Chris Curtis Web Site

What a nice event and what a pleasant evening!

Summer evening events are low-key and a little “different”. This one sent us out in roughly matched pairs – one with a map for the “A” course and one for “B”. Some controls were in common, but elsewhere there were two controls in close proximity, on similar features – and the control descriptions did not have the control codes, so you had to use fine navigation to be sure that the control you were punching was the correct pit, ditch junction, horse jump or thicket when there were two to choose from.  Thirty-second time penalties were imposed if you punched the wrong one or punched both! You had to keep thinking all the time, and there were the usual summer orienteering challenges like man-eating nettles and sky-high bracken in places too.

Borde Hill was being set up for a cross-country equestrian event, with the many jumps and challenges all tricked out in flags and greenery. It made the park feel very unusual.

Afterwards, Ali , the planner, shared cake and fizz for her birthday and in the warm sunshine and light breeze almost everyone sat around for a while chatting and laughing. Very relaxed and a great way to spend a long summer’s evening.

I was in a particularly good mood. As I drove to the event my son, Nathan, phoned me (hands free) to say he had passed his medical degree with distinction – six years of extremely hard work gaining a fantastic reward! I was (and am) thrilled and very proud.

Southdowns Orienteers has an annual handicap at the end of the “proper” orienteering season, where start times are based on the average speed in events through the year. If everyone ran at their average speed, everyone would finish at the same moment so that who finished first, wins. This should favour people like me who can be inconsistent, provided the event is one of the faster ones of the season, and it gives a genuine air of excitement compared with our usual time trials where you cannot know who is winning until everyone finishes.

This year’s event was held on the campus of Sussex University – a large collection of buildings in parkland in a downland valley near Brighton. The map was made using sprint orienteering symbols (to show such things as canopies and other places one can go “under” buildings). The navigation was complex and tricky, but very different to the challenges of the forest and with such manicured ground, you had to navigate at real speed.

For some strange reason, I was given a start time on the blue course! I was not sure if this was a mix-up or part of the “black art” of handicapping which always seems to produce a winner from among the newer orienteers in the club who is just at the right moment to take the next step into the sport and who just happens to live in the right area! The winner of this year’s event plans next year’s and one gathers that such an important thing is not quite left to chance. Whatever the reason, I thought I might as well put the recent training to the test and try the blue course after all – around 7km instead of my usual 4, but without the physical challenges of the forest, it was worth a try.

(Click on the thumbnail to see my GPS route) There were 24 controls on two maps – basically two long loops round the campus. I really enjoyed this event. My fitness was better than it has been for a very long time. I was very much faster than in recent events, even with the increased distance. I was back through to swap maps in a little under 40 minutes – about 10 minutes per km. If I had run at this pace on green I might have been in the top 3! I kept up the pace in the second half, finishing in about 78 minutes. Officially 7km but according to the gps over 8. Most of this additional distance was in my one significant error. I came out of the wrong “exit” from a courtyard which put me 90 degrees wrong and I had actually gone through another courtyard (wondering why it was there when it was not on the map!) before I realised that I should have been heading towards the distinctive building which was sliding behind me on the right so there was a long loop round to get on track (see if you can spot it in the route). As you can see from the plot, the course was brilliant with lots of different challenges, plenty to trick you and lots of changes of direction. All the controls were “spot on” – testing navigation rather than luck. If you ran a good route, you could rely on finding the control where you expected it. I thought the map was excellent too – it always seemed to show what you needed to see next.

Incidentally, the gps was a little less accurate than usual in and under the buildings – I ran straighter than the plot sometimes suggests! Google Earth is slightly out of date – some of the strange loops across what looks like car parks or open ground were actually needed to get round a large building site or go above a new car park, neither of which are in Google Earth yet.

I had no illusion about doing well, even with handicapping, against some very serious orienteers on the blue and with a much longer distance than usual. I managed to arrive at the finish before a couple of other runners on the blue (i.e. not last, hooray!) and I was not the slowest either, even if I was nearly half an hour down on the fastest. I had an attack of smugness when I saw the results for control nine (course B) – I was obviously one of the few people who read the control descriptions and realised the control was inside the fenced compound – I was ninth on that control and I watched a few people realise with horror and start the long run round the fence!

In short, the best run I have had in a while and quite encouraging. It was a challenge and I really felt the distance over the last mile, but it was dramatic proof that the training is achieving amazing things. This run would have been impossible for me even two months ago. The heart rate plot (click to see it larger) says it all – 8km with my heart rate not far off my maximum but I could actually do it. Part of the reason is that I thought I could – I have run far enough in training to know that. The next challenge is to be able to do this pace and distance in heart rate zone 4 (efficient) rather than 5. After that, I can start trying seriously to speed up.

This was a great “segue” between classic orienteering and the next series of “park-o” events. I feel as if I have something to work towards – running hard round Hove Park anyone? We’ll see next Saturday!

Lots of things went wrong for me in yesterday’s event.

Firstly, I only managed to get in one of the three courses. I had hoped to do two of the three courses but I arrived later than planned, then took ages and I had not reckoned on a 15-minute each-way walk to Monks’ Wood from the assembly area. Still, I particularly wanted to go into the new area and managed that.

Secondly, I was rubbish. There were a couple of things on the Monks’ Wood course that did not help but mostly it was me. I never really “clicked” with it. My mind was elsewhere, I was hot and distracted and I never got into any rhythm in my running. No excuses – I could and should have been much better.

(Click on the thumbnail to see where I went). I liked the first couple of controls – nicely planned. A quick run down a ride and path to one, then off into the forest to follow a clear vegetation boundary, round by a fence to a thicket – it all worked for me, but I could not see the second control. As you can see on the gps trace, I went looking around, finally convinced myself that it HAD to be there and found the control tucked under low branches – about a foot from where I had been standing.

Navigation was reasonably smooth through to nine (with one detour the long way round one of the fenced enclosures) where I got confused by the multiplicity of ditches and earth walls and went up and down until finally re-locating off the pond and up the correct re-entrant (little valley). I suffered (as did many) looking for the small cairn buried in the middle of acres of bracken. (I suspect the problem did not exist a week or two ago when the courses were finalised). As well as my not very impressive navigation, the forest was full of fallen trees and “brashings” (cut branches and other debris on the ground) so that although most of the area was fairly open and looked “runnable” it was not actually that easy to keep up speed.

The only positive in my performance is that the training programme is paying off for my running. When I got the chance, I was able to run without stopping for much longer periods of time. Control 11 to the finish I went at a pretty decent speed for me – according the gps I was well under 6 mins per km – if I had managed that throughout (or even a bit more often) things would have been very different (easy to say, hard to do!)

As I have often said, the sport is about getting everything right at the same time – that is the challenge. The running is genuinely and definitely improving, the navigation seems to be going to pot. The trick is to bring the navigation back up, without neglecting the running (easy to say, hard to do!)

The summer is fully here now – orienteering in Sussex moves out of the forest with its bracken and brambles onto trails and into parks until mid-September,with a month off in August.  Hopefully, the training will pay off in the park-o series and there is enough time to be fighting fit and ready for the “proper season” to re-start in the autumn.

Wolstonbury Hill is just that: one of the impressive hills in the South Downs to the left of the main A23 road as you approach Brighton. I remember this very well from last year. That event was my first run after a long recovery from injury and I thought I was going to die! It was very hot and the hill was mighty steep. I hoped to be rather fitter this time, but although the bright sun and very warm morning was welcome after such a lot of rain and cold weather recently it felt a lot like last year.

The approach to the hill, and the position of the start were very different this year. (If you click on the thumbnail, you will see my run plotted on a Google Earth image – read about how I made this below). We had to walk about 15 minutes, fairly gently uphill, to reach the start, but not much of a wait when I got there.

I could see the first control almost as soon as I started – the only trouble was it was about 50 metres above me! I managed a reasonably sprightly slog up to it, then had to keep heading up to the flat top of the hill for the next control. I felt in control and quite good, but was already breathing hard. Something was not quite right at 3: I quickly reached the end of the thicket where it was shown, and found what I was sure was the right depression, but no control, I found it fairly nearby in a depression with a big clump of bramble but lost time. I was rather vague round to 4, then fell into the groove for a while, with a level run across then round the earthworks at the top of the hill and a very long downhill run to 6 and 7, broken only when I stopped for a moment to help someone and to climb a stile.

Things went fairly smoothly really after that, except that I was becoming hotter and hotter, with sweat stinging my eyes and blurring my vision. I just could not go any faster no matter how hard I tried. I am not sure that I did the right thing from 10 to 11. I decided to go more or less straight through an area of forest which was marked as “with fallen trees” rather than follow paths around. I liked the shade but the slope was quite steep, there was nowhere I could run and there were quite a few trunks to climb or go round. I confused two paths at 13 and was in the wrong area for a few minutes then was very confident with navigation over the last few controls, but simply had nothing left to take advantage of that – I was hot and just could not go any faster than a jog no matter how I tried. I was back in an hour – quite a few of the “usual suspects” were a little faster, but I was not far behind. I ended up 22nd: a little better than recent events and almost 15 minutes faster than the last time I was here.

This event was the debut of my new toy. I recently bought a Garmin Forerunner 305 which is a wrist-worn gps and heart monitor. While you are running it captures your position and heart rate every second – you can then use software to plot your course on a map or Google Earth as well as analyse your performance. It comes with some software that keeps a running log and draws nice graphs, as well as allowing you to create and use training workouts. That is really why I bought it. The couch to 5K (see article below) plan is working very well for me but I only have a few weeks to go. It has made me realise that I have to have the discipline of a “tight” training programme in order to go further and faster without becoming injured. There are further plans that you can load into the Forerunner which should allow me to go beyond the programme’s immediate goal which is being able to run 5K without stopping three times a week.

I am sure I will not analyse in this depth very often but for the first time I had to go to town. First is the map plot of the route I took today. I plotted this on Google Earth using Sport Tracks – great free software that works with the Forerunner. I set the Google Earth view obliquely to give some sense of the hill and added the purple blobs for the controls. Apart from anything else, it shows that the course today was a really good use of the terrain – there was simply never any “dead running” – every control was a different physical and mental challenge.

I then looked at my pace over the ground. (Click on thumbnails to see full size graphs)

At first, this plot was rather confusing with the pace yo-yoing up and down so much, then I realised that the Forerunner was being very accurate – it was able to detect even when I stopped to punch controls or climb stiles! I produced this graph with the Garmin “Training Centre” software that comes with the Forerunner, then added the notes using “Snagit”. The overall pace is not too impressive, but there were a few points where I was actually running, and it proves that I was never quite walking, except where I was struggling with navigation!

Given the nature of today’s terrain, I had to plot the elevation. There is some exaggeration on the graph, but it really was pretty steep in places! Generally, I have found that the elevation data is less accurate than position and heart rate but the plot does give a good picture of the land today.

Finally, I plotted my heart rate. Officially the maximum rate for someone my age is 171, and I topped 180 today! It certainly felt like it. What was interesting was that running downhill meant only a slight drop in heart rate, but struggling up a steep slope is pretty much guaranteed to max it out very quickly. My heart rate only really dropped when I was struggling with navigation and stopped or slowing looking around. In the software, you can overlay these plots – though that quickly becomes confusing. Heart-rate does look very closely linked to the steepness of the slope (up and down) and to pace, but there is often a lag – for example, my heart rate kept going up after I stopped at the finish, before dropping pretty quickly.