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Saturday Night

The past weekend STAG hosted a weekend of events on the excellent little area next to Loch Faskally, just North of Pitlochry.  The Saturday evening saw the Scottish Night Champs on a clear and crisp night, followed by a more ‘fun’ event on Sunday, the Knoll Kollection!

I ran at a local event in Edinburgh on the Saturday morning, hosted by ESOC, planned by Tom as a ‘warmup’ but I think I may have run it a little too hard as for the rest of the weekend I felt the odd twinge in my hamstring.  That’s what you get for not warming up properly, dumbass!  Thankfully it’s fine now.

I drove up to the event on Saturday just wanting to run well and cleanly as I have a habit of being a bit crap at night events.  It was technically the Scottish Champs but there was a small and weak field.  The M35 course had a much better field and were on the same course so my goal was to finish ahead of all them.  The start was in an unusual place for Faskally, on the other side of the main road which required a short (150m) run under the A9 to get to the start triangle, which gave me good opportunity to look and the course and do some planning, the only major route choice leg being 5-6 where I decided to go to the North of the hill.  The rest of the longer legs were mostly easy choices and sticking to the paths.

I started really well, not losing much time at all on the first half of the course, although I had a little luck on number 8 when I pretty much found myself at a control, looked at the number and said ‘oh, it’s mine’ – not the greatest but at least I found it!  By the time I got to 14 I was leading, ~1min ahead of Fraser Purves and 2.5 mins up on Roger Goddard, both of whom generally finish ahead of me.  I see this as a big positive, despite what happened next it’s nice to know I was competitive at this point! It looks like Roger lost some time on 8 and 9, probably around 3mins.

So yes, it all went wrong after this.  The next 4 controls were disasterous.  I stopped short on 15, convinced I hadn’t gone far enough, bailed out to the path, realised I had been about to get to the control and dived back in and found it.  Lost maybe 1min but the confidence was shot too, then I really messed up 16 pretty badly.  I went down the hill too early and got stuck in a rhodedendron bush and had to backtrack out, figure out what was wrong, then go back up the hill to get round.  I faffed about far too much and lost nearly 4 minutes!  Confidence still shot I passed above 17 and ended up at 18 first!  Lost about 4mins here…  At least I had a fastest split to 18!

After this I was pretty clean but I slowed a lot, my lack of training was catching up and coupled with my general bad mood at making lots of mistakes meant I lost a lot of enthusiasm.  Course 2 had a lot of similar controls in the next section and I couldn’t really keep up with Steve Barrett who I should be able to keep up with!   I lost some time on 23 by mis-interpreting the vegetation and heading into the wrong bit of forest, but I realised soon enough to limit the damage, then plodded round the final few controls.

All in all a vaguely successful evening, lots of positives, a few negatives.  I need to work on recovering after an error and getting my head back into it quickly to minimise further losses.

I kinda messed up my GPS trace for this event, but if you’re keen to see it you can see it on my map archive.

Results / Routegadget etc

Sunday

The Sunday morning brought a more fun event (on the same area as the night before) called ‘Knoll Kollection’.  The idea being to visit as many knolls in the area as you can in an hour.  I’d heard that it was possible to visit them all in the time so that’s what I set off to do.  My route worked well and I only tweaked it slightly on the way round.  I hadn’t marked the controls on the map though so I knew there was a chance of missing the odd one out, and I did… I ended up with 78 out of 80.  Despite talking to the organiser as well as assisting with getting routegadget online I’m still not sure where the 80th one was!

Results and Routegadget

Map

I’m pleased with how the weekend went, 3 runs in 2 days and my legs are feeling pretty decent, if a little tired. Definitely signs of improvement, long may it continue!

Last Saturday was the Carlisle City race, part of the Nopesport Urban League this year.  Having never been to Carlisle before I was keen to run this especially as it was only a couple of hours drive away!

The day started with fog causing extremely low visibility in Edinburgh, so much so that we decided it’d be pretty horrible to orienteer in… Thankfully after an hour driving South we were out of the fog and into glorious sunshine!  Thankfully we were treated to this wonderful weather for the whole day… until our return to Edinburgh that is.

We arrived in plenty of time for the race, parked the car and then headed towards the start and finish ‘arena’ (picture above, taken after the race) which was in the middle of the busiest shopping street in Carlisle, on a Saturday afternoon!  Needless to say it was pretty busy. Borderliners were all ready ahead of schedule so people who were early were allowed to start their run before the official start block, we saw no reason not to just run so after a quick warmup, a trip through a crowded shopping centre to go to the toilet, and an argument with a start official about contact details in case I died during the race (!) I was ready to go.

I started off well to the first control but was a bit hasty and had not planned ahead to 2, a tricky route choice leg.  On leaving 1 I saw that the ‘obvious’ route choice to the west of the church was impassable so I doubled back and went to the East. If I’d planned it ahead of time I would have gone West but gone a little further and there was a road connecting to where I wanted to be.  The underpass was fun and the boulder control under especially so:

Then we were out into the open, away from the hustle and bustle of the city centre and running around the castle, with some easy route choice legs.  3 was pretty even for which way was best and then 4 was very simple and only there as a guide for 5.  5 was in the maze, which we’d been given special instructions about, which proved largely useless as the hedges weren’t easily crossable so I struck to following the maze.  I made a mistake coming out of this control, I should have gone towards 6 but I came out the way I’d gone in and lost some time. I made another slight error coming out of 7 and had to readjust my route to take this into account, I ended up cutting across the grass when I could have taken the path the whole way…

9 was a good route choice leg which I got spot on, it was quite hard to see where the control was once you got there but didn’t lose any time.  I made a mistake coming out of 9 though (this is turning into a common feature in this run) and went a little far before turning right, adding unecessary distance.

11 to 12 was an interesting leg, the North-South road you had to cross was very busy for the first 2/3 of it, after that point it got considerably quieter as there was a turn off into the bus depot / car park.  I didn’t realise this in time and did my usual ‘cross the road at the earliest point when you can do so safely’ and crossed it pretty early on (within the first third).  Then when I got to the potentially busy bit I realised I had to cross 2 roads in order to get to where I wanted to be, luckily there was nothing coming so I just ran across.  Later on while crossing this road on the way back to the car I had to wait over a minute at the lights here before it was quiet enough to cross, it could have been a costly thing to happen during the race.  I reckon it could have been saved by some out of bounds hashing on the road up to that point.

Apart from a bad route choice to 15 I was pretty clean for a while.  If I had to choose again I’d go a different way to 18 (around the castle rampart) but no real time loss.   19/20/21 were all dead running, and lots of it.  I planned most of the last few controls on the way to 21 (coincidentally I went east on this huge route choice leg, there was nothing in it though) and as a result had a lot fewer minor errors in the latter section which was just a parade around the alleys of the city centre.  I was a bit peeved at the penultimate leg, 29-30 which was through the same busy shopping centre I’d gone for a pee in earlier, it was really too busy to have as a route choice on a Saturday afternoon, I don’t think it should have been mapped – just as you wouldn’t map a stream as crossable if the weather had been really bad recently.

Anyway, here’s the map:

All in all I was pleased with this race, had a decent enough result and didn’t make any huge mistakes.  Took it too fast at the start and lost some time from not planning ahead well enough.

Could do with updating this blog on the day of the event rather than the week later!

Lots of racing coming up; FWTN tonight, Scottish Night Champs on Sat, Faskally knoll thingy on Sun, should be good!  Leg was a little sore after Carlisle but it was mostly on solid ground, hopefully all these races won’t be so bad on the legs.

The annual JOK chasing sprint was held in Edinburgh this year, so very accessible for me!  JOK had teamed up with EUOC, who put on their fantastic (and dare I say it, annual) street race on the Saturady, as part of their ‘Big Weekend‘.  I decided not to run the city race, I think it was this race last year where I started to have my injury problems as I ran very hard (and did quite well incidentally), then ran again the next day and came out with very sore calf muscles.  If interested, results of the 2010 city race are here, there were some epic route choices and it looks like a fantastic course, shame I couldn’t race it (I walked the short course with Tara)

After a fairly decent showing in the ESOC Sprint last week I thought I might be able to at least be part of a decent chase group and get a race out of it, turns out it wasn’t to be….  At least it was a lovely day, and a lot of the climb was removed with a hilly walk to the start:

The prologue started badly, I was very hesitant to #1 down the slope and never really regained any sort of speed, crap route choice to 2 and when coming out of it saw my James Lyne coming into it, he’d caught me 2 mins already! Arse.  I managed to stay ahead of him until number 7, where I made a silly error in staying too high and getting on the wrong side of the gorse, so I then had to fight my way back down, losing 45secs or so.  I was fairly clean after that, even when Spongey went flying past at number 10, though I was very slow and even walked some of it, here’s the map:

The chase started a lot better than the prologue, I was starting at the same time as Ross McLennan, but it turns out he wasn’t up for it after a tiring week of training and just jogged (and gave up?) so I passed him early on.  The first section comprised of 2 gaffled loops.  The map below makes sense if you look at the left bit first, then the right.  I got both loops pretty much bang on, my only problem was being slow on the uphills.  I managed to pass a couple of people in here, Duncan Grassie and Peter Helme (who I don’t know, just assuming from results) and then proceeded to totally and utterly cock up number 9.  I lost about 4.5 minutes, on Holyrood Park…  I was really being silly looking back, I went to the wrong cliff, too early, and then made the map fit.  The gorse was probably more passable than it was on the map and it made vague sense for where I should have been, so I stayed there, checking and double checking, being more and more stupid.  Meh, I wasn’t the only one there, 3 of us were looking for it, which probably compounded the problem.  Eventually I realised what I was doing and started heading for the real number 9 only to see Ollie O’Brien punching it, about 10/15 secs ahead of me.  I know I can run about the same speed as him, perhaps slightly faster so thought I might be able to catch him in the last section but my legs weren’t having any of it, booo. :/  Chase map(s):

All in all a pretty crap showing, only way is up, eh?!  Results can be found here.

Carlise next, on Saturday, as I’ve decided not to run any more this week and get myself back on the cross trainer.  Shins are hurting after these 2 runs and then running again on Monday night.

So now that I’m vaguely running again (as in, my physio told me to run as she couldn’t find anything wrong with me) I decided to have a go at the chasing sprint last Sunday, organised by my club, ESOC.  I was already doing the timing for the event so it was easy enough to run too, although I didn’t get much time for keeping warm between the races!

The first race was the prologue which was to be used to determine the start order for the chase, to take place ~1 hour after the prologue.  Given my recent lack of activity I decided to take this fairly steady and given the very simple orienteering had a decent run, leaving myself 5th overall, 2 secs behind Martin Dean with nobody else really close enough to us to see without significant mistakes being made.  Here’s the course with my route on it, the colour indicates pace as per the scale at the top:

As you can see from the green trace I started off pretty quickly, probably slightly so as I slowed down in the forest.  Not too bothered about the speed really, as long as it’s not going to harm my recovery / development it’s fine.

Producing the start times for the chase took slightly longer than expected, so I didn’t have much time for much between the two events other than a few slurps of coffee and Martin coming in to the tent to ask if I was ‘getting stressed out’ as he knew I would be chasing him down!  It turned out I had about 5mins which involved a slight re-warmup and a pee and then into the queue to get going with the chase.  I watched Tom, Dave and Will all head off in the same direction so headed off in the same direction with confidence, glanced at the map and saw 6 controls in the open and the rest were in the slightly steeper forested section.  I knew my current strength would limit my speed in the forest so had to try and get a gap ahead of Martin during the first 6 controls.  Then we had our ‘wobble’ – the first 3 guys had all come back out and round between 2 and 3 and we had a brief conversation in which we concluded we would too.  We were the last to do so as Fraser P took the initiative about 30secs after us…  The leading 5 all lost around 20secs on this control because of this…  Take a look at the map, it’s a double-dotted wall, this is why sprint standard maps exist.

4/5/6 were all a bit of a parade really, very simple navigation and I was just trying to get a gap on Martin, I took a chance on diving into the forest early on 5 to try to get ahead but I only ever got a few metres in front.  The photo below (thanks to Ken Daly for this) shows us crossing the bridge after coming out of number 6, I was ahead here but not for long….

About 10 secs after this was a slight uphill and my legs just wouldn’t do it, so I slowed and Martin came soaring past, nothing I could do about it.  A couple of controls later he was effectively out of sight so I reduced my speed to a cruise and hoped that nobody would catch me.  During the last 3 controls I lost a lot of time to lots of people!  I caught a glimpse of Martin going straight on 13 so I chose the path route in the offchance he got caught in some grotty undergrowth but it wasn’t to be.

About 10 seconds after punching 14 I heard some action behind me, Jon Hollingdale and Fraser Purves were head to head and really pushing it, so I was ready to break out in a sprint if they caught me on the (fairly long) run in, but they didn’t and finished 10secs behind me.  Pleased to hang on to 5th but disappointed I couldn’t give Martin a better race.

Chase Map:

Results are here (including RouteGadget etc)

We made a bit of a faux-pas with the results, the two SI units on the finish had ~3 secs between their clocks (oops!) which meant a few results needed to be amended afterwards which was a shame.  Either synchronising them or only having one unit with a marshal to make sure people punch in the order they crossed a finish line would have worked much better.

Thankfully nobody lost out because of the wall indecision, although my pride was dented slightly by being beaten by Andrew Lindsay over the chase course by a few seconds.  He was ‘chasing’ all the way though and his last few control splits are way faster than mine!  Hopefully this is a sign that I need to train more so these pesky juniors don’t start beating me regularly!

Really amazing to be back orienteering, long may it continue and short may my injuries woes last!