David Currie

I’ve got rather used to going along to the orienteering club’s summer series events and getting round the longest course in around half an hour. It was therefore a bit of a shock to the system to get to today’s event and realise that it was going to be a one hour score event. Oh well – that’s only a maximum of one hour I thought to myself. I should, however, have realised that with Jane planning I wasn’t going to be back in much under 60 minutes. As it turned out, I failed to get three controls despite covering over 8 miles in 59:07. It was certainly a good workout though with my heart rate averaging at 172.

The others had done a yellow course whilst I was out. Unfortunately it started to tip it down shortly after Christine set off. We repaired to the car where Duncan proceeded to insert coins in to the CD player (anyone have a set of removal keys so I can turn it upside-down and shake them out?!). By Christine’s return there was blue sky everywhere – just a shame that more people hadn’t hung on a bit for the Summer Series prize giving and club BBQ.

923On Saturday we were back to Fleming Park for more orienteering – this time one of SOC’s Summer Series events. I took Emma and Duncan round the yellow where the major challenge was navigating past the playground and sandpit without coming to a complete halt! It’s also only just occurred to me that Emma walked round – in last year’s series we never made it all the way without the aid of a pushchair. With the inclusion of the old municipal golf course it is an interesting enough area but not particularly big. My 4.1km light green course criss-crossed the map several times and it still only took me just over 18 minutes to get round. Sadly we left the event amidst much crying as there wasn’t time to revisit the playground as Emma was due at a party in the afternoon.

914Thursday night is usually Christine’s running night but this week we though tag along – partly so that Emma could see them doing their silly walks for the warm up, but mainly so that the rest of us could go to the orienteering club’s Maze-O event, also at Fleming Park. Quite what the general public made of the 15 or so people dashing about in a 5 metre square sea of red and white tape I do not know. It worked quite well for us though. Duncan got to hold the Emit brick. Emma and I then navigated around the maze shouting to Duncan when we reached a control. He would then just plough straight under all the tapes, punch the control and wander off again!