You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Wrekin Orienteers' category.
SINS is West Mercia’s two-yearly orienteering weekend, and this year it’s been blessed with perfect weather. I’m walking (as opposed to hobbling) again but I decided not to overdo it and “ran” course 12 at Brown Clee today, which was the shortest “expert” course available, at 3.2km. It was a good course, I made mistakes on a couple of the legs even though I was walking, and I got round in 80 minutes. I overshot #3, ending up at the lower pond, and after #8 I was dim enough to follow some tapes that I wasn’t supposed to follow…
The next couple of weeks will be taken up with various committee meetings. Checking the fixture list, unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be ready to run at Kingsford (June 4) but I’ll try and make my comeback (!) at Uffmoor Wood on the 14th.
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!
This was a mass-start score event using the permanent orienteering course at Severn Valley Country Park. I was late for the start but the organisers kindly allowed me a full allowance of time. I have a slight dislike of score events but my brain seems to cope reasonably okay with the challenge of working out the running order… in this case I got round all the controls without any difficulty (apart from a bit of knee gyp) in 45 minutes.
I raved back in August about the sprint event I went to in Hungary, and this country park would make a good location for a Midlands Sprint Championships. The first round in the morning, the second (and the prizegiving) in the afternoon.
24 hours to go till my event in West Park and I’m still working hard… I don’t want to put anyone off, but there’s a lot to this organising lark, and one has to do it completely “in the dark”, in that I’ve got no idea how many punters there are going to be. I’m still emailing people, and a web search I’ve just done has revealed the extent of Wolverhampton’s O funding: they received £76,363 of lottery money for what they dubbed the “Outdoor Challenge Project“. You’ll see some of that money on Saturday. (I won’t.) :-)
Apart from the white and yellow courses, which we’ve tried so assiduously to keep away from the edge of the lake, there’s a nice 2.3k sprint course (a.k.a. orange) for you old-timers to have a hare around, which you can beef up to a 4.3k red course if you like. Hasta manana, map runners…
It was Catherine’s birthday party yesterday so I didn’t feel I had much energy left today for such precipitous slopes, so I opted for Light Green. Less running (and climbing) and more controls (15, so good value!), and the knowledge that when you run down you’ll get an ego-boosting high position.
I was pleased with my run. Although I wasted a lot of time on control 2, I picked off the rest without much trouble. It took me 18 minutes to get to #2, but just 40 minutes from there to the finish. The first half of the course was hard but fair*. I left the path on the way to #2 and didn’t see another path till I was on the way to #7. The steep, rocky slopes reminded me of some of the events I took part in in Hungary and Slovakia.
Results (including impressive runs by Richard Dearden and Andy Hemsted on Brown.)
By the way, the barrels in the photo weren’t for us. See here.
*Okay, maybe not entirely fair. Only three sub-hour finishers, and several over two hours suggest it may have been a tad too tough… Looking again at the first control, from the armchair planner’s point of view it was clearly in the best and most obvious place, but from the age-sixty-plus runner’s point of view (i.e. most of the runners on Light Green) it was halfway up a cliff!
This was definitely worth going to. The weather was good and it makes a nice change to run on grassland instead of through trees. Stapeley Hill is “access land” (I think this is a recent term) just off the A488 between Shrewsbury and Newtown, and the views are great.
I started off well enough on my run on the Blue course, but I didn’t really have the legs. I made a bad route choice towards control 6, but at least it meant I got to see Mitchell’s Fold, an impressive stone circle I’d never heard of before. Control 10 was a bit weird: it seemed to be much closer to #9 than I was expecting it to be. And then came the mistake of the day. I thought I could see the next control, and ran straight to it, but unfortunately it wasn’t mine! The one I’d seen was in the little reentrant about 60 metres NE of my #11. And then I spent a few minutes wading through the bracken on the valley side before it clicked that I should be back up on the grass. (I wonder why such a distinct vegetation boundary isn’t mapped?)
Route: 
I found it interesting comparing my splits with Barry McGowan’s, who I travelled with. And it was also interesting comparing the Blue and Brown courses. Most of the controls were shared, and some of the legs were identical, which doesn’t matter too much for a small event, but is a mistake when the control circle is visible from a long way off, e.g. my control #8.
Ran blue. Not good. 33rd out of 42. I felt sluggish and I was sluggish, averaging more than 150% of the best time for each leg, excluding my five bad legs (1, 2, 3, 5 & 12). Got off to bad start! I punched #5 after 27 and a half minutes – the winner was there in 15.
Errors on #1 and #12 lost me 3 and 5 minutes respectively. On #1, I decided to go round the green anticlockwise, and I was a bit fazed when I discovered the green signified rhododendrons rather than young trees or whatever. I spent quite a lot of time trying to work out which green blobs were which, and I ended up running most of the way down the ride. As for #12, I ran up the reentrant but couldn’t find the ride. I think I found the perpendicular one, ran down that, ran back, overshot, relocated in the reentrant and still couldn’t find the ride. Luckily at this point a lilac-clad gentleman ran past me straight to the control! The ride was partly obscured by brashings, which was why I’d missed it. But I need to learn to judge distance better on controls like that.
p.s. Beautiful day, great event.
Recent Comments