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The weather was perfect for the last orienteering before Christmas. It was cold and crisp, but not too frosty, with a blue sky and low sun. It has not rained for a week or more, so the ground was firm for running. Knowlands Wood is small but excellent terrain set in a very pretty area of “low weald”, framed by the South Downs. It has very varied terrain – including for today a couple of runs straight across empty fields.

I decided to try a few things slightly differently this week. I would deliberately keep to a steady jogging speed but sustain it throughout and I would ensure that I really did thumb the map properly – i.e. keeping it orientated at all times and keeping my thumb on it to mark current position. Both of these strategies worked well. The steady jog covered ground much more quickly than my usual “run then stop” technique and I found I could think more clearly – the running became a background activity, so that navigation could become the foreground. Apart from running into a very grotty, bramble-infested patch and ending up in the wrong “compartment” of trees – mostly because of trying to escape the brambles – which lost time on control 7 I was navigating reliably and enjoying myself. I was round in under an hour – my second fastest mins per km on green this year and within my current target. I was quite pleased.

At one point in the wood, I was passed by a herd of deer: perhaps seven or eight of them. They were running hard and came from behind me, then crossed in front, perhaps 20m away. They were astonishingly fast and graceful. The low sun made me think of the chorus of “the Holly and the Ivy” – and there was nowhere I would rather have been this morning than out in the winter woods.

A cup of lovely fruit punch and a mince pie afterwards then walking back to the car past the duck pond made the trip complete.

I wondered how things would go when I had felt blocked up and “flu”-like all week, but I was fairly pleased with my run.

Sullington Warren is a very interesting area. It has several steep and well-defined hills and large areas of heather and sandy heath, as well as fairly complex ground detail. It has lots of very clearly defined paths – and it might be tempting to do the whole thing by running them, except that there are too many to map, so it is easy to get lost. It seems to be the dog-walking capital of the world too, so these were an additional hazard.

I had a much more consistent and smoother run than recently after a slow and tentative start as I literally “got my bearings”. As I had feared, my fitness was not at its best and I was a little breathless and runny nosed half way round, but I kept moving and despite going past a couple of controls managed to find everything first time, except for control 8 where I had decided to go above it and kept finding a “step” in the hillside which I interpreted as the earth wall marked on the map so I stopped and was looking for the control, before spotting another earth wall further down the slope.

I came in 17th – not quite as good as I hoped but better than recently and promising even better when I shake this cold off.

It was decidely frosty this morning. I went into school to collect a couple of keen lads and headed to Tilgate Country Park, just south of Crawley. We arrived very early for the event – there was no traffic on the road. The car park was at the top of a steep grassy slope, pure white with hoar frost but as the sun rose everything was soon dripping as the frost thawed. It was calm so not too cold as we made our way to the start.

This was very much an event of two halves for me. I could not believe how fast I was over the first four controls. I felt fit and comfortable, and seemed to have a clear mental image of the terrain every time I glanced at the map. By control 7, I was an astonishing 7th in the field and had aced one or two legs – running really fast and nailing the controls first time. I was loving the terrain – perfect runnable forest, fairly flat and open and just making sense to me.

The inevitable disaster came on the way to control 8. I was heading down a very obvious path looking for an indistinct path curving away to the left. At about the right point, there was an indistinct path, the direction was right and off I went – suddenly, the terrain no longer made perfect sense, but was close enough to keep me trying. Minutes passed until I hit a control – number 9: well away from where I should be. I used it as an attack point to head back to 8, but then hit the obvious path again and convinced myself I had gone off-line. It was only in discussion with other lost orienteers also looking for 8 that I finally twigged that the obvious path was in fact the indistinct one I had been looking for – I soon found 8, but then had forgotten where 9 should be. A loss of 20 minutes over the two controls and worse, a loss of the sharp concentration I had enjoyed to that point so that the second half, though generally not losing much time, was less precise – though my running was fast enough. I obviously run better when refrigerated.

So some very good things to take away – I really can orienteer well sometimes – and a hard lesson. I did not cope well when making a mistake, did not think flexibly enough and made it much worse, and then did not put it aside and get back to the task in hand – making it even worse still.

I liked the courses very much – the variety of controls and challenges was exceptional. I loved being out on a crisp and sunny morning and am just annoyed with myself that I let it all go wrong half way round.

I was looking forward to this event. Hollybush Wood, though quite a small area, is high quality, with lots of complex terrain. The course made good use of this, with many legs forcing you across interesting country with no possibility of path running. There was ample opportunity to use all sorts of line and point features, including several legs where the best route was using a stream as a handrail then breaking off to attack the control. In many places, you needed to read all aspects of the map, contours and vegetation changes as well as obvious features to ensure you stay on track. This course used the forest very well.
I felt better than I had done at Stoughton, but paradoxically, I was slower over the ground. Some of this was due to the very thick mud on all the rides and paths, which meant there was little chance to speed up on the occasional path run, and to a couple of errors – or more accurately to a couple of controls where I did not apply the right technique the first time and had to try again. In both cases I had not identified and executed a sensible attack point.
I also felt the effect of not having done any exercise all week, which affected me physically, but mostly mentally – I did not really believe that I could do well.
The calm, gently sunny weather was very welcome – a perfect south of England November day and I was delighted to be out in the forest rather than indoors.

Stoughton is one of my favourite pieces of woodland. It is far from any village or even house, lined out along part of the South Downs Hills which gives it a great deal of interest. It has a very varied ecology, making a feature of old yew trees scattered among beech and all sorts of other species. The area is dotted with ancient sites (4,000 year old burial mounds and the like) and in a few places has stunning views out across Chichester Harbour or across the Downs. From an orienteering point of view, all this makes it hilly and physically demanding, with a few confusing areas, though with too many paths to be able to become completely lost. The rain overnight and recent work in the woodlands meant that there was a lot of slippery “brashings” (cut branches etc) underfoot and wet chalk paths were particularly well lubricated, but overall the woods are “runnable” – open enough to run through.

I had wondered about whether I should go along today. I have (yet another) nasty abcess in my upper jaw and have been feeling quite ill generally. I thought I could always treat it as a walk in the woods if I felt too bad so I decided to risk it.

The first control was navigationally extremely easy, just a run along a path, but there was 80 metres of climb in the first 300m or so. I found the control easily, but thought I was going to die. I could hardly breathe despite having had to walk the worst parts of the climb. I was covered in sweat and shaky. Even when it levelled out, I still felt awful, much less fit than I have for many weeks. The infection was having a big impact. I was drifting along to control 2, working out what was the easiest route to walk out and give up. When I got to 2, I saw that the next leg was downhill and I reminded myself that I could do with navigation practice and could walk round even if I did not feel good. Once I had another couple of controls under my belt, I began to feel better and was running along fairly well, with one or two decent legs. With the slower speeds, my navigation was tight, apart from one control where I picked up an unmarked path instead of the one I wanted, and lost quite a lot of time cutting uphill through brambles to get back on track.

I finished a few seconds faster than the last time I was out, on a longer course this time, so the tighter navigation was important – a lesson for when I am feeling better. I was surprised and quite pleased to be 19th overall – feeling so bad, I thought I was going to be much further back than that.

So, overall, I felt really bad, but performed better than I felt. Being out in the open air and the exercise also seemed to help and I felt generally a bit better by the time I got home too.

After a wet and windy night I wondered what the morning would bring, but it was a lovely day to drive into the “High Weald” – the area of sandstone hills that runs east-west between the South and North Downs. It was calm and not raining, and gentle sun broke through just as we were preparing to run. It was mild but not warm and perfect for late October.

I enjoyed this course. Rivers Wood is compact and has a “proper” river (The Sussex Ouse) bounding its north and east edges. Inside the wood there are lots of parallel rides, and paths that are almost as wide as the rides, so there is plenty of opportunity for parallel errors or simply becoming very confused. The woodland itself has almost everything from mature plantations very easy to run in one direction, to very dense conifers and a great deal of scratchy brambly undergrowth in places. As the name suggests, there are quite a number of water features, but despite the rain, it was not too wet underfoot.

Vince Joyce had planned an interesting course, with lots of route choice, a great shape so you were having to make significant changes of direction at many controls, good variety of long and short legs and forcing you to use a whole range of navigation techniques.

I was reasonably pleased with my run. I navigated pretty well but not very accurately overall. I went past one control and often found the circle quickly but then took a little while to pin down the flag. On one long leg I made what should have been a sensible route choice, but came unstuck. I realised that I had drifted a little to the right of an indistinct path, but as I knew the control was on the other side of a pasture that stretched wide in front of me, but not yet in sight, I figured I should take a rough bearing and go straight, knowing I could not miss the field. That was true, but I ran into undergrowth and denser forest that slowed me right down, and made me doubt where I was, which slowed me down even more.

From this one big error, and just being a little inaccurate elsewhere, I lost 10 or 12 minutes finishing on 70 minutes in all. I would have been pleased with any time under an hour! Fitness wise, things were again better than they have been. I ran pretty well continuously – only walking up one hill and not stopping at all – but I was very slow and tired on the second half of the course and my legs were like lead over the last couple of controls, where my navigation was spot-on.