O.O'Brien

Just back from the Scottish 6 Days – I had a great time and did better than expected. Full writeup, photos, and day-by-day accounts and extracts to follow shortly! See here for results.

Well done to Pippa W for coming 3rd in the Women’s Elite race!

My final “regular” race this season, and a warmup for the Scottish 6-Day International Festival of Orienteering. Normally in late July, most forests would be consumed with undergrowth, however Thorndon North, a large forested country park just south of Brentwood in Essex, was in fine condition, with a maze of paths in the northern section providing a real challenge, and a pleasing range of terrain to provide a slight mental and physical test. And my technical skills that were just as rusty as my physical ones – my worst mistakes were at the first and the last controls – a hesitation due to mispacing at the first meant I remained too far up a bank and not far enough around. The last control was marred by distractions of walkers, a bearing error and some ambiguity in the mapping. This was my most serious mistake and I wasted 4-5 minutes here.

My time: 61:50 for a 6.39km Blue course with 90m of climb. The winner took 45:17.

Wow, I never knew Slough had it in it, but this is an excellent area, both for orienteering and as a general place to walk around in and enjoy. Black Park Country Park is bordered by the Pinewood Studios and as such has been the backdrop for numerous films and TV series – the most recent being Henry VIII (or so I’m told.)

This was my first race after I suffered a slight mishap on my bike – damaging my little finger. However it was the antibiotic that really knocked me out, leaving me seriously week and unable to bike, let along run, for several weeks. So, I wasn’t expecting a great time at Black Park. It was also pretty warm – never ideal for me.

Once again, my three-week spell off affected my race both physically and technically. Black Park is actually physically extremely easy, being both flat and with little serious undergrowth – a real treat for southern England in June! Add to that a complex and confusing path network and you have the makings of a great race.

My time – 84:34 for the 8.7km Brown course (compared with 53:22 for the winner) was disappointing, even in my weak state, mainly because I made two really bad technical mistakes. Ending up 24th out of 35th completers (+3 non-finishers) I made a serious error near No. 1 (a very technical approach and I hadn’t mentally “warmed up”) and near No. 16 (a real bingo control though and poor mapping.) The combination of these two mistakes wasted me 10-12 minutes. Still, there were some great legs on this course, a pleasure to run on, and a real gem of summer running.

After my shambles at the World Cup spectator races, I needed to redeem myself, and so made the journey, after work on a Wednesday evening, out to Romford and this local event. I do like summer local events, the pressure is off, it’s often warm and sunny and the maps are very different to those used in the high-power spring events.

This was a score event with a twist – you had one hour, during which you had to do 11 controls in any order, come back and copy down (and then get) up to 11 more. I managed to get a pleasing 18 (out of 22) controls, finishing under the whole and so escaping a time penalty. I was delighted to learn that I came second out of 23 runners – I got the same number of controls as the winner, but we was back just faster than I was – the tie break. The winner got 180 points in 55:48, I got 180 in 57:03. And this was despite a large blunder I made early on, and also a couple minutes of confusion after a control code didn’t match what I expected.

The only down-side, apart from some serious vegetation in some sections (inevitable for late May in southern England) was that it took me two hours to get there, and two hours to get back – mainly as I had to walk in to the event – no bikes allowed on trains during the commuter rush-hour!

Note my mistake on the extract – I had planned to run from controls 5 to 7, not realising that the fence is surrounded by an uncrossable fence around the deer park. I had to do some on-the-fly route replanning there. My main mistake was approaching control 4 from the north-east – I somehow ended up at control 18 (although I didn’t know it at the time.)

The atmosphere for this event was great, with the World Cup Long Distance race in the morning and the spectator race in the afternoon. There was a real international feel about the event, and the location was superb, the assembly area in a field high up in the Surrey hills, the weather warm and sunny.

Shame I had such a disasterous race really, finishing almost last. This was largely due to me not doing any training, or attending any events, for the previous six weeks – and unwisely choosing to run M21L (long) , having been running M21S (short) for the rest of the season thus far. I had a reasonable run for the first 2/3rds of the course, and would have posted a reasonably respectable time had I kept going at that base all the way, however I massively ran out of energy at around control 16, and ended up walking a large part of the remaining two kilometres, so ending up clocking over 2 hours out on the 12.9km course with 505m of climbing. (In the end, my time was an appalling 142:02, finishing 61st out of 63 finishers, plus 5 mps and one nc runner. The winner took 74:00.)

Mind you, even before I ran out of energy, I had not had an A1 run. Yes, it’s easier to lose physical fitness than “mental awareness” of orienteering, but I still made several stupid and tiring mistakes that I can only blame on having not orienteered in the previous weeks. For example, going from 2 to 3, I stopped at the drinks point, and then hurted down the hill, only to realise at the bottom that I had completely forgotten about control 3 and had been running to control 4. I had run all the way back up the hill… Also in leg 11-12, shown in the extract here, I (and several of my contempories, I should add) plunged down into the ravine and then crawled up the steep hill to 12. What I should have done of course was to go round to the left and stay high – distance wise it was longer, but it would have avoided the exhausting climb completely. I never really recovered from the climb to 12, and I think this triggered my gradual deteriation later in the course.

The graph shows my control-by-control performance compared with the 3 people who finished just in front of me. I’m the tan line – the red line for the latter part of the race shows how I would normally have run – the uptick at the end as I tradtionally finish strongly compared with my contempories. See how my speed just tanks after control 16, allowing the three to overtake.

Oh well, there was always the next event to look forward to two days later…