Paul’s
Orienteering Blog
Sunday 21 October 2007
GO District event – Puttenham Common & Britty Wood, Surrey
After last week’s epic 9-hour round
trip to Nottinghamshire, it was nice to do something much closer to home. Today’s event at Puttenham was only 10 miles
away from home (and I was nearly tempted to cycle there!). It was a lovely crisp sunny autumn morning,
perfect weather for orienteering, and an enjoyable race.
The Brown course was fairly
short at 8.4km, but the area couldn’t have coped with a much bigger course
without resorting to back-to-back maps.
With the car parking being on the far western side of the area, it was
only the Blue and Brown courses which made it across to Puttenham Common, which
I thought was the more interesting and trickier part of the area. The area was covered in quite a lot of dead
bracken, which made running tough going at times in some of the wooded areas –
although there were some elephant tracks through in places, I don’t think I
found all of them. I guess that’s only
to be expected at this time of year though, and hopefully in a month’s time or
so most areas will be relatively bracken-free.
I wasn’t running as well as
last week for whatever reason (and I seem to have gone down with a nasty cold
since the event, so maybe I was a bit under the weather). Navigationally I reckon I lost about 4
minutes in total, with errors at controls 9, 12 and 20. So not as good a result as last week, but I
was still reasonably happy overall and enjoyed orienteering in the autumn
sunshine.
Brown course – 8.4km / 230m
Result: 61:52 (winner 49:15) – 17th
out of 78 Full
results here RouteGadget
Sunday
14 October 2007
NOC Compass Sport Cup Final – Blidworth & Sansom Woods, Nottinghamshire
Finally back out in the forest
for my first orienteering since August.
Compass Sport Cup matches are always a good team day out, and this was
the third year in a row that SLOW had qualified for the final. This year we put on a team coach to take us
up to the East Midlands, although in order to get there for the early starters
this did mean quite an early morning, with the coach leaving Wimbledon shortly
after 6.30am, just 6˝ hours before my start time.
But what a delightful forest it
was. Hmm. To be fair, at least we had all been warned
of what to expect – when the final details include quotes such as “significant
areas of forest mapped as runnable have bramble and bracken growth” and “we
strongly advise robust full leg cover” then you know it’s not going to
beautiful runnable forest, and it certainly wasn’t. The early finishers confirmed our initial
suspicions that the best tactics were going to be to stick to the paths as much
as possible, just ducking in and out of the forest to get the controls. I was just pleased that I had a late start,
as there were certainly quite a lot of ‘elephant tracks’ out there created by
the early runners who must have found it much tougher going.
I stuck to my tactics of
running round the paths as much as possible throughout the race, with even a
long deviation on the first leg to stay out of the forest (see map extract right). Most
people I spoke to also took this route to number 1, although it turns out that
going straight, and right through a 100m block of fight, was actually a much
quicker route – not that you could tell that from the map. The vegetation throughout the map was quite
inconsistent, with many patches of white being very tough to run through but
some light green areas being quite nice.
Still, it always seemed to be best to stay on the paths as much as
possible anyway.
I found that I was running
fairly strongly today, although felt that I went off a bit fast as I found it
much tougher going in the second half.
The most pleasing thing today though was my navigation, as despite a
2-month break from orienteering I made less than one minute of mistakes today –
this was my cleanest orienteering race for a number of years! Admittedly it was quite an easy area
technically, and I was helped by the tracks, but it was still nice to have a
mistake-free run when lots of other people clearly had lost time on various
controls.
In the end my time of 68
for 9.8km does not seem particularly fast, but my new toy (the Garmin 305 GPS
watch) told me that I had run 12.4km in total, adding on an extra 27% for all
my roundabout routes. Still, my result
was very pleasing, beating a number of people that I don’t usually beat. I hope this is a good sign of things to come
for the rest of the autumn!
Tuesday
9 October 2007
SLOW Street-O – City of London
No orienteering in
the last month, so my next race was another Street-O. This one was held right in the middle of the
City, starting from Exchange Square just outside Liverpool Street station, with
the area covering most of the old City area and extending down across the river
to cover some of the south bank. Numbers
were up again with 54 competitors in total, a new record. We used the mass start format again, although
it was already dark by the start time of 7pm this time.
It was tricky to plan the
best route, and there were lots of controls fairly close together all over the
area, particularly in the South Bank (see
picture right), which meant I found it hard to get much ‘control flow’
going – too much stopping and starting.
In the end my route choice took me all around the edge of the map but
meant that I missed a few high scoring controls in the middle, which I might have
had time for with a bit more planning.
Still, at least I wasn’t one of the unlucky ones who got caught by Tower
Bridge being up when they got there to cross it!
Like last month I
made it back with only about 30 seconds to go, so my time judgement is getting
better. My result also improved from
last month and I made it back into the top 5.
Street score race – 60-minute time limit
Result: 445 points (winner 530) – 5th out of 47 Full results here
Tuesday
11 September 2007
SLOW Street-O – Battersea & Chelsea, west London
This was the first Street-O
of SLOW’s 2007/08 series, and was hosted by Mike Garvin from the Millennium
Arena in Battersea Park, which had previously played host to the 2005
orienteering World Cup sprint race final.
In a change from the normal format of SLOW’s Street-O events, this race
was run as a mass start from 7pm which meant that everyone managed to complete
almost their entire run in the light – that won’t be possible again until the
April 2008 event. We had a good turnout
with 45 competing – these events seem to attract more and more people all the
time. One of my first SLOW Street-O
events was held in Battersea in February 2004 and had only 14 competitors, so
it’s good to see that this seems to be at least one element of orienteering
which is increasing in participation!
I chose a poor
route from the start, crossing the Thames on the middle of three bridges on the
map, whereas I should have gone out on the eastern-most and back on the
western-most. This meant I ended up
running a lot further than I needed to in order to cover the controls north of
the river. It looked a good route at the
time! I measured on a map afterwards
that I had covered 12.4km; Simon reckoned he had done 12.0km and got exactly
the same points score, so there were certainly better routes out there. I didn’t even have time to get a simple
10-pointer only 100m from the finish on my way back, although I did just manage
to duck under the hour time limit.
Checking back
through my results, this was my 23rd Street-O event in total (since my first
one in January 2004) and in finishing 9th I achieved my lowest ever position
– though of course this must link back
to my earlier comment about increasing participation numbers!
Street score race – 60-minute time limit
Result: 530 points (winner 690) – joint 9th out of 43 Full results here
A few other
orienteering blogs: