David Currie

742This year’s Oxford-Cambridge Orienteering Varsity Match took place this weekend, a little later than originally scheduled. We went along to the individual event on Saturday held at Epping Forest North West. I had a run on the Mens A course and Christine took Emma round most of the Womens B in the running buggy. I was over 10 minutes slower than the winner, Mark Bown. I’ll put some of it down to helping Christine with the buggy on the way to number one and number two being in the wrong place. As a result of which, the splits show that I was already five minutes down on Mark when I left the second control.

Most of my mistakes were in the second half of the course. 15 really confused me as I found this massive building which I couldn’t see on the map. In the end I realised that the large rectangle on the map was the muddy green settlement colour rather than the yellow open colour. On the next leg I was then thrown by the fact that the bracken (which I think the green undergrowth screen was meant to represent) didn’t really exist on the ground. Mark then overtook me at 19 where I had disappeared down the slope to the left of the control. Anyway – it was all good fun and the sun obliged whilst we lay about at the finish eating our lunch.

Oxford won both the Mens and Womens A courses with Cambridge taking the Mens B. Sadly what JOK (ex-Oxford) had in numbers, DrongO (ex-Cambridge) had in quality and we lost to them for the first time in six years.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 26th, 2009 at 7:35 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.