SOG Local Event- Friston Forest
Today’s event was in the fabulous countryside behind Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters – Chalk Downland at its best, with impressive green hills and at Friston Forest 
a sense of being far away from anywhere in a comfortable landscape.
The course looked reasonably straightforward on the map, but was trickier and more physical on the ground. I went smoothly and fast enough to control 5, mostly on small paths in beautiful open beech woodland. I made a bad route choice going to six by going straight instead of running round a forest road or, what would have been even better, going along a path and running downhill onto the control. The straight route was uphill and into some fairly dense undergrowth. What made it worse was having to stop and take off one of my shoes as I had collected some bramble somewhere earlier which had cut my foot. Fortunately, once the bramble was out, the scratches were comfortable enough to run on.
Things went well again until control 9, where I lost seven places and lots of time. I had seen from the map that there was no obvious attack point near the control, which was a hide in the middle of some “light green” forest. I took a bearing from a path junction and ploughed in, but the forest was dense enough to keep knocking me off the bearing and stopping me from seeing the control. More time lost. Another poor route choice to 10 where I deliberately went past and came back, when I could have cut straight across and had a simple path run.
I was just over the hour and came 22nd (out of 40+). That would have been typical during the last series of events, but I have been doing much better this series so I was a little disappointed. Some terrain suits me better than others. This forest was mostly open and runnable which tempted me to lose contact with the map and made navigation vague rather than precise.
The map and people’s routes are on the SO routegadget.