We headed over to the Forest of Dean today for Bristol Orienteering Klub‘s district event at Moseley Green. I went out on the brown course and was pleased to discover that the planner’s primary concern seemed to be to ensure that competitors saw the best bits of the area and didn’t have to fight their way through too much of the bramble infested woodland (even if this meant the odd dog leg in to and back out of a control).
I was out for just under 70 minutes having had a pretty scrappy run and, once again, felt very tired (or perhaps it was the weight of yesterday’s dinner slowing me down!). Things first started to go wrong at number four when I found myself the wrong side of a graveyard having naively assumed that the church I had seen was actually in it. Despite not being marked as out-of-bounds, I decided that it was probably best not to cut through and jump the wall. Still managed to miss the control though despite coming in off the corner of the wall just 50 metres away.
Overshot slightly at number six and wasted some time at fourteen persuading myself that the control really was in the tunnel under the road. Many of the controls were very easy and my biggest mistake of the day was not spotting which ones were going to be harder. This was certainly the case at number sixteen where I circled a number of times on a pockmarked slope before eventually falling in to the desired pit at the same time as Christine’s Dad.
No results up yet but if Ifor Powell or Clive Hallett ran I suspect their times will be much closer to an hour if not under.
Provisional results are now up confirming that Clive did indeed breeze round in just 56 minutes. The splits graph reveals control eleven as another problem area. It would have been faster to stay on the track longer and only turn in to the grotty re-enterant at the last minute. Looks like second placed Andy Monro wasted even longer on sixteen than I did.
Bad luck to SARUM whose juniors appear to have been beaten in to the final of the Yvette Baker Trophy by BOK on count back.