SOG Local Event – West Friston
The weather was more like summer than spring and the journey to the Friston Forest behind the Seven Sisters was through the vividly green open hills of the South Downs. A perfect southern England journey.
It has been a few weeks since I have been orienteering. I did not go to any of the big events during Easter, but I have been training – probably over-training a little – and I wanted to see if it has made a difference.
I should have guessed that things were not going to go well when a small boy in the car next to mine in the car park flung open his door and put a dent in mine. My car is about three weeks old. Details were exchanged calmly enough but it would be fair to say that my mind was not fully on the event.
Things were fine to the first control and then, within a couple of metres of control 2 I snagged my foot on something and did a face and body plant into fresh, very vicious, stinging nettles and was covered in nettle rash, which is still sore and irritated many hours later and was very uncomfortable at the time. This might have been the reason I had a complete disaster on control 3. I knew I was on the correct path and close to the control, but I could not identify any “distinctive trees” and there were two, not one, paths going off to the left. I kept orientetating off the clearest path and spent ages looking – even diving into very nasty undergrowth. Eventually I had to resort to running up and down the path and looking. I saw the control on the wrong side of the path I had been using – the right side of the less obvious path. Most people had ignored both paths and simply seen the control as they came along the main path. I lost ten minutes here and the race was over.
Something similar, though less time consuming happened at control 11, where a “distinctive vegetation boundary” wasn’t, at least the way I came at it. Looking at the splits, lots of people lost time on that control, so my woeful 33rd was almost entirely due to control 3. Fitness wise, there were a few things to cheer me up. I did well on a number of controls – sixth on one and in the top ten on several. Without the ten minutes time loss on 3 I would have been in the “high teens”. I think my speed over the ground was better than usual and I was able to sustain running longer and without pain. The training is working, and mostly the navigation was too.
Anyway, it was good to be outdoors in such a beautiful landscape, even if it bit back today. As I drove away, it was other people who were jumping off cliffs not me – they were doing it for fun.