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Inspired by what Ian Hopkins and Tony Callow have written, I put something in the latest West Midlander about park orienteering, and a plan for next year is beginning to take shape. The Black Country is a bit of an orienteering desert, and most of the places available for orienteering in the region are parks, so a park league seems like an ideal system for the area. Also, there are some big running clubs in the area and we know that most runners don’t like classic orienteering – but we also know that many of them are prepared to cross over to urban and park events, neither of which require much – if any – compass work.
All the local clubs already organise park-O events, usually as part of their Saturday morning or weekday-evening series. LOK runs its Park Race series on Thursday evenings throughout the summer, getting 100 runners a time. Since rush-hour traffic is bad, and local clubs are already running Summer evening events anyway (and evenings are going to get even busier with advent of club nights in several new locations) I think that the Black Country Park-O series will have to take place on Saturday mornings.
Each event would have a short, medium and long race, about 1-1.5 km, 2.5-3 km and 4-5 km, though on some sites there might be score events instead. The short race would be a “Short Yellow” and the other two would be what used to be called Orange and Red, though the emphasis should be on route choice rather than fine navigation.
A programme could look something like this:
Easter: Sandwell Valley/Dartmouth Park mass start (same day as SLT Egg Hunt)
Apr (ii): Bumble Hole
May (i): Wolverhampton East Park
May (ii): Haden Hill
June (i): Baggeridge (HOC event)
June (ii): Warley Woods (COBOC event)
July: Walsall Arboretum
Most of these are HOC areas but I think the league should be open to assistance from all four local clubs.
The emphasis throughout is on running, not on navigation. There shouldn’t be any apology for this. All orienteers need the opportunity to pick their feet up and practise techniques at speed. And for non-orienteers it’s a great way to discover that running with a map isn’t as bad as they thought! In fact it can be, dare I say it, quite exciting.
I went to Nottingham yesterday to do the Level 3 Controller’s course, which took place at the Clifton campus of Trent University. The tutor was Mike Gardner and there were four of us on the course. The best part was the jog round the campus in the sunshine after lunch, inspecting controls. The only bad thing was that I somehow managed to end up on the M6 Toll on the way there and had to orienteer back to the M42…
Pauline Olivant and others are to be congratulated for putting on an excellent development day, for besides the Controllers course, there were also courses being run for Planners, Organisers, Mappers and Coaches. And an excellent free lunch! 
The Chris Evans Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2 has a feature called “Sporting Challenge” where Chris goes up against the sports reporter, Jonny Saunders, in a variety of sports over several weeks. I’ve been willing them to do orienteering (and wondering whether BOF has been lobbying them) and my wish has finally come true… While I was driving to work on Friday I heard them make the announcement, and have a chat with Anneka Rice, who the BBC has decided is an expert on this fine sport…
So, on Wednesday, and Chris’s health willing – I see he’s come down with a nasty cold, they’ll be trained up and put through their paces by the British Army Orienteering Club at a not especially secret location west of London. I wonder whether they’re putting on a special (shorter) course just for the two of them, or are they up to running 5km like everyone else?
We’ll find out when the video is uploaded on Friday. Looking forward to it! Meanwhile, if you want to find out where you can orienteer around Great Britain, there’s a handy map and (a user-unfriendly) list of clubs.
From time to time I’ve seen some logic in some of the changes to orienteering in the UK that have taken place over the last few years, but just at the moment they all seem like a waste of time, as have been the hours spent by many of us pondering and discussing the changes. It’s difficult to remember demands from orienteers that things be changed (perhaps I just have a bad memory) so it appears that the mess we’ve got ourselves into has arisen because of the good intentions of a few experts, and the honest efforts of organisational apparatchiks.
And if that paragraph lost you, you know how I’m feeling. Can’t we just press “undo”?
At last week’s BOF Regional Roadshow in Coventry I was one of the voices raised against BOF’s spending our money on a glossy in-house magazine: Focus. In fact I’m ambivalent.
Some people criticise Focus because of the content: too much of this, too little of that… but I think it’s a great magazine – the people who put it together do a great job. My objections are about money and competition.
Focus is lovely and glossy and costs a lot to produce, in staff time as well as in the printing itself. There isn’t much money in orienteering and the magazine seems like an extravagance. The only argument that Mike Hamilton put forward at the roadshow was that Sport England are very impressed with it, but that argument seems circular: we produce a nice magazine so that the funding body will be impressed enough to fund it. Another argument, that Focus is a great marketing tool, seems illogical, since you only get it once you’ve already decided to join.
But I can see that having a nice magazine as a member benefit might encourage some people to join or to renew, and also that some form of member communication is required, and changing to something cheaper won’t save as much money as one might think.
Another objection I’ve had to Focus is that it’s unfair competition for Compass Sport magazine. Perhaps Focus should be part of Compass Sport, which would then be part funded by BOF and available to BOF members at a discount. If this were to happen, Compass Sport would need to undergo a makeover – its design is somewhat old-fashioned – but it would relieve BOF of most of the magazine production duties and give them more time (and money?) to concentrate on promoting the sport.
If you fancy some adventure, it looks like this event on Calf Hey, a new island off the coast of Iceland, might be your cup of tea…
As I write, the women’s Long final is underway. Helen Palmer and Pippa Archer are going well. The women’s race is 10 km, the men’s is 15 km. Quite a slog.
Maps from the qualification races on Tuesday:
Today I went up to Stafford for one of those hard-to-define modern-style races: sprint? urban? middle? Anyway, it was a run around an army base. I like going to new areas like this, and the organisers did a great job, but it wasn’t the most interesting or difficult campus-style terrain I’ve run on. And with this being my second race in two days after a month off I found it hard going. (However, the fact I had to get Catherine to the circus by 2 p.m. gave me an incentive not to hang about…)
It’ll be a kind of orienteering relay. There’ll be six “controls” on the plinth and six in the Square. I’ll do a course on the plinth, then a group of orienteers and members of the public will do the same course on the ground. Then I’ll do the next course on the plinth, and so on… The courses will spell out letters of the alphabet, and after the hour we’ll be able to use Routegadget and GPS tracking to see what we’ve been spelling out (if you can’t guess). I wonder how many letters we’ll get through? It rather depends on how fast you guys are round the Square. (I might end up doing my courses on my hands and knees but even so they should only take one minute each.) In the bits where I’m not “racing”, people in the Square can ring me on my mobile and see if they’re any good at following directions…
RUNNING IN THE AIR
I blame Twitter. I don’t think I’d heard of One & Other until one of my Facebook friends, Ben Norwood (aka mittfh), started tweeting regularly about what was going on on the plinth. Turns out artist Anthony Gormley had had the bright idea of getting the fourth, empty plinth in Trafalgar Square occupied by a different person every hour for one hundred days. And each person could do what they liked up there, within reason. Okay, fair enough, but what’s that got to do with me? Well, nothing at all to begin with; I’m no good at heights, and how could I compete with Thriller??
But then it struck me: I could use the time to promote the sport I love, orienteering. I’d have to think of an arty way to do it, but, never mind, I emailed in my application. I had a sneaky feeling that I’d be successful, even though there must be something like ten applicants for every place, but when the draw was made for September I wasn’t on the list. But then while we were away in Hungary the email came: someone had dropped out, and I was in!
You have to choose three words to describe yourself, and, being a paid-up member of the awkward squad, I chose the phrase “The unholy trinity”. This is a reference to
my being a son, husband and father (Sorry, brother, I’ve missed you out. What comes next after “trinity”?) and to my (lack of) beliefs. But apart from that I’d already made a decision to leave politics and philosophy out of my “performance”. Just as well, my appearance is on September 11th, the infamous 9/11, and I think it wise to steer well clear. I dare say some of the other “plinthers” on Friday will take a different view.
Anyway, with the help of the British Orienteering Association and several of its members in London (thanks Helen!), I’ve found a way of (sort of) turning orienteering into an artform, and anyone who’s in the Square on Friday afternoon will also be able to join in. They can also take part, like I am, in the City of London race the next morning, though doing so is leaving me a real headache: I’m organising the Black Country Championships at Himley Hall, near Dudley, on Sunday morning, so it’s not the best time to be out of town for two days!
Turns out I’m not the only orienteer to get an hour up there: Roger Williams from down Milton Keynes way orchestrated some night orienteering when he was a plinther a couple of weeks ago but I have the benefit of daylight! I hope it isn’t too windy…
If you can, tune in on Friday at oneandother.co.uk, and join me at Himley on Sunday, where you can watch the experts in action and have a go yourself.
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