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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.