We went out to the SOC night event at Ocknell Inclosure this evening. Fortunately the afternoon’s rain gave way to a clear evening although this did mean waiting until after seven for it to be sufficiently dark. There was no chance of staying dry thought as the ground was pretty sodden.
I think most people opted for the one hour score event and, having been told that in the daylight several people had got all of the controls, the race was on. I picked a reasonably circular route which dived in to the middle of the area at the end leaving me with the option of cutting off if time was running short.
Things started well enough with only a small slip up at number twenty when I ran straight past the clump of trees in the dark. What I don’t understand is what happened a few controls later at 22 where I ended up right out on the plain, somehow failing to notice that I must have crossed one piece of tarmac too many, not to mention a few fenced enclosures.
The next few controls went smoothly enough. It was great to be out at night in such a runnable area, not having to worry about whether you were heading straight for the middle of a bramble patch! The navigation wasn’t trivial either as the area is littered with indistinct vegetation boundaries.
I must have been tiring towards the end as I stopped short of number ten. Fortunately as I headed out to the track to relocate I bumped into number 23. From there it was just a mad sprint back to the finish picking up the orange course controls on the track. My final time was 55:33, over ten minutes slower than the daytime runners but still not bad and top of the results for the evening. Christine also had a pretty respectable position despite walking around due to the stringent time penalties incurred by many.