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!

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.

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.

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!

GPS

The catalyst to all this geekery is undoubtedly my wrist-worn GPS.  I use a Garmin Forerunner 305.

I like this device, it’s easy to use and has some nice tools, when I’m just running I use it for pacing but more importantly (for me anyway) is for orienteering analysis (mostly in QuickRoute, below).  My Dad has a 405 which is smaller, sleeker and meant to be more advanced, but I found it somewhat painful to use.  I’ll be sticking to my chunkier, uglier but easier to use 305 for now.  I use a bit of software called SportTracks to analyse and store all the data from it. I don’t use SportTracks much as I have other tools I’m about to explain that I use a lot more, but it’s a nice place to store data from the GPS device.  I also have a heart rate monitor I wear with this, but I rarely analyse this data.

QuickRoute

QuickRoute is an excellent piece of software developed by a top Swedish orienteer – Mats Troeng. It allows the user to superimpose their GPS route onto an orienteering map.  After scanning (or obtaining from the organisers) your map you can create a new QuickRoute file by selecting the map and the GPS route directly from your device.  You then need to match the route to the course, the vast majority of the time this is very simple as GPS is very accurate, it is made even easier if you take splits at each control (I always seem to forget) as these are displayed.  The ‘line’ displayed on the map shows your pace by default (as a colour, red for slow going through to green for fast) and you can change lots of settings to do with this or even change the line to show your heart rate or other such numbers.

Here’s an example of a gps trace from a recent event I attended:

If you open the above you will see the route from the start, through the controls and to the finish (eventually).  You can see I made mistakes at numbers 3 and 14, just before the control.  I also made a mistake coming out of number 7 and got stuck in the thick forest for some time.

There are some excellent new developments with QuickRoute, you can import any file generated by it as all the data is stored within the image file itself which is great for analysing routes from other people.  It also means you don’t need to save any of the data yourself, if you have the image you’re good to go!  Another is integration with Google Earth where you can overlay the map onto the actual terrain so you can visualise the hills in intricate detail!  The final thing is that Mats has released the code as open source, on Google Code, it’s written in C# so I probably won’t be offering any assistance but I certainly wouldn’t mind a look at some point!

DOMA

DOMA, or Digital Orienteering Map Archive, is another excellent piece of software from Mats, though rather being a desktop application, this is a web application you need to install yourself.  You can access my install here.  This is a simple but highly effective place to store my map files, most of which I generate using QuickRoute.  One of the best features of this is a web service which allows you to upload files directly from QuickRoute without having to create the image file, log in to DOMA, upload the file… It does it all in one click!

I really like this tool, it takes away the pain of dealing with uploads through ftp, creating links and all the other drudgery that comes with website maintenance.

Attackpoint

I’ve been using Attackpoint for a year and half now, and it has completely changed my approach to orienteering.  It’s an online training diary built by an enthusiastic American orienteer, Ken Walker Jr.  I had heard about it prior to using but never really thought about even keeping a training diary.  Between leaving University at the end of 2004 and the start of 2008 I didn’t really orienteer that much and when I did I was a bit crap as I hadn’t been training.  So after attending (and loving) the JK2008 I decided to put a bit more energy into orienteering and actually see if I could get half-decent at it, attackpoint was a major catalyst in this process.  It adds a’peer pressure’ aspect to training that I’ve never really had before having never been part of a regular training group.  This might sound a bit odd a concept but basically I’m a lazy lazy person, I love orienteering and I love running but unless I have good reason to do it… I won’t!  So this helped coerce me into doing more, I love it!  Injury (see previous post) is the worst thing about it though as all you want to be doing is getting out there and doing some training, but I seem to be becoming less injured as time goes on (sitting on your arse for 3 years is bad, kids)

At the moment I sometimes write a bit about the races I run in Attackpoint but I’m thinking I might alter my approach and write a blog entry for each race (or race weekend if it’s a smaller thing) and link to that from Attackpoint, we’ll see how it goes!

I have ’sprinted’ well this year after taking ibuprofen to help protect my left leg, which has had various injuries, mostly related to each other.  I was 35th at the JK sprint in M21 (47th on course) and I was 26th at the British Sprint champs.  I ran well in the JK Long race too, not terribly fast given my fitness but was good navigationally and tactically.  The middle races I ran (JK and British Middle) weren’t the most inspiring but were ‘ok’.  In none of these races was I feeling anywhere near fit though!

So next year…  My goals are to fix my injury problems with physio, pilates and not being stupid by the end of this year (I will probably manage the first two, not so sure about the third).  I want to be able to run faster, both on and off road.  I’m not too bothered about on-road running but it’s the easiest way to train for me (there are other options but they involve on road stuff to get there) so I will do a bit with the aim of doing some 5k Edinburgh Parkrun events, possibly the Great Winter Run (5k round Holyrood Park, last year in 19.36) and the Great Edinburgh Run (39.51).  These were both personal bests on hilly courses.  I also need to get some longer hill/terrain runs in, whether with a map or not. At the moment I’m not too bothered about doing specific’speed’ training as I don’t particularly enjoy it.  I want to get a stage where I’m running pain free and enjoying orienteering.  If I get to that stage and realise I can actually be vaguely competitive I will think about doing more!  At some point in the future I want to run another marathon (3hr27 in London 2002) but not next year, I *may* do a half marathon next Autumn if I’m in good shape, i.e. below 1hr30mins shape. My plan is to (try to) run a sub 3 hour marathon at some point.

My orienteering goals next year depend on how my training is going, although the UK Cup races seem like a decent place to start as they are a bit more accessible for me next year.  The JK is kinda far away, but well, it’s the JK… The events are provisionally as follows:

• 27/28 March – Middle (TBC) & Long (Trossachs) – nice and local!
• 9/10/11 April – JK Sprint/Middle/Long – SW England
• 17/18 April – British Sprint/Middle – NW England
• 1 May – BOC Long – Cannock?
• 3 May – UK Cup Sprint

After that, who knows, I don’t plan at the moment to go to any ‘holiday’ events next summer as I have other plans with frinds (sailing, yay!) so I might as well focus on being fit and healthy for these events, as well as the Scottish Champs at the end of May.

That’s enough rambling from me, this blog wasn’t intended to be a personal ‘about my life’ blog, but it seems I don’t have much to write about apart from that, so I’ll probably write up my races and things too to pad it out

Oooh, and I have a training I organised last night to write about, which I pinched from another blog, oh well!

One of the main, but simple, changes was moving the blog to be the homepage of adalgleish.net which is nice, you can easily have it hosted in another directory (/blog in my case) but appear as if on the homepage.

I have no idea if anyone will read this, but I will keep writing and trying post vaguely informative things in future   I have also turned on google thingies, so posts should get picked up there and be found under relevant searches.

I got the idea from the SYO ‘Garmin Ultrasprint’ that seems to have taken off in the Sheffield area.  What better way than as part of an informal ESOC social of learning the ropes. I loved the concept, but I didn’t like their idea of the ‘maze’ being so open which I felt would lead to a ‘look at map’, ‘look up’, ’see control’, ‘run to it’ approach.  So I combined this idea with the previous ‘taped maze’ format, where there were dead ends and such like.

After ‘canvassing’ some people in ESOC I came to the conclusion that it needed to more maze, less open field, so I aimed to have only a shortish section of ‘running’ to get the heart rate up with some maze action before and after.  I selected Lauriston Castle as the location as it has a nice open bit of grass with some features on it (a concrete block thingy and a tree) so I could have them in the midst of the maze as well as some vaguely interesting bits of woodland / gardens for running around on.  This required a small number of map corrections which resulted in my first foray into OCAD – which is reasonably simple for changes like adding trees / bushes. What required a bit more thought was how to actually draw the maze on the map.  Obviously I did this in OCAD but should I use the fence symbol?  I played about with it but it simply didn’t look right.  The little dashes you get coming out of the fence line were too distracting from the detail required for the maze.  In the end I went with the small cliff symbol, which has a slightly thicker line and no dashes.  It didn’t make perfect sense from a mapping point of view, but it looked good and was navigable.  Here is the maze at 1:750:

The Maze

Map drawing complete I was ready to design some courses, this was pretty simple as I’ve planned a fair number of courses in my time.  The idea behind my designs were to get little distinction between a difficult route choice legs combined with some easy legs and some faster running outside the maze to get the HR up and make decision making a bit more troublesome.

Start of Course 1

All 3 maps are viewable in their slick-as-you-like Word documents via the link to the ESOC Site. The layout could have been done entirely in Condes or OCAD I guess but I didn’t have much time so I went with the easy option of pasting into Word.  The problem was how to make the maze navigable as well as the entire course.  In the maze there are a lot of controls in a small space so a 1:500/1:750 scale made sense, but this would have been huge for the rest of the course (and unecessary) so I opted for 3 map segments… One with the start, one with the entire course and one with the finish.  The start and finish bits were in the maze so it worked very well.  I guess I could have hidden the controls in the maze on the 1:2000 map, but again laziness / lack of time prevented this.  There were no control descriptions, I wanted people to know they were in the right place rather than find by number, I probably should have puts dots on the precise location on the map but forgot to do this before I printed.  I think, for a basic amount of effort, it looks pretty good and worked well.

End of Course 1

After helping to set out the maze last year I knew it was no easy task.  I decided to leave about 2 hours for it and arrived at 5 with few helpers signed up.  So my Mum and I set out the canes in all the right places and our mini army of Dad, Mark/Emma Wood and Simon set out all the tapes.  Once the canes were in place I set out all the controls (22 in total I think), then set up the download, then test ran one of the courses (!).  I think this was all finished at 7, when the event was due to start, perfect!

And below should be the full course, as you can see the bit in the maze is verging on the illegible, hence the blown up start and finish sections!

Everything after this went very well.  Download was a bit manic, there were a LOT of mispunches and hired cards etc. So glad I was using Autodownload (shameless plug) as with anything else this would have been a nightmare.  I did get to run all 3 courses though, and I made mistakes, big mistakes.  I lost maybe 20 seconds through hesitating / bad route choices on course 1.  I mispunched on course 2… misread the map and went to the wrong control.  oops, bit embarrassing!  Course 3 was pretty much perfect.  I realise I had drawn the map and planned the courses but it was annoying to mispunch as I would have won otherwise.

Ultrasprint Maze - thanks to Crawford for picure

A few people mispunched so I ‘let’ them run the courses again to get a valid time, because I’m so nice!  It was really hard though, so guess I did a good job! It was nice to see some non-ESOC people ask to come who were travelling a bit further, shows they are interested in the format, hopefully they will have been inspired and will put on their own versions!  I’m happy to help with advice too, just ask.

We already have an offer to plan the same social next year, can’t wait!  Would love to see something like this which is a bit more competitive though, hint hint All in all, very fun event, thanks to all who helped make it happen!

It’s simple, has cool stuff on it, isn’t too flashy and is a bit more professional than the default one.

The header image doesn’t seem to always work for me though, perhaps Linux + (an older version of) Opera isn’t particuarly nice for WP, would be good to know if it isn’t working for anyone else who stumbles upon this post, as it could be something to do with my host…

Actual, decent post is on the way, no more crap like this, honest!

Over the last few years I have found a lot of helpful and interesting things on various blogs, from humour to innovative coding solutions to orienteering training ideas.  So these are things I hope to write about in the hope that they will help someone else.

I realise the theme / layout are very basic, time is of the essence after all, so these will no doubt change and be enhanced at some point!