O.O'Brien

This was another of the TVOC summer series races – a mass start race of three loops. See my race writeup.

Here’s my mistake towards the end of the second loop, leg 5->6. Green shows where I thought I was going, red shows where I was actually going.

On leaving 5, I made a big parallel error. There were certain things that should have alerted me to the mistake – the fact that the ride went on for much longer than I expected, and an apparently unmarked tower – but they didn’t. I ended needlessly climbing the hill and ended up at control 2, punching it before realising and heading back down. In doing so I dropped out of the lead of my running group, into third.

This was an evening race put on by Mole Valley as part of the London summer evening orienteering series. Hogsmill is down by Ewell, and getting there involved a commute on a packed train from Waterloo. I am so glad I don’t have to do this every weekday.

The map is very small, but excellent planning squeezed out a 4.7km course which felt a lot like a sprint race – there were plenty of route choice legs, and “tricks” – including one where the straight line led straight across a bridge, only to later recross the river, with no bridge in sight. I ended up having to double back for this one. Another leg had a choice of running through the streets, or a straighter but trickier course through woodland. I took the former route which paid off, I think – but then found myself stuck on the wrong side of a high fence, having not read ahead carefully enough. Also at this time of year, “white” forest was often actually an impenetrable sea of nettles. The locals also proved an interesting distraction – a groups of girls blocking a crucial set of stepping stones, and the local stoned youth enquiring as to the nature of the sport.

These challenges notwithstanding, I had a good race, running hard as I knew Ed was somewhere behind me. In the end, he beat me by three minutes. Nick B was only a minute ahead of me, having also made some small mistakes.

A real sprint classic! Still waiting on the results list due to “technical problems” but I think I finished a good third.

N.B. These race articles compliment my training/race log, which includes mistake analysis, ratings, times and distances.

I had a different race strategy for this one – instead of starting slow and then gaining speed, passing lots of people as a motivator, I positioned myself from near the front of the line and went off fast, passing the “playground turn” (1km) at just under 4 minutes. I felt quite comfortable throughout the rest of the race, and was still able to pick off a few people – also didn’t get passed on the final straight which was encouraging. Finished 26th – highest placing so far. Also a new PB by 22 seconds. My 19 minute target is looking more attainable now. I’m not going to shout about the target too much though – SGB can do 16:29 and Roger T 17:01.

This was a low-key evening event put on by LOK. The course was hung with extra small control kites, and no punching or electronic timing. The course was just 5.4km but with 17 controls, and used the most technical parts of the heath. Unfortunately one control was stolen, and another was hung in the wrong place, my comparatively slow time (50 minutes) reflects the time I spent looking for these two. The weather was nice though – not too hot or sunny, but not raining either.

Hampstead Heath is one of the few regularly used orienteering areas bikeable from from where I live, along with Shooter’s Hill and maybe Battersea Park and Abbey Wood. It is certainly the best area in London and one of my favourite of the south-east.

This was another in the TVOC Summer Evening series. Park Wood is just north of High Wycombe, it’s not an area I’ve been on before, but it’s near Hughenden which I did run on last year. Just like Hughenden, it’s a hilly map, with runnable forest mixed with plenty of green areas.

The race was a mass start, two loop race, your loop and the direction being randomised. This allowed for eight possible course combinations. I had the short loop first. Unfortunately, I misread the map on picking it up, and started off the wrong way around the loop. A high hedge prevented a quick correction, but in the end it was not so bad. The second loop was far longer, and I had Jon M on my tail (or ahead) for much of the way around, so I kept the pace up. I had a couple of unconventional route choices, and a couple of shortcuts that didn’t pay off, but I got around OK in the end and finished a pleasing third (on the A course) – the same position that I had finished in at the last TVOC summer evening race the week before.

My leg from 10 to 11 – the final big leg before the finish, and a downhill one – was an unusual one routewise. Convinced that Jon M was right behind me, I ran along the path, turning right and heading quickly down. However it was the wrong path – I took the first one down, rather than the long, wiggly one. I was the only person to do this route I think, however in the end it was probably the best route – once dropping unexpectedly on to the field junction and reorientating myself, I just had to contour through the fast field. The fence at the end was a little worrying but it proved to be not so high after all once I got there.

All in all a good race, finished up with some tasty food at the local pub, conveniently only a few hundred yards away.

Here’s an extract of the map from the previous week’s summer series event, at Hodgemoor Woods near Seer Green. Another new area for me, it was flat and generally fast, but with some vague contour features ensuring I made three mistakes in a row in the middle section. One of these mistakes was approaching the control in the extract here – I ran fast into the area from the north, overshooting and spending a while in the light green.

This was put on by SLOW as a trail challenge – a different format race, designed to attract runners. The key differences to a normal O race were the mass start, the 10km quoted being the shortest practical distance rather than the straight line distance, and being able to see the map – with route – well before the race start. Also, all the controls were on paths and the most obvious route choices involved paths and roads, so there was no need to go into vegetation – just as well at this time of year with waist high grass.

The map was big – it was A3 and drawn to the ISSOM sprint race standard. I spent the time before the start coming up with unusual ways to do the tricker legs. Despite this being a trail challenge there were plenty of real orienteering legs, with great route choice. After four legs through Ham Riverside, with its tricky path network, there were three longer legs through the suburb of Ham – via Ham Common which was surprisingly technical. The race finished with three legs through the westernmost part of Richmond Park itself, a very pleasant, but quite hilly area.

I really enjoyed the challenge and was pleased to finish fourth out of around 50 runners, although well behind the first three. As I haven’t run a “formal” 10km distance race before, my time – 47:39 – represents my 10km PB. I would hope to get this down to around 40 minutes if I was on a track, though.

Having the race start and end near the Ranelagh Harriers clubhouse was great – hot showers, and somewhere dry to get changed and recover. As it was raining during the race, with a thunderstorm overhead at one point, these were much welcomed, as was the pub around the corner.

Routegadget route.

My route from 5 to 6. Most others took a route quite a bit further west.

My, the nettles! Writeup here.

Here’s my whole route – a pretty good GPS trace the whole way. Note that I made good use of paths and roads, because of all the bracken and nettles about the place.

Here’s a mistake on the approach to the first control – not a great choice of route (the red arrows show a better route that I should have taken.) Then, when I got to the fence corner, I turned left and went down the bank, whereas the control was actually straight ahead. Oops!

Here’s my biggest mistake. Thanks to the shoulder-high bracken I didn’t see the reentrant for No. 16 so overshot it. But the big one was the very short leg to No. 17. I spent ages getting stung by nettles, trying to find the control. Again, it was hidden by bracken. I was less than 50 yards from it the whole time but never saw it until I hit on the “elephant trail”.

This wasn’t a mistake – I just love the fact that with a free tool (Google Earth) I can see my exact approach to an individual tree. Post-race analysis doesn’t get much more detailed than this.

The first of my 22 races planned for the next six weeks. I’m aiming to blog every race, on the same day that it happened.

This was at Worthy Down, a military base north of Winchester. Hopefully I (or Google Maps) aren’t jeopardising the security of the base with these high-res satellite photos!

It was a 2.5km sprint, but map memory. Instead of carrying a map, you had to remember the next leg or two from the maps attached to each control.

Here is the GPS trace for my whole race – the triangle shows the start/end. The first two legs didn’t have good GPS reception, but it was fine for the rest of the race, although there were a few echoes off buildings in places.

Here’s a detail of my approach (from the top right) and departure from of the controls – located beside a water tower, although not quite so close to it as the GPS indicates. In fact, I think the bending upwards was a GPS echo from the tower. The actual control was on the tree just to the south of it.

See my Attackpoint training log for a writeup of the race.