Chris Curtis Web Site

I have not disappeared just very busy at work. We have been making a fantastic new performance space, appointing staff, preparing for inspection and all the usual things, plus I am coaching a cheerleading team towards the National Championships. Too little time to blog, or to do anything much outside work worth blogging about. Apart from regular walking, and very occasional runs, I have not done anything related to orienteering for many months. I miss it, but can’t fix things to get there at the moment. I am playing the sax often, but only for fun.

There was frost on the car windscreen and shadowed grass this morning – the first this autumn – so it was a cold start for my first orienteering event in ages.

Blacklands Farm is a camp and adventure activity site for the Girl Guides, so has large, fairly well mown grass fields, but also lots of woodland, which has lots of tracks and various interesting (and confusing) equipment dotted around inside. The woodland is on the slopes of a stream valley.

I am not very fit right now, and felt it, but managed to run a little faster than I feared and was not expecting to be competitive, so I just relaxed and went as fast as I could. I really enjoyed myself. Once I was warmed up, the day was calm and dry. It was lovely to be running in woodland and across fields. I had forgotten how good it feels to navigate cleanly and “nail” controls and navigation felt straightforward, perhaps because I was not trying to go “hell for leather”.

I was delighted to find I had come 11th (out of 30 or so), my best result for a very long time.

I have a “love/hate” relationship with sprint orienteering. I stayed away from it for a long time. I am not a fast runner at the best of times, and certainly not a sprinter and I love being in forests and wild country so it seemed less attractive. As my club’s summer “park-O” events mutated into sprints I joined in and soon discovered that the essence of the sport is definitely there – very strongly – in sprint orienteering.

On a well-planned sprint course there are very real navigational challenges. In a complex environment like a University campus, with all sorts of buildings, roads, fences, hedges and more the map and ground is crammed with detail. You are challenged to simplify to the right level. Simplify too much and you run straight past a control or miss a vital short cut, simplify too little and you are overwhelmed with detail and choose poor routes. It is definitely real orienteering, but at speed.

This was a great event. It was by far the sunniest and warmest day of the summer (not brilliant for fast running on pavement and lawn but very welcome after all the gloom and wet) and with hundreds of people, from lots of clubs it had something of the special occasion. The format was a first race around lunchtime, with random starts, then a second, slightly longer race with starts in reverse order of time for the first race.  For most people this left an hour or two between. The grass was covered with orienteers having picnics and it gave the event a pleasant “laid back” and social atmosphere. This approach also meant that you were usually running with a number of others in sight during the second race, as you caught up with the people in front of you and were being caught by faster people behind.

Both races demanded careful route choice. None of the controls was particularly hard to locate, but it was easy to find yourself on the wrong side of an uncrossable wall, or climbing up a steep bank only to have to come down it again, when you did not need to.

I was pleased not to miss any controls (something I was very prone to do during the club’s sprint series) and navigated cleanly, but I ran much slower than I have been doing recently. It was my slowest pace for many months. I have been doing 5k training runs, cross country, recently at around 7 minutes per km and on the very clean surfaces on campus I could not break 10 mins per km. I am not sure why. I just could not get into my running and felt heavy and was very quickly out of breath. Part of it may be that the campus is quite hilly and I live somewhere very flat – and have been training on virtually flat terrain. I found the hills very hard. Having said that, I was almost as slow on the flat sections and not very fast downhill so I do not think it explains everything.

A lot of it is mental. Maybe I need a psychologist like the olympic cyclists! I really enjoy navigation in orienteering. I get a buzz when I nail a control, especially if I have avoided some potential pitfalls, and it feels good where the route has been smooth, efficient and accurate, but I find it hard to add the word “fast” to that list. I tend to overthink and rationalise things like route choice, throwing all sorts of techniques and thinking through all kinds of possibilities, when what I really need to do is simplify the problem, apply the right technique to the leg or section of a leg, and do all the excellent navigation really fast. If you do not do this on a sprint, it really shows. In the season ahead, I need to focus on keeping it simple in that way.

So the result was nothing to write home about, but I enjoyed the event and the sunshine. I thought the courses were really high quality and I am very glad I was there.

Two courses for the price of one today (excellent value!)

This was about the fourth time I have run in Hove Park. According to winsplits I had a consistent but slow run. I felt reasonably good and navigation was easy (apart from control two which saw two of us running round a little building before diving into the bushes to find the control). I am very unfit at the moment – lack of time for training and lack of orienteering generally – so thought 24 minutes for 3.2km was not too bad, especially as it was becoming seriously hot in the sunshine towards the end.

The second course was a genuine sprint around two adjoining school campuses. I did enjoy this very much as the navigation was intricate and demanded total concentration, but with 26 controls I wished I was fresher. There were fewer long runs and more darting around buildings, up stairs and so on which suited me. I was not as slow as I feared but yet again lost concentration and missed a control, so was disqualified. I have a very bad habit of doing this at the moment.

The list of really good orienteers who were disqualified for the same reason (though at different controls) made me feel a little better!

There were some nice views of the sea and the breeze across the school field was very welcome.

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.