Category: Orienteering Events Log

This was a well attended local event, the local was just down the road from the excellent Bagshot Heath map. My last event however was back in October, so I wasn’t too suprised to get a fairly slow time (it was sub 9mins/km, but the winner did sub 7mins/km.)

I took 48:23 to get around the 5.55km Blue course, which had a suprising amount of climbing in it. The terrain however was extremely pleasant, as long as you looked out for the loose barbed wire, trip hires, and hidden bolt holes in this typical army training area. The course design was tight and I managed to make a number of mistakes, including an extremely silly one near the end that cost me at least 4 minutes and 50m.

Finally – a rhetorical question. Why can’t more events be on Saturdays? This was an easy 40 minute train journey away from Waterloo, thanks to the frequently Saturday timetable – I would have had a 90 minute journey if it had been on Sunday. Also there was no way I would have made it on Sunday due to a Saturday night party as I would have been too tired (ironically in the end I was too tired from this event to make it to the Saturday night party…)

I almost missed this event, missing a train connection. I made it half an hour after the start closed, having to do a “DIY” start in the end. My glasses also fell apart during the rush at the start (I now wear contacts) which somewhat hindered my progress through the forest – the main issue was I couldn’t see undergrowth directly in front and so frequently ended up impaled on the local flora.

Anyway… I really liked this area, in fact it would rank just outside my top 10 all time areas. It’s a military training area, with tank tracks, light forest and crazy, confusing line features – ideal for technical orienteering, really. I had an OK run considering my reduced visibility – taking 77 minutes to do an 8.02km, 220m circuit. My par time would have been around 65-70 minutes. Some parts of the forest contained enough tracks to really confuse me – one particularly interesting one looped up a slope, then straight back down, then up, then down… Gigantic, man-made puddles/ponds in the very wide roads also presented the competitors with the classic through-or-round choice. Only as these were man-made, some were deliberately much deeper than expected.

Bagshot is a classic bit of Berkshire forest – the county is full of long, rolling forests that remind me of parts of the Scottish Highlands (without the mountains) – and I’m planning to be back fairly regularly to the general area for other orienteering events.

Another epic bike/train/bike trip to get to the start of this one – made more interesting by the railway station being a good 150m below the event start. Trosley Country Park is a lot like Shotover Park, an area in Oxford I’ve been many times. The sharp drop at the edge of the North Downs dominates the whole area, with the flat, wooded section in the north abruptly halted by the steep, 100m drop down in open countryside.

The Blue course, which I did, had an impressive 200m climb (this is southern England, remember) and 24 controls, for just 6.5km. The route basically involved two loops, which meant climbing the big embankment twice – but also plunging down it uncontrollably twice.

My time was over 10 mins/km – 68:31 – but the winner managed only just under 9mins/km and I was well up the list in the end. Simon Evans, another SLOW M21er, had a flying race to finish second.

I had no problems with my back after last week’s disappointment, although the excitement continued on my way back home – I built up some speed on the 150m drop back to the railway station, and misjudged a roundabout badly, taking quite a tumble on the kerb and basically writing off my bike. 2 years service around Oxford and a month in London – it deserved better, but it took the impact for me thankfully and I escaped with just scraped hands and a lot of shock. Oh, and I missed the train…

This was a bit of an epic to get to, tucked between the South Downs and the Channel, near lovely Arundel, My epic relay of a bike ride to Victoria, a 90 minute train journey, and another four mile bike ride, got me warmed up, but I twisted my back just as I was coming down the last hill to the event site. It was the usual back pain problem, in the same place as before. So I had to sit it out – I bought some proper O-shoes, finally, for the season, while I was there. By all accounts it was a tougher area than the map looked, particularly the Nore Hill section which had some interesting looking earth features (I didn’t see them as I wasn’t walking anywhere.) The prospect of a long journey back with a bad back making movement difficult, was initially very daunting, but in the end it wasn’t that bad, and I was back running in a few days.

Day 4 was the sprint race – less than 4km in length, and rumours of the terrain being very different to the previous days’. The fact that the walk to the start from the assembly area (and finish) was over 3km left the JOKers wondering whether the course would be a straight line back to the finish. In fact, the walk to the start essentially went right around the competition area – three sides of a square.

The terrain certainly was different, and of the several hundred maps I have orienteered on, this one was up there in the unusual stake. The first two-thirds of the course were on open, flat rock, with crevices and gullies abounding, as well as plenty of heather. I launched into the race from the off (it is a sprint after all – every second counts) and proceeded to make the biggest mistake of my whole five days. I spectacularly misjudged the difficulty of the map (just because you can see far doesn’t mean you can see all the controls!) and the scale (1:10000) and took over nine minutes to the first control, whereas I should have done it in under 3 minutes (and the elites in well under 2.) I got confused by the positions of the small lakes and ended up running more than twice the distance needed, beyond the control. In the map extract here, I ended up at the small lake at the top.

The rest of the course was OK in general. No. 3 was wedged down a gully about 80cm wide – one way in and out, for most people, except me – I instead jumped directly on the control from the crag above, almost squashing several other runners in the process. I made another big mistake at number 9 (going from SW to NE on the other extract here. Here, it started to rain and I found it quite difficult to see. The control was considerably further to the east than I thought. The nature of a sprint race is that you have to just go for it, so I was running around madly every time I made a mistake – often making it worse.

My time in the end was not unreasonable considering two big mistakes and at least two smaller ones. The area was superb to orienteer on, really unusual and a real test of initiative. Just a shame I didn’t rise to the occasion here. I’d love to do more of this kind of orienteering though. I would call it “Scrambl-O.”

Day 3, and the JOKers had the undeniable luxury of essentially staying at a club hut on the map. Considering that we were on the edge of the city though, we were all suprised at the ruggedness and remoteness of some sections of the map. The dominating features were distinct lines of crags, running directly north-south at around 500m intervals. The forest however was almost universally runnable and very fast, making this the most pleasing “conventional” map of the five days and my personal favourite day.

I only made one serious error on this course, at Control 14. I made a very bad route choice indeed on the leg from 13 to 14, deciding to go over rather than around a hill, but then at the highest point, deciding do “go around” after all and dropping down in the wrong direction. This exhausting climb probably caused the big error around the control. I was search just 50 metres too far to the west of the control, on as it turns out a parallel reentrant. Only the hefty cliffs further to the west stopped me from going even further away, and in fact provided a useful relocation feature.

Some of the legs were really lovely on this course – long but fast sections, such as leg 9-10 shown here, with muddy paths far away but some nice, firm marshes and broken forest to speed through. The earlier sections however were much more rugged, and the regular lines of cliffs provided some serious obstacles – see the extract here on my way to No. 3.

All in all a really beautiful area and it was the one that reminded me most of the excellent, fast terrain over in Stockholm I experienced at the Varsity Match there in 2001.

After yesterday’s damp run, the weather was much sunnier today – and indeed I took most of my race photos today. The terrain was wonderfully technical, but not too physical and I had probably the best run of my 5 days, here.

The very beginning of the course was a technical minefield, with the runners being thrust into the confusing and tightly detailed area in the south west of the map. Almost everyone in the JOK made big mistakes going to the first control – a parallel error was common. Thankfully I was one of the few to have a clean run in this early stage. Indeed after yesterday’s nightmare, today I made only two mistakes costing me more than five minutes, although I did make four two-minuters. My time of 96 minutes was still well over 10 mins/km and still in the bottom half of all finishers, but I enjoyed my run and was pleased with quite a few legs here; while many of my (British) contempories were technically disqualified for taking over two hours on this stage.

Leg 3 to 4 offered the most interesting route choice, being the longest leg and an out-of-bounds (OOB) section blocking the direct route. Glancing at the map, I planned to go in a roughly straight line, bearing left around the OOB – as this would involve the least running and the general rule in these forests is that it’s best to go straight. There are so few paths, and the undergrowth and “green” areas are so sparse, that the traditional British detour is not normally worth it. I ended up going both left and right around the OOB in the end, as I had a bit of a change of plan en route and turned 90 degrees. The normal rule I go by is once I’m committed, go for it. But the terrain was tricky and detailed, and an obvious road that I bizarrely hadn’t seen earlier, offered a tempting, but longer, route. I probably wasted 3-4 minutes having to backstep, but I’m glad I did as thereon the rest of the leg to 4 was fast and easy. The fourth control turned out to be perched in a crevice on a cliff-face, and I turned the wrong way on approaching it, but still this was one of my better controls and I caught up at least one of the other JOK-ers here.

From then on, it was straightforward. A dreadful mistake ensued at No. 10, where I was distracted by the large number of people and controls and stopped concentrating for a moment – fatal in Sweden. No. 14 was my other five-minuter. Being the second last control, I had completely switched off. Instead of going either above or below the cliff, like everyone else, I decided to go through, then up the cliff. Duh. And once again I got distracted. But I’d estimate I didn’t waste more than 20 minutes on mistakes – still a huge amont of time, but I wasted over 30 minutes yesterday.

It was incredibly hot when I got back to the finish and a spot of sunbathing was in order, before retreating back to our hired club hut (picking up that day’s free gift from the event sponsors – toilet paper (!?!?) on the way) from where we didn’t move again today. Doing absolutely nothing after racing hard is so nice…

So, on to the real races. I was running H21-2 throughtout the week. H21 was the most popular of all the courses and so was split into H21-1 and H21-2 – almost everyone else on the tour with me was also doing H21-2 (there’s also H21SE, H21E, H21N, H21M and H21K!) This first day was my worst day actually, although not nearly as bad as my highly traumatic first day in France. Indeed, the troubles today were all of my own making. It was also the wettest of the five days.

Out of just 12 controls on the 7.33km course I managed to stuff up 5 controls, wasting over 5 minutes on four of them. A combination of parallel errors, unfamiliarity with the 1:15000 and sheer recklessness meant I took around 105 minutes to finish the course, well done on most others in JOK, the club I was running with (and a good group to compare with – after all, none of us – Nick Barrable excepted – were ever going to be able to compete with “the Scandies” on level terms.

Annoyingly, the first mistake, to No. 3, was on a 150m leg. I was distracted by the large number of people passing just to the left of the control, and also (I have to say) the map was slightly vague too. The control was hidden in quite dense undergrowth just to the south of where I spent five minutes looking. Even with an obvious line feature just 50m beyond, I still struggled.

I was very pleased with the next couple of legs, and even caught up the fast Jon Marsden. A little too pleased in fact, I comprehensively blew the leg to No. 6, failed to notice a stream was 90 degrees to what it should have been, and got myself in a frightful mess. Even a full scale relocation didn’t help and I only hit an obvious feature that I could follow by luck. The leg is shown the extract here. The next leg again should have been straightforward (this was not a particularly technical area, exccept near the end) and I again veered to the right and wasted a lot of time. I didn’t aim off going to No. 9 and again went right, just missing the control on my left. And No. 10 was just horrendous – I was looking for the control far short of where I should have been. It was near the end of the race and I had lost contact with the map, again being distracted by the large number of people around. I only found the control while on the way to relocate at pylons.

At least the finish was dramatic. The O-Ringen organisers really know how to build one hell of a finish. There were masses of people watching and a huge run-in lane, below a balcony containing commentators, TV cameras and a giant clock.

Overall, not the best start to the five days, it could only get better on the following days and thankfully it did.

This was the third leg in the Frolic summer series of events put on by London orienteering clubs, like the others the format was a 3km handicap race followed by a similar length sprint race. This was also my O-Ringen warm-up event (!) – hardly Sweden, in fact possibly the easiest area I’ve ever been on. Interestingly the winning speeds for the sprint race, which used the confusing Sheen Common only were slower than for the Frolic race, which used the fast, open parkland more. Ed Catmur won both incidently. My times were OK too – comfortably below my 8 min/km target speed.

There was nothing to get too excited about for the main Frolic race, although it is a scenic area as befits a Royal park – I passed a herd of deer on the way. One leg of interest is shown on the right – not because I made a mistake here, but because this leg afforded a good choice of routes. I went left, through the open forest, rather than following the paths here. The end of the race was a quick circuit of Sheen Common, a very green area.

The sprint race was more interesting. I didn’t realise, until picking up the map, that it was in the trickier Sheen common. The course was well designed and was a true sprint, with dead-level running, tight, close legs and enough on the map so that you had to keep your brain switched on. Every leg of mine was finished in under 60 seconds, except for an unfortunate (any mistake in a sprint is very unfortunate) error between 2 and 3 – see left – where I went east through the rough and then some how ended up in the marsh marked. It took a little while to extract myself from the vegetation. From there it was plain sailing to the end – the prior Frolic race helping with the layout, admittedly. I glimpsed Ed about half way around and so sprinted the rest of the way, but he was doing well under 5 mins/km and was never for the catching.

This was the second Frolic event of the summer season, put on by LOK this time. Trent park surrounds Trent University and is a rather pleasant mix of parkland and rough open, with small pockets of forest to slow down the pace. Considering it’s July, the undergrowth was not too bad at all, and the weather was pleasantly cool and dry. Like last week, it’s not a technical area, and so not ideal “training” for the Oringen in just two weeks. Still, it’s good to get out of London’s heart and experience another new area. I took part in the 3km main race, caning it around and finishing in a great time (for me) but decided to sit out the following sprint race, as I was pretty tired already, and besides – they’d packed up the start!

I suppose if I made any big mistake, it was going from No. 9 to 10 – I was right behind another competitor and because I really don’t like following, I decided to take a cunning (and more direct) route than going around on the paths. Unfortuantely the rough open was rough – it is July after all, and the other person gained 10 seconds on me here by whizzing around the path and then on an unmarked path.