David Currie

Yesterday saw my first orienteering since the JK – a local event at Micheldever Forest between Winchester and Basingstoke. Christine decided to stay home as she didn’t reckon pushing the pram up and down the car park track would be all that much fun so I hitched a lift with Sam Massey.

Chatting to the controller beforehand he told me the brambles weren’t too bad but the nettles were a little high in places. I can’t say they bothered me too much and the area is fantastically runnable in many places. A more helpful warning would have been to draw my attention to the date on the map. These days it isn’t often you have to run on a three year old map and its age showed. Here’s a short catalogue of my woes many of which were captured well on my GPS (GPX, KML on Google Maps):

Start – 1: Off to a bad start failing to look where the start triangle was. Then caught my foot in a ruined fence and fell twisting the wire around my ankle. Now I know how a trapped animal feels!
3-4: Stopped about 35m short of the control and wasted 2 minutes in headless chicken mode before running on far enough. Only later on in the course did I realise that the green crosses were distinctive trees not the rootstocks I’m used to.
8-9: A little thrown by the tapes around the edge of the field when the map didn’t show a taped route.
14-15: Not concentrating here and almost ran past the control. Not much time lost though.
15-16: Still not focused and found myself running to 17. Probably wasn’t a bad route choice though.
19-20: A little more of the detail in the white block of forest before the control wouldn’t have gone amiss. For the second time the control descriptions used a quarry symbol rather than an earth bank.
20-21: Failed to find the small path towards the control. Should have looked at the descriptions as I failed to see the minuscule green dot on the map next to the green screen.
21-22: Lots of people had trouble with the extra path on the ground just before the control. Lost me about 4 minutes.
24-25: The dark green on the map extends much further south than shown which is why I thought I’d gone too far. Failed to spot the strange combination of earth bank and slope used on the map. Another minute and a half gone.
26-Finish: Small compensation but at least I had the fastest run-in split!

My overall time was 71:36, ten minutes down on Joe Mercer and in 6th place in the results. With 7.5 mins of mistakes on just three controls that doesn’t seem too bad but then the graphs show Joe also lost five minutes on 22. Still, I had a better day of it than Sam who lost is glasses yet again!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 7:51 pm and is filed under Orienteering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.