Category: Notes

Michael writes about the perfect Christmas gift for any orienteering-obsessed family – a personalised orienteering map of the house and garden.

With this in mind, I downloaded the Adobe Illustrator CS demo for Mac, the excellent free Map Studio, and some old site plan PDFs from the local council planning department. One quick survey in the snow this afternoon, followed by a bit of experimentation in Illustrator, and the result – one personal orienteering map. I reckon I could just about get a sprint race out of this map… 😉

Thumbnail:

Extract:

The full size version, is here. Note, this is the first time I’ve done a map from scratch, so bear in mind there are some “spatial scale fluctuations.”

The countries I’ve visited in Europe (via Alex.)

Create your own one here.

(The Lithuania highlight is slightly cheating, as I haven’t been there yet – but I’ll be there in July 2006 for the JWOC spectator races and JOK tour.)

Scotland – 1980+
England – 1990+
France – 1992, 1993, 2003
Iceland – 1994
Netherlands – 1998
Germany – 1998
Austria – 1998
Italy – 1998
Spain – 2001, 2003, 2005
Switzerland – 2001
Wales – 2001, 2002
Sweden – 2002, 2004, 2005
Greece – 2002
Lithuania – 2006

(Visits that were primarily orienteering in bold.)

It’s suddenly just got much darker, just as I’ve got home from today’s race. Here’s why – a huge black cloud from an oil fire is spreading over London. Amazing satellite picture from the BBC here. It’s getting dark anyway at this time of day (4pm) but it’s like it went from day to night in about 2 minutes.

Made it to the assembly field of today’s event (Blackheath & Farley Heath, Surrey) but no further – a dash between trains on the way to the event resulted in much ankle pain on my right foot – dull pain when still, fine when walking, instant agony when running. I’ve managed to twist that ankle at least once at each of the previous four races (Kyloe, Epping, Esher and Banstead) so it was only a matter of time – I can’t put all the blame on Southern Trains’ cancelled train I guess. Anyway it was a nice walk to the start along country roads, the morning mist gradually burning away to leave the beautiful rolling Surrey countryside looking crisp and postcard-y. Looks like Christmas will be R&R after all – my next race will probably be in the New Year, although I might be able to hobble around Hedderwick Hill on the 27th.

As you’ve probably noticed from the last two event entries, I’ve started to list categorise the mistakes I make during each race, in the hope that I can identify and work on the worst ones. I’ll endeavor to keep the “poor mapping” excuse to a minimum – bad workmen like to blame their tools, so I’ll try and stay balanced. Note, the reasons all need to be ones that could cause a multi-minute mistake – almost everyone makes sub-minute mistakes on courses for a wide variety of reasons – it’s not those I’m tracking here.

So far, I have the following – if you know any more please add them to a comment and I’ll add them on here.

• Navigational error
  (e.g. bad compass bearing, bad orientation of the map, natural “drift”.)
• Map-reading error
  (e.g. simply looking at the wrong bit of the map, not spotting a point feature or vegetation change.)
• Poor route choice
  (e.g. it looked great when you glanced at it, but you somehow missed the plainly more obvious route.)
• Parallel error
  (e.g. two similar valleys, went up the wrong one…)
• Poor pacing/scale awareness
  (e.g. running on 1:10000 map for the first time in a while, tending to overshoot the control, or under-run to it.)
• Inverted contours
  (e.g. mistaking a hill for a depression, or vice versa.)
• Contouring error
  (e.g. accidently drifting down (or, more rarely, up) a slope you are trying to cross level.)
• 180 degree/90 degree error
  (e.g. temporarily getting N and S mixed up, running in completely the wrong direction.)
• Distraction
  (e.g. inadvertent following of other competitors or bad bias when choosing route.)
• Hesitation
  (e.g. other competitors causing focus to wander, or tiredness after a hard leg.)
• Fatigue
  (e.g. significantly slower running due to exhaustion. Perhaps not really a “mistake”.)
• Unanticipated hazard
  (e.g. marsh actually uncrossable, thicket really is impassable, needing a lengthly diversion.)
• Poor attack point
  (e.g. forgetting to pick one that allows you to aim-off, one that is itself hard to fine.)
• Poor mapping
  (e.g. missing vegetation patch or vegetation boundary, misplaced point feature.)
• Bingo control
  (e.g. control hidden, or control on point feature in middle of featureless, low visibility terrain.)

The last two are not the fault of the runner!

• I subscribed to Orienteering Today, via their website. I’ll have Issues 3 onwards hitting my mailbox soon, and Issue 1 is available as that PDF – hopefully issue 2 will go up on the website too! Again, as I mentioned before, I really like the production on this magazine – it makes all the difference.
• I haven’t managed to do any orienteering recently because there were no trains running on the necessary day for a couple of events (Leith Hill and Welwyn Garden City), then there was a spot of very bad weather… and then I came down last weekend with a nasty cold/sore throat/headache thing that’s been going around the office lately. Still suffering from it but hoping to bounce back because…
• I’m going to the Kyloe orienteering events this coming weekend, up in Northumberland. A middle-distance race on the Saturday followed by a National on the Sunday. In light of my lack of health (and fitness) I’m running M21S on the latter. The Saturday race is also the JOK club champs (a handicap, so maybe I’ll do well!) and the JOK AGM is in the evening. There was too much of a danger of me getting voted onto the JOK committee if I stayed at home. Plus I’m looking forward to making it out of Zone 1 London for the first time in weeks. Bamburgh Castle, Holy Island and the Northumberland coast should be a nice change, although it might be a bit brisk.
• It doesn’t look like I’m going to complete the remaining western legs of my X-England bike ride anytime soon, what with it getting dark when I tend to wake up at the weekends these days. So below is a map of the route so far. Green = really nice, Yellow = OK, and Red = really nasty bit of route. Malborough to central London was mainly on National Route 4, then London to Whitstable was generally on National Route 1. I also rode from Oxford to Reading last autumn on National Route 5, and have coloured in that section too. Note, west is towards the top of the diagram.

From a posting on the NopeSport forum – issue 01/2005 of Orienteering Today magazine can be downloaded as a PDF (watch out, 81mb file size!) The production quality of the Czech-based, English-written magazine is excellent – I’m going to subscribe as soon as I can get along to a major event which CompassPoint (the UK distributors) are at. Nick Barrable (a JOKer) is on the magazine’s editorial team.

Download link.

From some random blog:

http://www.oobrien.com/yepsport/ – Wait — getting to your desired destination with a map and compass is a sport??? Obvious Joke: No girlfriend I’ve ever had could possibly compete. New sport: Calculating and paying a gratuity of at least 18% while armed with a calculator and “The Tipper.”

Indeed, it is a sport, as is running round and round in circles, kicking a ball around a bit, and spending two hours getting no where in the end.

Also – I was Blog of the Day, whatever that means, on 30 March this year.

More inbound links found by Technorati.

It’s always a good idea to pay very careful attention to the map when out orienteering.