Chris Curtis Web Site

It must be summer. Southdowns Orienteers have come out of the woodlands, where the brambles and bracken are head-high at this time of year, and for the next few months we will be running around parks and adjacent terrain.

In recent years the traditional “Park-Os” have developed into the Sussex sprint series - thanks mainly to Rob Lines’ great organisational skills. The sprint orienteering format uses these areas well, and allows good navigational challenges when the terrain is not as technical or physically demanding as some “classic” areas. The idea is to make competitors go very fast, with tight small-feature navigation on detailed 1:4000 maps. In that context it is very easy, and very costly, to make mistakes like coming along the wrong side of a wall.

I thought the course was excellent. I can’t believe it was the planner’s first (though he says it was!). There were lots of changes of direction and changes of style, from simple straight-line running to obvious features to micro-navigation in a tricky quarry and in a complex parkland and set of buildings. I never felt the interest wane and with 19 controls close together, you had to think all the time.

Well, how did it go?

Better than I feared and a little worse than I hoped! I have missed a lot of orienteering and training recently. I am terribly unfit and out of practice. The last couple of outings I have missed controls or become hopelessly lost at some point. I was very pleased that neither of these things happened. I had a cleanish run apart from being rather vague in the quarry (it was tricky!) and not spotting from the map that there was a path round a building - which meant going up a high embankment and having to go round to find somewhere to climb down when I saw the reality on the ground.

I was terribly slow despite feeling the pace and came back in 41 minutes for 3.5 km - well behind the average but I have been worse.

I thoroughly enjoyed it though - which has not always been true recently. Things should allow more training and orienteering soon so improvement must be on the cards.

It has been ages since I went orienteering (or had much of a training run) and it showed!

It was a glorious morning with bright sunshine and real warmth. The first part of the course took us through open woodland carpeted with bluebells. There is nothing more wonderful in nature than a southern English bluebell wood in May. The planner encouraged us well off the paths to enjoy it more and it was a privilege to be there. The woods were very wet from recent rain, which made the first few controls a little tricky: what the map showed as wet ditches were rushing streams and there were lots of places to be caught in mud. At one point I managed to go knee-deep (literally) into a marsh which was marked on the map but not very visible on the ground.

I made two huge errors both for the same reason. Going to control six, I chose the optimum route to control 11. My eye caught the circle on the map and I was fixed. I had to go from finding 11 (which was not easy from that direction) to six. I did a very similar thing at control 14. I left control 13, but read the map as if I was going from 12 to 14 - I managed to convince myself that the ground agreed with the map until, after quite a long way, I could not pretend any more and had to backtrack because I could not remember if I had visited control 13. Just lack of concentration but these two errors cost me over 20 minutes.

Thankfully, the terrain slowed everyone down, and my performance did not look quite as disastrous as it really was. I was 21st, but was beaten by all the “usual suspects”.

I thought the course was very good. There was a huge variety of terrain and you had to navigate every step - shame I could not keep my head together.

There was rain overnight and it was still raining when I set out. The temperature and wind had a real feel of autumn. Cold, wet, muddy and a physically tough forest - that’s proper orienteering!

I like Sheffield Forest. It feels as if it is rarely visited, with lots of bracken and brambles in places and a wide variety of woodland, with well-grown plantations and more tangled older areas and even a sense of “landscape garden” in a few places. There are lots of streams, in deeply incised valleys and there are even genuine rock outcrops - almost unheard of here in Sussex. I remembered it being quite physical both in and out of the valleys and running through the forest itself.

The green course was well planned to use the terrain. There were lots of route choices and always diving back onto paths and tracks was not going to be successful and in some cases was clearly daft. That said, there were a couple of legs when I should have done that and did not! The forest was wet, though the rain stopped before we started running, and I was soaked very quickly. The terrain was fairly open, but the bracken has not died back yet and was very hard going at times, even though I stayed out of the areas where thick undergrowth was marked. Recent forestry also left some areas covered in cut branches (brashings) though had also removed quite a lot of bramble. The feeling of running well off the paths through dark, almost gloomy, forest while rain dripped from the trees and almost believing that I was the only person out there was a classic orienteering experience.

My run was reasonably clean though not a “classic”. I lost a lot of time on one control again - number 7. I headed straight for it but the going was much tougher than the map suggested and it was hard to keep on line. I emerged onto a clear path, but was not quite clear at first how far along it I was. I finally spotted an area of “green” (thick forest) that should have led me to the control but it was hard to see where the green stopped and the open forest began. A couple of loops round the area found the control - which was quite low and beneath low-growing trees - but my navigation felt very sloppy. I also made a bad choice going along the fence by the lakes towards control 10 and 11. Although my navigation was secure, it was impossible to go through there with any speed - I should have gone on the paths and headed back in.

It took 75 minutes - much slower than my average, but faster than the last times I have run here. The physical terrain and challenging courses brought all times down so I was 21st. According to my gps I was really motoring when I had the chance - comparing myself with others I was less consistent, mainly where my navigation was sloppy or where I made the wrong route choice and found myself caught up in tough terrain. Still, I beat pretty much everyone in the field on at least one leg (including the winner) which suggests that the potential is there and the fitness training is bearing fruit - I just have to get every control right!

I enjoyed it - I got back covered in mud, water and blood from hundreds of scratches but I felt I had conquered a challenge - that’s what it is all about.