Category: Orienteering

Summer Plans

What I’m planning on doing this summer:

3 June pm	LOK Park Race	Grovelands Park	5km
5 June	parkrun	Hackney Marshes	5km
8 June pm	SLOW Park Race	Battersea Park	5km
11-21 June	A wedding/Lakes/Knoydart trip
22 June pm	SLOW Trail Challenge	Ham	10km
26-27 June	A stag
29 June pm	SLOW Park Race	Tooting Bec Common	5km
3 July	parkrun (maybe)	Hackney Marshes	5km
3 July	North Downs Relay	North Downs	10km
4 July	LOK London Interclub	Addington Hills	7km
7-15 July	Sweden training tour
17 July	parkrun	Hackney Marshes	5km
18 July	MV London Interclub	Ashtead	7km
20 July pm	SLOW Park Race	Bishop’s Park	5km
21 July pm	DFOK local event	Shooters Hill	5km
22 – 31 July	Land’s End-London cycling trip
4 August pm	DFOK local event	Lesnes Abbey	5km
7 August	parkrun	Hackney Marshes	5km
8 August	SAX Trail Challenge	Sevenoaks	21.1km
10 August pm	SLOW Trail Challenge	Richmond Park	10km
11 August pm	DFOK local event	Bostall Heath	5km
13-15 August	Purple Thistle orienteering event
16-22 August	Hillwalking/Edinburgh Fringe
28 August	parkrun	Hackney Marshes	5km
30 August	Urban Race	Didcot	7km
4 Sept	Urban Race	Sheffield	7km
5 Sept	Urban Race	Lincoln	7km
9 Sept pm	DFOK local event	Jubilee Park	5km
11 Sept	Two2Go marathon	Lea Valley	42.2km
18 Sept	Urban Race	City of London	10km
19 Sept	LOK local event	Hampstead Heath	7km
25 Sept	Urban Race	St Andrews	7km
26 Sept	District event	Tentsmuir	10km
2 Oct	parkrun	Hackney Marshes	5km
3 Oct	Urban Race	Warwick	7km

Leisure Orienteering Orienteering Events Log

So, I ran in the Nike Grid ARG (alternative reality game) on Saturday, concentrating mainly on the E9 postcode in Hackney, but also going jogging around the City of London (EC1, EC2, EC3 postcodes) doing an informal City of London Race. The aim of the game was to log runs between four specially designated phoneboxes in each postcode, dialing in at the start and end of each leg. The more legs done, the more points you got – bonus points were available for running early/late, doing a fast run, completing every possible leg, and the most number of legs.

My strategy was hampered by having a severe hangover from the night before, so I didn’t make it out of the house until 3pm (the game ran from 8pm-8pm) and was pretty dehydrated. It was also a very warm day – and, to make things worse, the phoneboxes themselves acted as heat reservoirs. One City leg went via a supermarket and its chiller cabinet…

In my first session I essentially ran all of the six possible legs between the four phoneboxes, and several extra legs between the two closest ones. In the later session (after my jog around the City) I again aimed to run all six possible legs, getting the fastest split bonus for each, but realised near the end I wasn’t going to make it to/from the far one, so repeated some of the smaller legs. The many people enjoying a cool drink in the garden outside the Royal Inn on the Park, immediately opposite the most southerly phonebox, must have wondered what was going on.

The map below shows the routes I took between the four phoneboxes, marked with green rectangles:

In total I ran around 16.5km (10 miles) in the E9 postcode. The phonebox dialing process meant I essentially had a two minute rest after every leg – the longest of which I did in just under 10 minutes. My shortest leg was 1m 26 – I tried this one again and again but my times kept getting worse with each attempt!

I ran into the last box about 10 seconds before the game closed – I had to push it for this final leg and got bonus points for running this leg in the fastest time. (In fact I think I picked up all six of the fastest leg bonuses during the day.) The Nike team were filming this last phonebox and interviewed me afterwards.

I was extremely unlucky not to win – notice how close I finished to the eventual winner in the leaderboard below. However I did get 110 of my points in the dying seconds of the race. The guy who finished third appeared at the same phonebox a minute later (i.e. too late) and, had our arrivals been reversed, he would have finished in front of me.

Although I didn’t win, a friend won not once but twice in a different postcode, so I’ll at least get to see what prizes I missed out on!

There were some “bugs” in the game – certain phoneboxes in the City had quite unresponsive keypads which made it difficult to clock in at the end of the leg. Quite often, the automated service appeared overloaded and stopped talking half-way through, leaving you wondering whether the run had been correctly logged or not. The game leaderboard was updated in real time, which was impressive, but it was written in Flash so I was unable to see how I was doing on my iPhone. (A dedicated iPhone app would have been cool.) There luckily weren’t many players in my postcode, but many more would have clogged up the system – it took 1-2 minutes in the phonebox to stop and start each leg. Some clarity on how many points were on offer would have helped me refine the strategy, although I suppose part of the challenge is figuring it out for yourself. A couple of “test” 3am short legs I tried on my way back from the pub didn’t count for “early” bonus points, although game messages suggested they would at that time. Finally the maps weren’t too great – some phoneboxes were in the wrong place. I had however done a bit of online research first though and used a marked orienteering map instead, so this didn’t affect me. A friend of mine greatly benefited from one phonebox not being themed – he was the only person in that postcode who realised it was still a game phonebox and so completely destroyed the opposition.

It must have been a nightmare to organise, with nearly 150 postboxes scattered across many miles that needed theming, maps distributed to them, checking and fixing them – not to mention answering the many and varied questions and complaints on the Facebook event page, and writing the software to handle the automatic logging, updating and cheat detection.

Overall I really enjoyed the style of the event. There was definitely something of “The Matrix” about sprinting through the grimy streets to a phonebox (themed in green and black, too!) and breathlessly grabbing the receiver in front of surprised bystanders. All things considering, it was a nice “Real Life 2.0” take on the street orienteering theme. Not sure we’ll see this repeated – Nike generally organise a “concept” event in London yearly but each year’s idea changes dramatically to keep things fresh – however I would certainly love to try it again.

OpenStreetMap Orienteering

OOM Presentation

I gave a talk on OpenOrienteeringMap at an (un)conference today – the slides are on my research blog.

Orienteering

OOM Undocumented Feature – Rotating Control Labels

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 4 March 2010
1 Comment on OOM Undocumented Feature – Rotating Control Labels

One problem which my club has come across when assembling Street-O maps using OpenOrienteeringMap is where control labels clash with other features on the map – they may obscure important underlying topology, or intrude on the circles denoting other nearby controls, as shown in the first image below.

To fix this, you can manually specify the angle that the label appears at with respect to the control circle. I haven’t yet built this in to the online map builder, partly because I didn’t want to clutter the UI with too many options, partly because I haven’t got around to it, and partly because the variables that allow labels to be positioned as such is not yet in the released version of OpenLayers (it is in the trunk) that the map builder is based on, so I’ve had to patch my version specially – I’m reluctant to do too much coding in this area before it’s formally released.

…anyway, to fix it, first produce your map as normal. Then, notice the faint horizontal black line on the bottom left of the PDF? This is actually text which represents a partial URL that allows the map to be recreated. Zoom in to the bottom left in your PDF reader, and copy the line of text into a text editor.

The next step is to edit the label angles. Find the section starting “controls=“. Everything beyond this is a control, each control is defined as four numbers, each seperated by a comma (and no spaces). A comma is also used to separate each control. e.g. controls=1a,1b,1c,1d,2a,2b,2c,2d – where 1a, 1b, 1c and 1d are the four attributes for control 1, etc. The attributes are control number, label angle (clockwise from north), latitude and longitude. The lat/lon coordinates look funny – they use the “EPSG900913” Google-style coordinates. The label angle is the one to change – they all default to 45 (top right), changing this to, for example, 180, will set the label to be directly below the circle.

Once this is done, copy the long line of text and append it to the URL http://casa.oobrien.com/maptiler/pdf? in your web browser. Make sure there’s no comma at the end. Press enter and you should get back a new PDF with the corrected angles, as seen in the second image below. (N.B. the URL may change in the future, I’m piggy-backing off one of my work project websites at the moment for this.)

Before

After

OpenStreetMap Orienteering

OOM Live-Updating

OpenOrienteeringMap now updates in near-real-time from the OpenOrienteeringMap database. It does what’s called “minutely” updates, although the actual time-lag from updating something in OpenStreetMap (say, using Potlatch), to it appearing in OpenOrienteeringMap, is typically around five minutes – occasionally the delay may be up to 15 minutes, or the update doesn’t appear at all if something wrong happens. This is, however, a vast improvement on the per-month updating I was doing before – that process took a couple of days to run, this only takes a few seconds each minute.

Note if you are viewing OOM in your browser, your browser will probably cache the tiles, including ones which have since been updated, so you will want to do a “super-refresh” of the page (Control+Shift+R) or reopen your web browser, if you’ve made changes and want to see them reflected. Creating PDF maps always uses the database so doesn’t suffer from this caching issue.

A huge amount of adding and updating is going on around the world in OpenStreetMap – the project is growing by around 5% a week – so it’s good to be able to take advantage of people’s efforts on a timely basis.

OpenStreetMap Orienteering

OOM Map Builder

OpenOrienteeringMap now has a map builder, that will create a PDF map of any area, optionally with score-course orienteering controls on it, for you to print out and run on. You choose the scale, orientation and style – street-O, pseud-O or a special street-O without railway lines. Adornments such as a title, north arrow, logo and attribution are added.

To use it, click on the “Create a Map” link. The builder (which is written in Javascript) doesn’t exactly match the final map 100% as it is just building up a URL that gets sent to another service, powered by Python, Mapnik and Cairo which actually creates the PDF map for printing – the latter is a high-quality vector map so should look great when printed out – no jaggies, except for point-features as Mapnik trunk doesn’t (yet) support SVG icons.

Tip: The URL used to create the map is reproduced in tiny-text on the bottom left of the map – it will look like a small black line until you zoom in to 1600% or so. Copy this text and add it to the end of “http://tiler1.censusprofiler.org/pdf?” to reproduce the map. You can tweak the size (in metres) of the PDF sheet, to accommodate unusual sheet sizes, and also change the title and control positions here rather than having to recreate the whole map in the builder.

I’m going to be documenting how the PDF map is produced, on my research blog, in the next few weeks.

Orienteering

Orienteering 101

Making lists of orienteering maps seem to be popular at the moment. Following the CompassSport 99 which featured a map in each of the UK’s ceremonial counties, and the Attackpoint 51 which does the same for US states, a project has launched to build a list of the top 101 unmissable orienteering maps around the world. It’s a collaboration between Jan Kocbach of WorldOfO and Ivan Nagy of OO.Cup. They are planning on making it into a book – If this comes to fruition as a coffee-table book of amazing photographs and maps (and I know Ivan takes good photos, the OO.Cup pages always look great!) then it looks like I already know what I’ll be getting people for Christmas.

I’m not sure if the emphasis will be on the best areas technically (and toughest physically), the areas that are most enjoyable to run in, or are in the most spectacular situations – the three types are subtly different, and the very best maps probably need to fufill at least two of these three criteria.

In terms of best technical areas that I’ve run on, The Trossachs in Scotland has got to be up there, along with most areas in Sweden I’ve run in – particularly Lunsen near Uppsala which was the venue of the Varsity Match in 2008. The most enjoyable race I’ve run in is probably Venice, and running around and through the Cite de Carcassonne in the south of France was pretty spectacular. Some of the urban events that are currently popular in the UK would rate quite highly as spectacular, I think, including Oxford in 2006, and my own City of London Race – particularly if we do have it on both sides of the River Thames in 2010.

An area that fulfils all three of the criteria without doubt though is Trockener Steg, which was Day 3 of the Swiss O Week in Zermatt in 2006. In fact, the whole week was superb, but this was my favourite map of all, particularly the running on the amazingly complex, recently glaciated rocks. The views to the Matterhorn were stunning, the orienteering was fiendishly complex and it was great fun.

(Article updated to clarify the project organisers, and add some nice photos.)

Orienteering

Pub-O

While digging through some old directories, I came across this artwork for an OUOC social back in 1999:

[Update – I believe this may be the work of the legendary OCCO President and true recreational orienteer, The Boy Nailest.]

Orienteering

Drawing Nice ISSOM Buildings in Illustrator

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 15 January 2010
No Comments on Drawing Nice ISSOM Buildings in Illustrator

ISSOM orienteering maps show buildings in plan view. Many buildings edges are orthogonal (i.e. at right angles to each other) – here’s how to draw these buildings neatly and correctly in Adobe Illustrator CS3, and also ensure that parallel building features are lined up correctly.

1. Measure the angle that the building is at, on your basemap:

2. Open up Preferences and go to the General tab. Enter the measured angle in the “Constrain Angle” box:

3. Draw the vertices of the building. Holding down Shift will now constrain subsequent vertices to the constrain angle (and +/- 45 degrees and 90 degrees from it) rather than to the horizontal and vertical of your screen.

4. Using Smart Guides in conjunction with setting the constrain angle will help line up parallel features, allowing buildings to be drawn quickly and accurately. A quirk of switching on Smart Guides, is that you will normally then need to click to reselect any existing node, vertex or partially-drawn building.

Smart Guides are very useful, but can be annoying when drawing very complex buildings with shallow or unusual angles – I typically switch them on or off repeatedly when tracing such buildings, and memorise and jump between two or more constrain angles for different “wings” of the building.

The background imagery used in this example, by the way, is recently released imagery showing the extent of the earthquake damage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The OpenStreetMap community is working to quickly complete a map of the city to aid the rescue effort.

Leisure Notes Orienteering

Review of the Year 2009: Part 1

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 14 January 2010
No Comments on Review of the Year 2009: Part 1

2009 was a year in which I started to do less orienteering (after 13 years in the sport), a bit more running, and a lot more cycling. It was also almost an injury-free year.

January

The year started with a training score exercise in Aird’s Park, near Oban, on New Year’s Day. “Park” is a highly misleading name for the area, it was extremely physical with tussocks and marshes everywhere. Managed to finish second, but only because most of the good people misjudged the time back to the start and got penalties. I was up in the Scottish Highlands on the annual JOK New Year hillwalking trip, so the following day it was back to the Munros – and what a day. The four eastern Mamores climbed in cold and crisp conditions, finishing well after dark.

The only other orienteering in January was two London street-Os – an LOK race in Hampstead and a SLOW race in Wimbledon. They were very hilly, and I got a late penalty at both. And also a weekend of city races – on the Saturday the second Edinburgh Street Race which I enjoyed even more than the first, especially as I didn’t get disqualified this time – and then on the Sunday, having travelled right back to London, it was up again to Lincoln for their own City Race, again the second time I have run it. Again, a great race, and even better than the one before. This time, we got to run right through Lincoln Castle – up the drawbridge, across the battlements and out through the gate. A race with a definite “wow” factor.

February

In February I was quite preoccupied with planning for the JOK Chasing Sprint, which was near Watford. A few chilly weekends were spent surveying the courses. There was also another SLOW street-O, at Kingston, where I again got a late penalty!

Also, I got back up in the Highlands, for one day only. Sleeper to Glasgow, early morning train up, six damp hours in the hills around Loch Ossian (some snow, but a big thaw was on) and then back on the train overnight to London. I’m doing it all again next month.

Finally, I got to use my mountain bike on “proper” terrain as opposed to the streets of London – a two hour lap of the “Red trail” singletrack at Bedgebury Forest in Kent – a warm-up for a weekend singletracking in Wales. My cheapo-MTB held up just fine, which was more than could be said for Chris’s hire bike.

March

The first terrain orienteering of the year – BUCS in SW London. Oxford was organising it on SLOW areas. I went very wrong indeed at the individual race – probably lack of practice. The relay was a bit better but I was still a bit clueless. At least I was a bit better at the next SLOW street-O two days later, in Surbiton. Didn’t get a late penalty for once.

The next weekend it was time for my first mega-cycle of the year – over 10 hours in the saddle, as I tried (and failed) to get to Eastbourne. My mistake, perhaps, was following the National Cycle Network route (21) strictly, even where it goes off the road to go up a bumpy, muddy track, only to rejoin the road a couple of km later. It did this many times. Some sections were very pleasant, such as the bit around Eridge. But, 140km after leaving Hackney, it had got properly dark, so I cut the trip short.

One week later I was off on the bike again, this time taking the “official” road-cycling route to Brighton. I completed the 100km route in just over 5 hours, + a couple of hours of stops – slightly disappointingly seven minutes longer than last year’s.

I also made a start on mapping the western extension to the City of London orienteering map, with a wander around the old alleys off Fleet Street.

The month finished with a weekend in Wales, on the various MTB singletrack trails in Coed y Brenin in North Wales. Great fun, a lot of trails were done, including the Tawr and most of the Dragon’s Back.

April

The fourth trip in four months to Scotland – on Saturday I ran in the Scottish Sprint Orienteering Champs at Stirling University. Afterwards I went for a walk up to the Wallace Monument – I’d been meaning to have a look around this for years. The following day I ran the Edinburgh Half-Marathon – the sprints having been a less-than-ideal preparation. The second half of my race was a lot slower than the first. I’m doing the full-marathon version this year, and will be preparing better!

A couple of days later, and I had not recovered, but I ran anyway in the final SLOW street-O of the year, in Pimlico. I got around with two seconds to spare, and got my second best result of the series. Tim & CJ’s feast was excellent. Then it was back up to Scotland for Easter, but doing the JK Sprint in Newcastle on the way.

Back in London, I cycled 75km to Cuckfield with Anna, the first of our joint training trips for John O’Groats-London in the summer. It was a busy weekend – on the 19th I ran in the Newham Classic 10K – it was a very local race for me, and cheap to enter, and the route past the Olympic Stadium looked interesting. Then in the afternoon more City of London map surveying, around Lincoln’s Inn – and I had my bike nicked! It had lasted only 18 months, although as it happened I was going to be getting a road bike for the long summer cycles anyway.

Finally, there was the Varsity Match, which was just north of London and later in the year than normal – this year’s is in early March in Cornwall. The individual was in Epping Forest – always an enjoyable area to run on. The course was tough but pleasant, and my race was livened up when I spotted a snake slivering away from one of the controls near the end. It was warm enough to lie around at the finish and eat ice cream – summer was on its way!