Duncan and I went to the SN Saturday Series event at Horsell Common today where, as has now become the norm, he beat me. This was followed by some junior training which mostly involved me soaking up uncharacteristic November sunshine.
I had to have the significance of the sandpit adjacent to the start pointed out to me. Despite having reread it in the past year, I’d failed to remember that Horsell Common is the setting for the start of H G Wells’ War of the Worlds. The sandpit is the landing site for the first Martian…
The recent spat between Garmin and Strava reminded me that there was a time when I used to post GPX files on this blog for orienteering events and my more interesting runs. I then used the XML Google Maps plugin to render those GPX files. That plugin failed to survive a PHP upgrade many years ago, and the maps were gone. I sensed another opportunity for Copilot…
I decided to test out Copilot on another MapRun-related challenge: planning the optimal route for a score event. Our Summer League events are, more often than not, planned using OpenOrienteeringMap. This uses OpenStreetMap data for the base map. The format is usually a 45-minute urban score event, using MapRun’s ScoreNxx scoring system. The aim was to take the KML file that describes an event, and determine the best route to take to maximise the score. As a constraint, I would specify the maximum distance that the route should cover (i.e., how fast the competitor was expected to run).
We decided to spurn the Scottish 6-Days for our orienteering holiday this year, and instead went south to the OOcup. The event moves around, but this year was taking place on the Slovenia/Italy border. We flew Easyjet to Venice and then hired a car to drive the 200km to Kranjska Gora where we had rented an apartment. (I now know much more about cross-border hire charges than I ever wanted to. For the record, Enterprise was around £25 for the week.)
Southampton Orienteering Club has what is now an annual MapRun league. A few years ago, I wrote a tool to scrape the results for each event, allocate points (only your first attempt counts, and it must be in a specific time window), and publish some HTML results. For example, those from this year (which I might just happen to have won!). For some reason lost in the mists of time, it was written in Node, but I decided that I would rewrite it in Golang before sharing it with the world on GitHub.
I’ve written before about our use of Drupal for the Southampton Orienteering Club website. We’re now on Drupal 11, and my opinions haven’t really changed. Upgrades are still painful, particularly the community modules that we have to leave behind each time. The user experience for creating content also lags behind newer alternatives. We have a significant amount of historical content on the site (not all of it publicly visible), making a move a daunting proposition. In the meantime, as this post demonstrates, we continue to utilise the powerful features that Drupal and its ecosystem offer.
I spend a couple of hours a week hanging around the leisure centre at Fleming Park while Emma swims. For the past month or so, I’ve been using that time to update the orienteering map of the area, ready for the SOC Summer Series event there in August. The fairways of the old golf course are becoming increasingly overgrown, aided by the planting of lots of new trees. I therefore wanted to update the map to the latest sprint specification, ISSprOM 2019-2, so that I could make use of the ‘rough open with scattered bushes’ symbol. Although it hasn’t shifted much since 2016, I thought it was also time to update magnetic north.
The following directions for OpenOrienteering Mapper (OOM) are based on those I received from the club’s mapping officer, Mark Light.
Last weekend, the children were away on a music tour and Christine was examining a viva in Lancaster on Monday, which was the ideal excuse for a long weekend in the Lake District.
Friday – Loughrigg Fell
I took Friday off work and we took the train to Windermere via London, and then the bus to Rydal where we were staying in the Badger Bar. (Badger feeding was supposedly on offer each evening but I think we went to bed before the badgers got up!) It took about seven and a half hours door to door which, while a couple more than driving, was certainly more relaxing. We had time for a walk on Loughrigg Fell before dinner in the pub (and watching a very damp Olympic opening ceremony on TV).
Saturday – High Raise and the Langdale Pikes
The forecast was for rain most of Saturday morning. We eventually set out about 11, staying low and skirting the lakes to Grasmere. After tea and cake, things had started to dry out and we set off up to High Raise. Our younger selves might have continued on to Bowfell but we decided to drop down to Dungeon Ghyll via the Langdale Pikes.
We had a drink at the pub while waiting for the bus and chatted to a couple of guys who had been watching the Blisco Dash fell race (this year, the British Short Champs). They also mentioned it was the Lakeland 50/100 and we cheered the runners in Ambleside as we sat and ate our fish and chips.
Sunday – Fairfield Horseshoe
The weather was set fair for Sunday and we headed up Nab Scar to do the Fairfield horseshoe clockwise. I was dripping in sweat when we reached the ridge but sadly we then headed into the clouds as we approached Fairfield. The clouds did clear as we headed back towards Ambleside.
Monday – Lancaster
We relocated to Lancaster University that evening and had a wander around a mostly deserted campus. On Monday I had a couple of hours to kill while Christine worked. I decided to take the guided tour of Lancaster Castle. You started in the wings that were still in use until the prison closed in 2011 and then headed back a few hundred years to the waiting cells where, if you timed your arrest badly, you might have had to wait up to 9 months for the court of assizes. The tour then moved on to the impressive courtrooms, concluding in the “drop room” (which I’ll leave you to fathom for yourselves).
There was just time for a quick bite to eat before it was time to meet Christine at the station for the return train home.
Posted in Family, Running, Travel | Comments Off on Lancaster and Lake District Getaway
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