I’ve been to a few events recently. Here’s some map samples for the areas. You can see my event writeups on my Attackpoint log.
Hainault Forest Country Park
Foots Cray Meadows
Lesnes Abbey Woods
Clapham Common
Hampstead Heath
York City Centre
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:
| 13 May 07 | Lesnes Abbey Woods | C 15 | T | C 2 |
| 29 Apr 07 | Rewell Wood | C 15 | T | C 25 |
| 28 Apr 07 | Foots Cray Meadows | C 15 | T | C 5 |
| 22 Apr 07 | Wimbledon Common | C 2 | U | C 15 |
| 22 Apr 07 | Hainault Forest | C 2 | U | C 15 |
| 28 Jan 07 | Hawley and Hornley | C 25 | T | C 25 |
| 21 Jan 07 | Ashridge | C 40 | T | C 45 |
| 17 Dec 06 | Ashtead and Epsom Commons | C 25 | T | C 2 |
| 3 Dec 06 | Hindleap Warren | C 15 | T | C 40 |
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.
I ran today’s Foots Cray Meadows DFOK local event with my GPS logger and got an excellent trace – pretty much no dropped signal, due to the open nature of the area and cloud-free skies.
Here’s the trace, overlaid on a Google Earth image. The start/end is on the top-right. Any straight lines are me running in a straight line, rather than the signal dropping.
Update: I’ve posted the image on Flickr here so you can (a) see it in greater detail and (b) see the various notes I have attached to parts of the course.
I’ve updated my VM results table with this year’s results, from the races last weekend. (I incidentally wasn’t there this time, having been to the last 7.)
Roger (JOK & TVOC) is running his 1000th orienteering event tomorrow.
I haven’t been keeping quite such a close track – I think I started 13 years ago, back in 1994 (a Yellow course at Archerfield was my first competitive race) and I’ve raced on around 240 areas altogether, based on the maps I’ve got sitting around in my binders. That’s on average 18 areas per year. So it’ll be 2049 before I pass this total. I’ll be happy if I’m able to run at all then, aged 69!
I ran in 48 races last year though, and I’m planning to be similarly ambitious this year, so maybe it won’t be that long.
Okansas is doing a Top 10.
Here’s my Top 10 Areas I ran on in 2006:
10. Hindleap Warren (enjoyable, felt good.)
9. South Ashdown Forest (satisfying battle against the weather.)
8. Hatfield Forest (a breakthrough race for me.)
7. Ilkley Moor – JK Day 1 (moorland but intricate.)
6. Druskininkai – JWOC Spectator Races Day 5 (so fast but so hot!)
5. Leith Hill – Varsity Match (always an interesting area.)
4. Temple Newsam – JK Sprint (fast, scenic.)
3. Trockener Steg – Swiss O Week Day 3 (unique glaciated terrain.)
2. Oxford City Centre – Street Race (home advantage.)
1. Epping Forest North (and not just because I won it!)
Merry Christmas!
Brown Course, 9.22k/105m, 70:13, 7.6mpk, 8th/28 finishers.
Here’s how I’m getting GPS tracks for my recent orienteering races.
I’m using a Navi GPS (£80) bought from Storage Depot, with an SD memory card (£15) to log the route.
I download the data as NMEA sentences via a memory card reader and then convert it to GPX with GPS Babel, and then upload it to RouteGadget. I can also convert it to KML for displaying on Google Earth, or use GPS Visualizer to create altitude-coloured images with dots showing each log point.
I’ve also bought a Holox (£35) off eBay; which, when it arrives, and when Nokia fix a bug in Python S60, I’ll be able to use with my mobile phone recording the data that it sends via Bluetooth. Unlike the Navi GPS, the Holox is ultra-sensitive and very fast at acquiring fixes. I have a Nokia N73 phone, I plan to use NMEA Info to record the data, which a friend has written. I’ve learnt a bit of Python so I’ll be able to hopefully add some orienteering-specific features, e.g. a minimalistic “Sports race” mode, or a “Race start/end” button, to the application.
