Chris Curtis Web Site

Having a quiet couple of days, I thought I would compare my performance in my club’s orienteering league to see if I am improving. I had the idea that I am gradually improving my times but wanted to be sure. One of the problems in doing this is that, unlike track or road running, performance can be very variable in orienteering – although the club green courses are planned to the same guidelines and so are comparable, the courses are often of different lengths and across very different terrain, and are run in very different weather. Times that seem very slow on some courses would be almost miraculously fast on others. It is also possible to have a generally good run that becomes extraordinarily bad because of a navigational error on one or two legs.

In the end I decided to compare the best, worst and average times of the “best six” events in the spring and autumn 2006 series. This seems reasonable.

I am quite pleased by the results of this analysis, which do suggest a real improvement.  My best time was over 5 minutes faster this series or over 1 minute per kilometre. I have knocked 7 minutes off my average completion time, almost 3 minutes per kilometre! My worst minutes per km in this series was faster than my average for the last series and the average in this series is only 5 seconds per km slower than my previous personal best.The speed increase has been reflected in better placings (also helped by some good runners “moving up” to the harder course this series)

This all shows that some physical training and determination, plus the slow gathering of experience, does make a difference even at my age, and suggests a New Year’s resolution to train harder and better in 2007.

After heavy rain overnight, it was cooler and dry for the event today. I planned an event at Southwater Country Park, near Horsham , a couple of years ago so I know the ground very well and was looking forward to a fairly fast run, but I also knew that I am not at my best for various reasons, including a bit of a cold.

It was fairly chilly waiting for the start but I was keen to be going. The first shock was finding some paths marked on the map blocked with piles of bramble cuttings, presumably to keep motorbikes out, but requiring a quick climb over, or a detour through the very prickly bushes. I felt fairly confident with my navigation. The problem was reading the land, rather than the map. The park used to be a clay pit (for bricks) and the vegetation has grown haphazardly. Many areas are covered with dense, short hawthorn and blackthorn: small trees or large bushes, each with razor sharp thorns. The sides of the pit are very steep indeed and the wet clay underfoot made it very slippery so that some parts were more like climbing than running. Still, I was making good progress until control 6 where I simply did not see the obvious path on the map and lost time cutting through thick trees to get to another path. I recovered fairly well, but was never as fast as I could have been.

I was back in a respectable rather than speedy 44 minutes, placed 14th and about 8 minutes behind the winner. As is traditional in the last event before Christmas, there was a mince pie and glass of mulled fruit punch waiting at the finish: I enjoyed chatting in the sunshine but it was too cold to hang around too long plus my head and several cuts on my arms were bleeding from the thorns.

An article about this blog, and why I write it, appeared in “The Times Educational Supplement” today (available online here). Apparently a survey says that 10% of British Headteachers write blogs, but I was one of the few they could find and identify.

Producing the article was strange. I had a short telephone interview, which was supposed to continue later, but no-one phoned back. One photographer came and took an hour with various set-ups. I flatly refused to pretend to orienteer while wearing my work suit, but various parts of my study were strewn with maps and compasses. We also did some more arty shots where he blurred the background while keeping me sharp. Apparently, the picture editor did not like any of these, so I had another hour with a different photographer, with several set-ups. The photo they used was made by having kids jump around while I kept still in the middle.

I thought the article was reasonable, in a “vaguely interesting, soft news” sort of way, but like so much of modern journalism it is only loosely related to what I said in the interview and, I think, to what I actually write about here. At least online you can judge that for yourself. The photo is very contrived, but how do you photograph “blogging”? I thought the headline was nasty and insulting: I guess the sub-editors had a competition to see who could get the most “b”s in a bottom joke.

I despair of British journalism at all levels. The culture where journalism was fundamentally about reporting i.e. going out and trying to understand something well enough to describe it to the readers, has long gone. Now the culture is about providing the readership with entertainment or selling the paper’s “take” on things rather than trying to convey something that the reader can respond to him/herself. I see this even with our local paper. Reporters are looking for an angle – which can be either sensational or humorous (there is no other angle allowed in local journalism) – instead of simply gathering the facts and telling the story clearly. About the only real journalism left in this country, in my not-so-humble opinion, is on the BBC’s “from our own Correspondent” and, most of the time, on “the World this Weekend“.

Eartham, near Chichester, is an open woodland, divided into large compartments. It is usually quite fast to run in and controls can be visible some distance away.

Things went fairly smoothly and I had a clean run, though there was a lot of young bramble so running in the terrain was quite hard work, as ankle high thorns would keep scratching away. Still, I was around in well under the hour, despite a few unwise route choices towards the end. I came 10th and caught and passed a few folks on the way round.