Chris Curtis Web Site

We were up well before dawn (enjoying a great view of Venus as the morning star and Orion high to the South while I was packing the car) and off to Brize Norton air base to collect Nathan from his RAF flight back from the Falklands.

A friendly civilian security officer photographed us, checked id and issued passes before a soldier with a very big gun waved us in. Military bases have their own strange and special ambience. Brize Norton has a proper (but small) terminal, but without any advertising and all painted in drab military colours. There were signs insisting that those in uniform should wear hats and “pay compliments” or face a large fine. Inside were a mixture of service personnel, girlfriends and families waiting for people from the flight, which had arrived early. We were supposed to hand in our passes, but I had gone out of the base before we spotted the letterbox we were supposed to put them in.

Nathan was soon there and we went up to Chipping Norton for breakfast with Trish’s brother, his wife and the girls.

He looks very well, though tired and jet lagged after a 19-hour flight.

Today was the first “SOG” (or “Southdown Orienteers Galloppen”) event – SO’s league based on a series of local Saturday events. I took a group of excited and enthusiastic students from my school to run yellow and have a go at their first “real” event. We had over an hour in the minibus (with a few extra minutes to cope with travel sickness – though thankfully with enough warning so it happened on the verge and not in the bus) before pulling into a typical country park car park. It looked like there was a good crowd there too.

It did not take long to register the kids, explain how the SI kit worked and to help them copy maps. They were very keen to be gone and soon were. I copied the green map and was off soon too.

I enjoyed the course. It was on a chalk slope with quite varied woodland including some genuinely inpenetrable dark green stuff, very clear and obvious paths (and not too many of them) and lots of small features from benches to “small ruin” – which was very small – all I could see was half a square metre of concrete. It took the first couple of controls before I felt at home, then had my usual experience of some controls and legs making sense and going very well and others that I found hard, for no obvious reason. There were three controls towards the top of the slope, each in a compartment surrounded by good paths and not visited in order. I got caught twice by aiming into the wrong compartment and finding the wrong control before realising the error and quickly getting to the right one, but with time lost – basic bad navigation on my part, but that part of the woodland all looked the same to me. My fitness is slowly getting better – I was able to run almost all the way, and finish with a reasonable run in, but I was very tired by the end. I was shivery and aching in the evening, so I wonder if I had a bit of a virus.

I finished in 69 minutes – around 18 mins per km – my fastest SOG event so far – though with a good turn-out, it was not my best position. Analysing winsplits suggests that I could go much faster – the real problem is errors, though there were less of these than was typical before the summer. Anyway, I enjoyed it.

The kids had a great time. They had quite a variety of approaches. There were one pair who crashed about fairly aimlessly, found every control on every course but still were not much slower than the pair that discussed every possibility before making a couple of big errors. I think in future I need to be more insistent about them going out alone. The one who did was very much faster than the others.

I took nine juniors (ages 11-15) out onto the permanent orienteering course at Redhill Common this evening. One had run yellow before, the others were complete beginners. The one who has run before I sent out on a subset of the whole course – about 2K in all. The beginners had a 1K course, nowhere more than about 150m from where I was going to be based.
The one who had run before did what he did when he ran previously – he ran very fast but had problems with his fine navigation and missed controls. Interestingly, he gave up easily if the control was not immediately where he thought it should be. He is only happy when running fast.

The beginners, I sent out in pairs. They found it much harder than I thought they would. They were reading the map correctly at one level (they could tell me the feature the control was on) but not pulling it all together. To give one example, I suggested to one pair who were lost that they might start looking for a control on an earthbank by finding the bank somehwere easy (like where it crossed a path) and working along it – this seemed a revelation to them, especially as we were standing right by the other end of the bank!

They seemed to enjoy it – and found it challenging, rather than boring. They all want to come out again.

Good thing – I had 20 minutes sitting in sunshine with a great view – most relaxed I have been for ages. Bad thing – one girl student stung three times by the same wasp before the gallant boy student who was with her killed it. Fortunately, she showed no major reaction.

The course at Redhill common is trickier than you would expect from a permanent course – some controls are clear of paths and linear features, though there are good catching features with all of them. The terrain is good for a small area – runnable woodland mostly, with a few open areas and a lot of climb plus some pits and other “features”. The map is becoming old, but I think only 3 (out of 17 or so) controls are missing.

It was a glorious day for a Park-O. There was hardly any wind and there was that lovely “buttery” coloured sunshine you can get on cloudless days in September. As I drove off the downs, the sea was stretched out ahead; a delicate blue, dotted with grey fishing boats and sparkling beneath an electric blue sky. This was the fourth in the summer “Park-O” series organised by Southdowns Orienteers.

Hove Park is about 1Km long and 250 m wide, running roughly N-S with a curve so it is almost a crescent. It is an excellent example of a town park – it runs down a hillside with some interesting sweeps of slope, has small patches of thicket, and larger areas of open trees, of all sizes and some charming formal flower beds. It has a few buildings and fences and quite a few courts and a bowling green. It was very full of people enjoying the sunshine, including lots of young footballers, who set up their training session, with hundreds of cones and posts, right in front of the start.

I set off steadily on the light green course, slightly wary of my delicate shins and wanting to build up as I went round, rather than “bomb out” towards the end. It was about 300 metres to control 1 – straight across well-kept lawn to find the control in a clearing in the middle of a thicket. After that it was criss-crossing the park control by control to 8 where there was another master map to copy from – 17 controls in all. Navigation was “pretty easy” as promised, so it was a matter of going as fast as I could all the way round the 3.4Km.

I have mixed feelings about my run, mostly quite good. I did run nearly all the way, though not very fast. I had to have a few brisk walks towards the end, but my fitness was very much better than before the summer. It was hot (around 25C) and there was very little shelter. I did feel very overheated at times, but I was never completely out of breath or wrecked. Best of all, my shins and legs felt a little delicate, but I was never really worried by them. There was some stiffness, but no pain. I would jog along happily, get into oxygen debt and slow down, then start jogging again. A minute or two after the finish and I felt fine, perhaps I did not go hard enough?
Anyway, I was round the 3.4Km in 39 minutes. Around 11 mins per Km, which is my best so far by about 1 min per km. As navigation was no factor, this is a measure of my speed over the ground and moves me a little nearer some of the regular runners. The training has definitely paid off. All that is good.

It does show how far I have to go, though. It is really quite a small park. I should have been able to do 3.4Km much faster than the average 5.5kph I managed. That is really a brisk walk, though I am not disappointed. Training works, just a lot more of it to do. Running in the park did not cause me problems, I need to do more of it. That is the challenge for the future.

The results are here. I did not appear on the results list at first, but a quick exchange of emails and it was sorted out.
I will have to miss the last Park-O (next Saturday at Stanmer) as I am on the University run to Edinburgh, but I can’t wait for the SOG series to start again – back in the woods!

Although it is a little early to tell, broadband from Blueyonder (the internet arm of Telewest) is great.
One man turned up to install it. We have telewest telephone and used to have their analogue cable TV, so the cable connection was re-used and there was no need to dig up the front garden. The connection was run round the side of the house into the study. A neat connection point was made and the man attached the study computer to a new cable modem. In all, we were up an working on one computer in well under an hour.
As soon as he had gone, I connected the hub of my home lan to the cable modem (which has standard ethernet and usb sockets) and connected the study computer back to the hub. About 30 seconds config of the hub and everything was connected.
Downloads from good sites run at around 90K and response seems very fast. Uploads are noticeably slower than ADSL (at 128K instead of 256) but are perfectly acceptable. If I want faster I can upgrade. There have been no disconnections or slow-downs in six days of heavy use.
Time will tell, but I am happy to have made the move.