th at number 20, to finally finish
in 7th place - so a very good finish to the race, and a final result which was
hugely better than the day before.
M21L course
Day 1: 7.4 km / 345m – 104:54 (winner 64:49) – 22nd out of 31
Day 2: 8.5 km / 290m – 86:16 (winner 67:32) – 7th out of 29
Overall: 15.9km / 635m – 191:10
(winner 138:24) –
16th out of 25 finishers Full results here RouteGadget
Sunday
5 – Saturday 11 August 2007
Scottish Six Days – Speyside, Scotland
The Scottish Six Days is probably my
favourite orienteering event, taking place every other year in Scotland, and
this was my 8th time competing (having first taken part as an M10 in 1989 at
Loch Lomond). I had decided to run M21
Elite this year, mainly due to the interesting format which was being used this
year – unlike all the other classes, the Elite had two short races (days 2 and
5), one full-length classic race (day 3), a chasing start complete with
butterfly loops (day 4) and a reverse order start (day 6). It was also different from the other classes
in that every day counted, and that there was no conversion of time to points
scores – total time was all that counted.
I was staying with a SLOW group on
the event campsite. This had been very
good two years ago, but was a lot wetter this time around! – especially in the
first half of the week. I think I’ll
give in and stay somewhere a bit more comfortable next time around…
Day 1 was on Alvie (picture right), one of three areas
during the week which I had previously run on during the Lagganlia junior
training camp in 1993. It was a pretty
tough start, with a long hilly course in a forest which was quite tough going
at times, but very enjoyable with some good technical areas. I lost quite a bit of time on a number of
different controls, but was reasonably satisfied overall.
The second day at Balavil
was quite a strange short race, with only 10 controls, and only about 
1km of the course was in technical
forest. Unfortunately this was this bit
I managed to make a hash of, with two major errors on controls 6 and 7 losing
me around 12 minutes – over 20% of the total time, so not ideal – I think this
was my worst result of the week.
Day 3 was the epic 14km
classic race on Inshriach (picture left). I really enjoyed this race, which was quite
tough with some pretty rough dense forest to go through at times, with some
very tricky controls in the low visibility forest requiring accurate
navigation. It was a very different area
from the intricate east side of Inshriach (used for the 6-Day in 1995), but
still a good challenge and I was pleased with my stamina to still be going
reasonably strongly at the end.
After a welcome rest day, day 4 was
at the beautiful forested sand dunes of Culbin (picture left – the butterfly loops), a complete contrast to all
the other days, with a lot of very highly runnable sections between large areas
of very intricate contours which required maximum concentration. I made a few large blunders very early on, at
the 3rd and 5th controls, losing around 9 minutes here. But I managed to put these behind me and had
an almost perfectly clean run after this, and finally managed to catch Simon
Evans (who had started 2 minutes before me on the chasing start) at the
penultimate control, so my overall result wasn’t too bad.
Day 5 was at a new area,
Camerory, which most people on the longer courses didn’t seem to enjoy too much
due to some rough open heather sections.
Thankfully the Elite short course stayed almost exclusively in the small
forested sections, so we definitely got the best of the area. As with yesterday I made a big mistake at
number 3, and with a few other mistakes I got a pretty bad result (mistakes are
punished much more on short races!).
The final day was at the
lovely Anagach (picture right), a
great technical area with lots of intricate contours. With a reverse-order start list at 3 minute
intervals I had lots of people starting around me who were similar in total
time after the first 5 days. Again I
couldn’t take this pressure (!) and blew the first control badly, losing around
5 minutes. I did have a reasonably solid
run after this, but by two thirds of the way round I was starting to feel
really tired – finally the effects of two weeks of hard M21E catching up with
me. Simon re-caught me up at the
penultimate control to beat me by 5 minutes overall, and I also lost 2 other
places on the final day by a few minutes – although I did manage to stay ahead
of one other runner by 5 seconds overall.
Some close competition at the bottom of the 
results!
Overall it was a very
enjoyable week with some excellent orienteering areas and good tough
courses. I didn’t have any run I was
particularly pleased with, with far too many mistakes all through the week –
hopefully things will improve when I’m back in familiar south-east terrain in
the autumn! I enjoyed running Elite
though and coped pretty well physically, if not technically, but will have to
wait and see whether I will run it again next time.
M21E course
(1) Alvie – 9.6 km/415m – 87:16 (winner 59:21) – 58th out of 66
(2) Balavil – 5.0 km/180m – 55:27 (winner 32:29) – 61st out of 66
(3) Inshriach West – 14.0 km/390m – 125:54 (winner 82:56) – 50th out
of 63
(4) Culbin – 9.6 km/100m – 82:46 (winner 52:35) – 60th out of 66
(5) Camerory – 5.1 km/110m – 56:25 (winner 34:36) – 56th out of 64
(6) Anagach West and Heathfield – 10.0km/260m – 90:56 (winner 57:07) – 59th
out of 62
OVERALL – 53.3 km/1455m – 8:18:44 (winner 5:24:51) – 47th out of 51
finishers Full results here
Thursday
26 – Monday 30 July 2007
OO Cup – Nazarje, Slovenia
This was the first of 2 multi-day
events I'm doing this summer, with the Scottish 6-Days following almost
straight afterwards. I travelled to Slovenia with a group of eight
SLOW/JOK members for the OO Cup, Slovenia's annual multi-day event which was
extended to 5 days for the first time this year. I had been told people
how technical the terrain was in Slovenia, with a few different people telling
me these were the most complex areas they had ever competed at. I
certainly wasn't disappointed – the terrain was indeed very intricate at times,
far more complex than anything I'm used to running on, which was very
challenging and enjoyable. The weather was very hot for most of the week,
with temperatures averaging around 30 degrees, which made for pretty tough
running conditions at times – especially as I'd chosen to run M21E, along with
three others in the group.
The event was based around Nazarje, a
small town in north-central Slovenia, around an hour away from the capital
Ljubljana. After a day sightseeing – including a visit to the famous Lake
Bled in the north-west of the country – we checked into our accommodation for
the week, a couple of nice wooden self-catering chalets around 20 minutes drive
away from the event centre. Staying next door were a couple of Swedish families
also competing at the event.
Day
1 – Tiha dolina [above right]
This turned out to be the toughest day of the week - my speed of 17 min/km's
was my slowest for many a year! Even the Elite winner was only going
round in 10 min/km's, which says something about the area. It was mainly
very technical rocky hilly forest - runnability was very tough in places due to
all the rocks, and it was very energy-sapping with the hills and heat and rough
forest as well. I really struggled with the navigation at times as well,
with around 25 minutes of mistakes, spread out over many different
controls. We did have a couple of long legs, but apart from that it was
an epic control picking course which had me thoroughly knackered by the
end. We'd initially thought the courses looked a little short, at only
6.8km for the Elite, but I certainly wasn't thinking that 114 minutes later!
Day
2 – Mala in Velika planina jug [left]
This event was based at
the same assembley area, but was a stark contrast to the day before, being
mainly open alpine terrain, very similar to some of the days at last year's
Swiss O Week. The heat was very strong today in the open, and again the
climb was pretty tough. My run also had a couple of significant errors,
which couldn't really be blamed on the intricate terrain which was much more
straightforward than day 1. The scariest thing was that the area was
covered in very large cows and bulls (compete with cow bells) - not a problem
in practice as they couldn't care less about orienteers as we ran amongst them,
but I have been known to have run-ins with cows in the past!
Day
3 – Letuš [right]
I enjoyed this day
immensley, much more so than the previous two. Definitely my favourite
day of the week, and also my best result (coincidence?!). It was a short
race, only 4.2km, with completely different terrain to the previous two days -
a very small area of very runnable intricate "karst" terrain, with
the large depressions scattered all over the map being the main navigation
aid. With an average leg length of under 250m, the only way to navigate
here was to stay in constant map contact throughout and take things fairly
steadily. For once I managed to do this, and only lost a minute or two in
navigation (only very small mistakes in the circle), and had a very pleasing
result - still running at what seemed a pretty slow 9 min/km's, but with a much
higher position than I managed on the rest of the week. I also managed to
overturn the 14 minute lead that Jon Marsden had built up on me over the
previous 2 days, to leave us just a minute apart with two days to go.
Day
4 – Črni graben [left]
This day had a beastly
walk to the start, 2km with 250m of climb, but the course that followed was
mostly back down the hill! The terrain was very similar to the day
before, but with a course of twice the length. I generally had a fairly
good run, and caught 5 mins up on Jon early on, before then making a horrible
10 minute mistake which included running off the map for a short time (always
makes relocation more difficult I find). Despite that I gradually got
back into it, and finally caught Jon up again about 80% of the way round and
beat him in by a minute.
Day
5 – Veniše [right]
Today was a complete
contrast to the previous four days - both in terms of weather (gone was the
glorious sun, to be replaced by non-stop torrential rain), and terrain, which
was more similar to south-east England than anything else, with lots of paths
and some quite thick forest. I found the course very enjoyable, with lots
of good route-choice legs which made for interesting splits comparisons (some I
got right, some wrong). Time loss wasn't too bad overall. Ed Catmur
caught up 10 minutes up on me towards the end of the course, but I was pleased
to manage to out-sprint him on the run-in!
Overall a very enjoyable week, and I
really felt my navigation skills had improved during the week - I was probably
a bit out of practice at the start, having not done much orienteering for a
while, but now I feel tuned in and ready for Scotland!
