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The main tale today is what I didn’t do: I didn’t go to Stone, and I didn’t go to Shrewsbury. (Mike Hampton did – and did, and achieved the rare feat of winning two races in different venues on the same day – WTG, Mike!) It’s 35 miles to Stone and 40 miles to Attingham – once upon a time I wouldn’t have thought twice about travelling to one of them, but at the moment I’m finding it hard to justify the time and expense. (Meanwhile, rather than participating, I’m becoming more interested in organising local events. Yet, sadly, a Black Country or Birmingham version of the Malvern Mini-League still seem to be surprisingly distant prospects.)
What were these two events doing taking place on the same day anyway? It’s been suggested to me that it’s POTOC’s fault, but whoever’s fault it was, just make sure you don’t do it again! I’m all for purely local events taking place at the same time, but both these events today deserved a wider catchment.
I did take Catherine and her friend up to Barr Beacon, where we found Barry McGowan standing close to a pile of O maps. 
A new area (for me): the army training camp at Swynnerton. Nice and flat, so I managed 10 minute k’s, even though my knee was a bit dodgy towards the end. Running round, it was fascinating to imagine what a hive of activity this place had been 65 years ago.
I managed to underestimate how long it would take to get there, and then I took a wrong turning, so thanks to Jean for kindly letting me register and run.
A beautiful day in North Shropshire for the qualifying round of the Compass Sport Cup. Weston Heath is a challenging area (a wooded escarpment dissected by cliff-sided gullies) and I found it tough – I made it round my 7 km course in two and a quarter hours. (I suppose that counts as good value for money!) Not last, but nearly last.
My problem today, apart from the fact that I don’t much like climbing at the best of times, was dehydration. I didn’t have enough to drink before the race and, especially in the last half hour, my legs were cramping up and I could barely make any progress on the uphill sections at all. Of course that’s my fault (I was caught out a bit by doing a course that was much more demanding than those I usually run) but I wonder why clubs don’t routinely provide drinks points on the courses. (e.g. control 122 at today’s event, which was visited by the longest courses) What was worse, when I struggled in to the finish, I realised it was still another half a mile back to the car park before I could get a drink!
Ramshaw Rocks are the east wing of the Roaches, a famous outcrop of millstone grit in the south-west Pennines near Leek. Some information about the history of orienteering in the area is given on the POTOC website. I think some people had a quiet chuckle when I announced I was going to this event – it’s a fantastic area for walking and rock climbing but it’s less than ideal for orienteering because the areas shown on the map as “rough open” are covered with Calluna vulgaris.
On the way back up the dogleg from control 11 I calculated the russness of the event at approximately 0.1R (degrees Russ), being the percentage chance of Russ bothering to finish the course. So low on the russometer, in fact, as to bearly register a flicker of russity. Only Russ himself could tell me if there has ever previously been an event so lacking in russocity. I await a russlessness report from the Bewdley headquarters of the International Russ Institute of Futile Dibberomatics. As I write, their scientists are… (Contd p. 94)
It was a beautiful evening in a beautiful area, only spoilt by the orienteering. I managed the 3.6 k of Blue part 1 in 45 minutes but, as I began to struggle to give my fig, the 2.7 k of Blue part 2 took me another 50 minutes. Included in that are the 20 seconds I halted right at the top to admire the panorama. A few of the runners seemed to be able to bounce through the heather as if they had pogo sticks for legs, but the rest of us had to content ourselves with any-which-way-but-straight (and the odd cheery comment).
Spot the difference:
leg 2 leg 9
Answer: To #2 I ran along the path, then across the heather. To #9 I ran down the path and along the road.
No run today – I had a christening to go to.
Last month the UK Cup Middle Distance event was held at Weston Heath in north Shropshire. It’s an interesting area and I ran there at POTOC‘s badge event on 16/2/03. I wasn’t doing much orienteering at the time so I didn’t register for a race, so I had to make do with a colour-coded course, and it must rank as one of the worst-value trips to an event that I’ve ever made. After driving 50 miles it was quite a disappointment to discover that the course had just six controls, and that I’d only be spending about three minutes of my run in the interesting part of the area.
Walking back to my car after the race I was surprised to hear Hungarian voices. (My wife is Hungarian.) If I remember correctly, it was a lady and her two sons, members of the Chester club.
Meanwhile, here’s a few photos from yesterday’s Ultrasprint in Sheffield.
…doing the white at POTOC’s Swynnerton event a few weeks ago:
Catherine and I stayed at dad’s in Congleton last night and this morning we made our way to M6 J15 for this POTOC event. The rain was threatening but held off until we reached the finish. Between J15 and the finish Catherine enjoyed all the bits: changing into her boots, paying, getting the control descriptions, the walk to the start (which was half the length of the white course), checking the dibber and the race itself.
I’ve taken Catherine before. Once on Cannock Chase when she was only one and she really enjoyed it, once at a chilly Shugborough when she hated it, and once at a sweaty Rosliston when she wanted me to carry her round. But she’s shown quite a turn of speed of late, so O might just be her bag! The attractive things about O for C seem to be: 1. There are other kids around; 2. Trying to be the first to spot the kite is a fun game; 3. Checking it’s the right number is fun too; 4. And so is dibbing. She’s even old enough already to understand about route choice. If I orient the map for her and ask her whether we need to go left or right, she can work out the answer from the way the purple line is going on the map.
(By the way, if she’s four in May, should she be a W4?) She sounded proud when she told her mum on the phone that she’d “found all the numbers”.
So she’s building up enjoyment and confidence, but I know that one day that’s going to take a massive knock. And that’s when she starts going round without me. Just look at the times on the white and yellow courses in the results and you can see that a course that should take ten minutes can easily take forty. Most juniors seem to keep coming back despite such bad runs, but some must be put off. Training is an issue – I know that when I ran a school O club I did virtually no training, and some of the kids I took to events had very random methodology. It’s a vicious circle: insist on training and you can seem like a spoilsport, but miss out the training and they’ll get frustrated and give up anyway.
POTOC have made a couple of apologies:
“We apologise to the competitors who had to wait for maps at the start. The unexpectedly large turnout meant that a large number of maps had to be printed at the event (the number of competitors on the Green course was 50% higher than the number of maps printed before the event), and this took time.”
In these days of preprinted maps, perhaps clubs need some kind of expert system to help them work out how many people will come. I think this was bound to have been a well-attended event: it was the only one in the whole of the North West and West Midlands; it was a league event; it was very handy for the motorway; and the weather was more for than against too. Ollie O’Brian’s brilliant event map isn’t perfect but it’s a great tool for runners and for organisers.
“The Blue course competitors were discommoded by a mismatch between the control description sheets and the maps printed at the event. The final results for this course will be adjusted by changing the finish to be at the last ‘good’ control.”
This appears to be a typical problem when maps have to be printed during the event: the same thing happened at an event on the Chase a couple of years ago. The Red map I was given was not the lastest revision, and a young lady and I spent a good ten minutes wandering around a stagnant pool looking for an invisible kite… (Hmm, I wonder if I can get my result that day counted as a Red badge time??)
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