Orienteering – Goodwood Country Park
Today was the first “SOG” (or “Southdown Orienteers Galloppen”) event – SO’s league based on a series of local Saturday events. I took a group of excited and enthusiastic students from my school to run yellow and have a go at their first “real” event. We had over an hour in the minibus (with a few extra minutes to cope with travel sickness – though thankfully with enough warning so it happened on the verge and not in the bus) before pulling into a typical country park car park. It looked like there was a good crowd there too.
It did not take long to register the kids, explain how the SI kit worked and to help them copy maps. They were very keen to be gone and soon were. I copied the green map and was off soon too.
I enjoyed the course. It was on a chalk slope with quite varied woodland including some genuinely inpenetrable dark green stuff, very clear and obvious paths (and not too many of them) and lots of small features from benches to “small ruin” – which was very small – all I could see was half a square metre of concrete. It took the first couple of controls before I felt at home, then had my usual experience of some controls and legs making sense and going very well and others that I found hard, for no obvious reason. There were three controls towards the top of the slope, each in a compartment surrounded by good paths and not visited in order. I got caught twice by aiming into the wrong compartment and finding the wrong control before realising the error and quickly getting to the right one, but with time lost – basic bad navigation on my part, but that part of the woodland all looked the same to me. My fitness is slowly getting better – I was able to run almost all the way, and finish with a reasonable run in, but I was very tired by the end. I was shivery and aching in the evening, so I wonder if I had a bit of a virus.
I finished in 69 minutes – around 18 mins per km – my fastest SOG event so far – though with a good turn-out, it was not my best position. Analysing winsplits suggests that I could go much faster – the real problem is errors, though there were less of these than was typical before the summer. Anyway, I enjoyed it.
The kids had a great time. They had quite a variety of approaches. There were one pair who crashed about fairly aimlessly, found every control on every course but still were not much slower than the pair that discussed every possibility before making a couple of big errors. I think in future I need to be more insistent about them going out alone. The one who did was very much faster than the others.