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It is possible to travel to orienteering races by public transport – but only if you live in south-east England – living in the centre of London helps a lot too.

Here’s how I’ve got to all of my recent orienteering races:

Of course, I’m not including the events which I failed to get to as I could get there by public transport and had failed to get a lift, or had never got there due to late trains, missed connections, etc…

I’ve been to a few events this year so far, but haven’t got around to writing about them yet…

One race I’ve started doing is the Bushy Park Time Trial. This is a 5 km trail race that happens every Saturday morning at 9am in Bushy Park – one of London’s Royal Parks, beside Hampton Court Palace. It’s a mass start, the course is along grass and paths, up to 400 people do it, and it’s free! It’s well organised, there’s proper race timing, photographers, and free drinks at the end! You even get a personalised email with your result, a few hours after the race.

The only problem (for me) is getting up early enough to get right across London for the start. But I’ve managed it twice now – last week for the 140th race and this week for the 141st. The first time, I broke 20 minutes, which was great and was way in excess of my expectations – running with a friend helped a lot for the pace-setting. This week I wasn’t so great, but I’m still pleased at running it in around 21 minutes.

Doing 5 km trail running is probably the ideal exercise for me to improve on my Park Race/Street Race orienteering skills. I’m planning on doing quite a few this summer, starting with the York Park Race at the end of this month, and finishing with the Venice Street Race in November.

Brown Course, 9.22k/105m, 70:13, 7.6mpk, 8th/28 finishers.

• My writeup.
• My GPS route (see monster mistake on leg 2-3.)

I took my GPS on today’s orienteering event, and again it performed generally well.

I’ll write more about the event soon, but for now, here are the “signatures” of three of my mistakes today, as captured by GPS and shown on Google Earth (in an area with low resolution satellite imagery, which is why you can’t see the individual trees.) Note the scale – it’s only about 70m from the left to the right of the photo.

Control 10, approach from North: The Undershoot – Stopping too short, thinking you’re on the wrong line, head away, look back, oh, there it was in front of me after all.

Control 13, approach from East: The Lack of Attack Point – Slightly off line, no plan. Realise I’ve gone too far, double back but don’t know which way to turn, so go the wrong way. Then look at map and realise what’s going on.

Control 23, approach from West: The Overshoot – Misread map, path goes on further past the control approach than I thought – so I just turn off too late. Realise and turn around, there it is, back up the spur.

Here’s a map showing a dot for each second of the race – when the GPS receiver was able to get a fix. The start is the big green blob on the top right, the finish is the yellow blob to its left. (The trail to the north of these points is the walk to/from the assembly.) The general layout of the course is an anticlockwise loop – not a figure of eight.

The only section where there was no signal for a significant amount of time was very near the beginning – there are several gaps here. Once climbed to 170m, the signal remains good for pretty much the whole way round.

At the Epping North event last Sunday, I ran with a GPS logging unit, for the first time. It logs my position every second, assuming it has a fix on at least four satellites. l Considering the device is not very sensitive, and I was wearing it at waist height, I am quite pleased with the results. The only section where the track didn’t come out well was the first part of leg 1 to 2.

It is difficult to line up the track with a scanned map, however the excellent RouteGadget software makes this easy for you – you mark known points on both the track and the map, and it does the rest. The result is not perfect, however if you look at my GPS track for the race, you can see both where I spiked the control and where I fumbled near the end – as well as my big mistake, which was the latter half of leg 1 to 2.

My GPS track for the 8.29km Brown course is here.

2: Big mistake here, I swung to the right, heading to Control 7. Despite realising this at the control, I was still unable to close in on Control 2, and overshot – you can see all of this on the track.
5: Confused by unmarked yaped path, went around the control.
12: Low visibility, turned back too early, thinking I had overshot.
16: I came off the path too early here – I lost reception here so you can’t see this on the track.
21: Swing too far to the north, corrected my mistake early on.
22: Overshot.

The others, as the track shows, were spikes. 🙂

I’m hoping to run again with the GPS unit. I’ve ordered a more sensitive unit, which I’ll be able to use with my mobile phone as the logger, in the new year once some bugs have beeen ironed out.

Despite the errors you can see on the track, I went on to (just) win the race. Full writeup of this event, and of the preceding events this month, including the Oxford City Race, to follow.

Just back from from a week in Lithuania, running in the JWOC (Junior World Orienteering Championships) spectator races. Photos, maps and full write-up to follow. For now, here’s my Attackpoint writeup for each day, and my Day 1 route.

Summarising the week in one word: hot.

I’ve now competed in five, and missed two, of my planned nine events in June.

Frithsden East
HH
Local Score Event
3rd June
Warm, sunny.
5.25km, 8.4mpk
Race writeup.

Petworth Park
GO
District Event
4th June
Hot, sunny.
10km, 6.7mpk
Race writeup.

Hughenden and Downley
TVOC
Local Evening Event
6th June
Hot, cloudy.
7.82km, 8.3mpk
Race writeup.

Mereworth
DFOK
Local Event
10th June
Very hot, sunny.
5.1km, 10.9mpk
Race writeup.

Epping Forest South West
CHIG
Local Evening Event
14th June
Warm, sunny.
5.9km, 9.2mpk
Race writeup.

(Cross-posted from my Attackpoint training log.)

Campbell Park is in the centre of Milton Keynes, providing an excellent venue for a sprint – the planners managed to avoid the infamous roundabouts. it was overcast and damp, but not raining. The heats were to the south of the park – the first half was through a housing estate with numerous alleyways and tiny parks.

Unfortunately the first few controls were a catalogue of mistakes: On the way to No. 1 I misread the map and overshot badly, costing me 45 seconds – a big mistake for a sprint. I was still misreading the map on the way to No. 2 – another 10 seconds. I left No. 3 at the wrong angle, wasting another 20 seconds. No. 4 to 5 was also bad – I was confused by a playground and swung too far to the left – another 20 seconds.

Errors at the start of the heat race

From 5 onwards I was OK – the legs got longer and less technical, and the course moved away from the housing estate and into rougher land, and then into ornamental woodland. I was overtaken by a few fast people, and latched onto them for a couple of legs, which was useful – although I had great problems punching at some of the controls – Wasting 10s in some of the 30s legs is not good! But, the remainder of the race was generally fault-free and fast. However, I didn’t achieve my original aim of scraping into the “B” final, instead being placed in the “C” final, although high up.

So, onto the final, four hours later – it was damp, and raining hard before the race. The finals were very spectator friendly and were in the main, ornamental part of the park. A specator viewpoint on a spur meant the first half of the course was very visible, including a hill-climb leg right through the viewing area.

I still managed to make quite a few mistakes on this race. It was only the “C” final but I had a good reason to keep up a good pace – Simon from SLOW was starting two minutes behind me.

To No. 1 was a short uphill leg which I tackled at a fast pace, feeling the pain when I got to the top. 2-3 was only a 30m leg but i still managed to head in the wrong direction. I was having some problems with the intensity and shortness of the legs – 6-7 was a 10 metre leg (!) but I still hestitated, not believing it was so close! The split was 12 seconds, almost certainly my shortest intra-race split. I wasn’t sure of the direction leaving 7, such was the pace. 9-10 was the infamous hill leg, but I wimped out and went around. Then, the course took us away from the specator arena and through rougher ground – past roads built for houses that weren’t there yet – very MK! The last section was back through the ornamental woodland – I started to tire here unfortuantely, and made a poor route choice from 19-20, not noticing a good path. 21-22 was another poor route.

Overall, not as scrappy as the heats though, and my pace was slightly faster. I finished a respectable 12th out of 42 – but then, it was only the C final.

My route for the heat (Men’s B)
My route for the final (Men’s C)

Spectator control in Campbell Park.

Following Mapsurfer’s lead, I’ve installed RouteGadget on YepSport, so I can electronically plot my route for some of my races. There is an index of available maps I have up. For now, the only race is Day 2 of the JK, at Keldy. Here’s my route, running M21s.

Drawing my route for this course was an eye-opening experience. Only now do I realise how much time I wasted – not so much making the mistakes, but just by poor route choices. For many controls, I ran far further than I should have. The RouteGadget plot shows that for this 7.6km course, I seem to have actually run for 9.7km – an extra 27%. Only for legs 6-7, 9-10-11-12-13, 17-18 and 19-20-21 did I (a) not make a mistake AND (b) not pick an inefficient route.

Being more accurate will, I think, help me just as much as running faster and not making mistakes (although all three would be great!)

New toy arrived yesterday, after an epic eight day journey via Shanghai, Amsterdam, Arnham and… Northampton. New iMac, powered by an Intel Core Duo chip.

Comments after 6 hours:

• Really nice big, bright screen.
• Really thin case, considering the whole computer is behind the screen.
• Really quiet (even quieter than expected.) This is really important in my small apartment.
• The speakers point downwards into the table and reflect off – resulting in quite a nice sound actually.
• Did I say how big the screen is?
• I couldn’t get a wireless connection working – probably just some configuration thing, but I have heard anecdotally of wireless problems with the new iMacs.
• Photo Booth is a really fun and really nicely executed.
• The first application I downloaded off the net is Firefox. It’s a PowerPC application for now, which means it has to run through software emulation on the Intel chipset I have, so is a little slow.
• I can use the remote control that comes with it to turn on the machine. Which means I can walk in from work, put on a movie and crank up the volume, without even going near the computer.
• Wow this screen is big!