Courses. Youngest ages were taken through the enclosure of the forest, as always fitting into the advised course formats, this means lots of controls on definite features- we don’t want kids up to 12 years old having nightmares out there. On the flipside long courses are my speciality, having until last year been running the Brown course – the longest possible distance. With such a big area of tussocky open ground my task was to find control locations and link them well across 7 adult courses. Type of places I love to navigate in are wild places, open places, places where looking at the map you can see locations mile away, then run to them.  There were lots of times I encountered the Snipe on my wanderings, one of my very favourite birds that is secretive and a treat to see up close as it zig zags away.

Holmsley and Dur Hill gave me plenty space to play with and some months ago I set about finding the kind of Earth features brown on the map that require accurate direction on compass bearings to reach. West side before the forest near the Trig Point on Dur Hill provided most of the control points on the long courses, and in between massive route choices to get there. I wanted to put the runners into sighting vistas far away, to drop them into their zone, the sort of places where self reliance is essential. Having the drive to move fast over open ground on a competitive level really marks out endurance ability.

Event. Starts–

Drawing closer to the event all the organisers skills come in to play with maps, final details and in the background the planner and controller have already conferred on lots of the final course plans. Discounting any ideas too technical we had sorted out the event, both myself and Ian Pierce of SARUM having visited all controls several times, checked tags, maps and agreed on them. Given that Forestry commission had already informed us that felling was due to start, I approached the day with a little reservation in case major areas of the map had changed! Happily arriving Saturday the day before and putting out all the stakes there were no major changes. As always WSX came together to manage the 200+ entrants arriving at the site, and after a quiet night in the T4 camper on the site minding the tents.  I set out the 3 helpers putting out controls at 8 A.M. Having already rode around for an hour 7 A.M myself I put out the rest and headed back to base. 1000 A.M I gave the okay and exactly to time we were open for business . A dry day greeted us with freezing Easterlies, much better than wet weather and this was perfect. We were lucky that only one section of the enclosure had been touched and felled, not affecting the courses, result!

Calshot Coaches 

Feedback. Courses were well received, the largest number of 64 on Green being challenged to the maximum, our Chairman and several others finding my favourite control 69 impossible.  Brown courses very good and won by Ben Chesters superb navigator and runner. Blue course would have been my course and a couple of runners felt short changed by the track run on return- sorry, still in the main well received. Both Blue and Green winners were M18, M16 boys from Devon, with the more regular competitors falling in behind- I’m happy about that, they were challenged and showed good speed endurance for their ages to win. Across the other courses Greens worked well for many club runners, and we also had 23 Orange standard guys many from who were coaches from Calshot activity centre which was a win. Another great day in the New Forest, Thanks to all helpers, competitors and readers for the interest and coming to our Event.

The event was in an area used for Army training and it was a bit unnerving to see a last-minute hand-written note in the Pre-Start box that “Troops are in the area”.

It was great to have just an A4 map – much easier to handle than the A3 – and I set off with high hopes. The forests were pretty runnable although there were also many paths and tracks which were sometimes the better option. After messing up control 2 – stopping FAR to soon along a track to go in and find my control – the rest of my run was fairly error free. Having said that I, and many others (including Gavin Clegg!), messed up getting from the last control to the Finish.

My finish time was 30 seconds over the hour, for a 5.2k course, so I was quite pleased with that. When the results came through I ended up 33/100 and 3rd out of 12 on W60 – so I was happy with that – especially as I beat a few rivals who normally beat me.

A very satisfying day.

As part of my London Marathon preparation, I need to start raising the distances and need to actually not skip the long runs. For today, I figured I should get there early, and run both the Brown and the Blue courses as a training exercise. Yes, I am using these events as training opportunities, not as target races. Next weekend is the Concorde Chase where I will run Black, and that will be a race that I treat with higher significance than this weeks Galoppen – I will try and push all the way and see how my fitness holds up through that long distance. But as preparation, I wanted to run Brown as a race and then just jog through the Blue with 70% effort but use the terrain as much as possible.

As I got there they weren’t sure if they will have enough Brown maps, so I had to reverse the plan and run Blue first – this meant that it had to be the competitive one. By the time I got back they had plenty of Brown maps left but only 2 minutes before the start window closed, so I jogged around the Brown course, completing both as the training plan dictated, even though I was pretty exhausted by the middle of the Brown course.

Most of the Blue course was OK. I did wonder a lot of places why there were such a lot of undergrowth not mapped – in hindsight, looking at the Routegadget, I realised a lot more green on the map than during running. I have looked at the map hard now and realised that they were there, but hte green print was very faint, so I did not see a lot of it during the run. This effected my route choices and pretty sure even that underestimated the vegetation in places, especially between 11-12 where I was seriously stuck in brambles and what should have been dark green on the map. I have lost about 2 minutes there, running around on the track would have been much faster. My other bigger mistake was 4-5 where I have decided to run over the hilltop, again not realising that the open field on the other side would be full of brambles stopping me from just running down there. Running around on the track would have been again about 2 minute faster. Besides this I had smaller mistakes to 1 and 14 and a few seconds here and there, which means I legitimately lost 5 minutes – the remaining 4 minutes that I was behind the winner was purely running speed most likely.

As far as the Brown course is concerned, I wasn’t pushing the running at all so no expectation of any result and no use comparing times. However, I wanted to have a clean run at least, which unfortunately wasn’t the case. The first wobble came on leg 7, where I initially wanted to run out to the tarmac road, but a combination of seeing the (not really mapped) drop to and with of the stream, and my initial plan to use the course as a terrain running training convinced me to turn back and go more or less straight. That was a decent plan, but then very poorly executed. I ended up way too high and on the road, climbing 10m more than I needed, and not used the small paths as well as I should have. I then messed up 9 which was strange because I had that control on the Blue course where I had no problems, but the whole leg here was executed like a mess, more a hope and pray than a proper plan with attackpoint. I paid the price! Which as usually the case, lead to messing up 10 as well (though not as much). I messed up my pace counting probably because I started to look for the control too early and then veered right thinking I wasn’t on the right bearing. I did then turn back before it became an even bigger mess and luckily saw the control. I suspect leg 11 in a real race situation would have been faster running up on the track – the forest was full of brashings so it was a slog to contouring round. I even ended up above the control and almost overran by one spur but again luckily I spotted the control and ran back for it. Luckily this ended the streak of badly executed controls and the next few were quite precise, although I did actually take it very carefully in the tricky bits around 14-17. The only control where I made a slight mistake was 15 – learning from my mistakes yesterday I di have a good plan to run down the path and then the spine of the spur, unfortunately the complex terrain meant that I first came across a different reentrant than mine. I quickly corrected though. Leg 18 was another slog where the hillside that was supposed to be white was full of brashings and brambles and I would have been better off running around, at least in a race situation. At this point though I was quite tired and out of gels, so I really broke down to walking up there into 18 and out of 18 up to the crest of the hill. Luckily from this point there weren’t many climbs and neither did I make any more notable mistakes (though I did take one or two quite safe but longer route choices).

Two “B” course done then, a sum of about 19kms with just under 600m climb, mostly though terrain, a good training day completed.

This Wessex Night League event in Romsey, more a Street-O type event which I occasionally attend in the London area, except that there were proper controls out (thank you) as opposed to the SLOW Street-O events where you have to write down clues at every “control”. Touch-free punching also meant better flow in/out of the controls (usually – I had to double back for a few that didn’t register first).

Well planned by Rob Finch, you really had to think and there were quite a few options, not only for the generic strategy but specifically in between quite a few pairs of controls the route to choose. This is in my mind an indication of good planning as it reduces dead running – even though some of that is inevitable in a street event and there was some here too. A really nice intricate area in the NE corner of the map, had to take it carefully and almost felt like a Sprint event in that area with lots of rapid decisions and the opportunity to practice route simplification a bit.

In the end got 2nd place, exactly like I expected when I went through in my head driving there trying to guess the likely contenders. Dave Currie (SOC) won, and whilst in hindsight I don’t think my strategy was the best, he seems to have followed most of the same strategy, so this was purely about him being faster than I am. Not really a surprise there, but a confirmation of an aim for myself to work towards
Made a few errors amounting to about 2 min altogether (this includes changing my mind and doubling back a few times), and from a running perspective felt quite tired in the middle section. Not really a surprise after 2 relatively hard running sessions over the last 2 days. Once I conquered the uphill it became easier and somehow I also felt fresher from that point as well, so tried to push from that point on.

The positives – I was there on time (ha!), and it was an enjoyable challenging course. But this wasn’t my day – although nowhere near the catastrophe of some of the recent races, it was a combination of the state of my legs (tired) and random mistakes – I was only able to have the flow for periods. There was always something breaking up the rhythm – either a slight mapping issue causing me to make a mistake (I should be able to handle these by now), my lack of ability to execute the plan of simplification well and slowing down, or just some distraction of some kind.

So, as far as the analysis is concerned, time losses were:

• No. 6 (the first long leg) – I just overly generalised the plan for the leg. The route I took in the end, is not that bad – but, unfortunately as a result of the oversimplification, I had to slow down severely in the middle to figure out where I got to in crossing the many tracks. I had a good hunch but wanted to make sure – so stopping and relocating myself a few time cost about 2:30, and I had a really bad approach through rough to the control as well costing me some time.
• No. 11 – I was on the correct bearing but I just caught up someone before who veered left and unfortunately I did not have the mental strength to resist the pull – did not fully follow him but deviated sufficiently. Realised quickly enough and corrected but this cost me about 30s
• No. 12 – Really bad approach to the control. The map wasn’t 100% here, the rough open was basically hip high gorse, so had to fight through – but worse still, it made me question whether I was in the right place so I hesitated and backtracked a few times – and even on the previous rough open patch was a fight so very slow. Lost about 3 minutes here and got caught up by Kevin F who pulled Dimitry U with him.
• No 14 – I tried to avoid the pull of the train so opted to check out to the road earlier and run on it more – unfortunately, the barbed wire fence was an obstacle – took some time to find a safe place to cross and then it took time. By the time I was out on the road already have seen the 3 men train punching the control and I still had a minute and a half to go there.
• No. 16 – Not sure what the train ahead did but I caught them up here without seeing them for 2 controls…
• No. 18 – I am fairly sure that the pit wasn’t mapped precisely. I ran up the incline next to the ditch, expecting to basically fall into the control – which was nowhere to be seen (the GPS track clearly shows me starting the hunt at the right place). At this point the train in front broke up, I could see most members hunting around me for the control, Kevin was gone, but none of them got the control. As this made me question whether I deviated too far left, I decided to contour to the right in case I was actually tracking the wrong ditch. When I found not other obvious ditch, it became more and more obvious that I was in the right place, I finally bounced back from a patch of marsh with a control and ran back, attacking the control site from above this time and indeed found the very small pit with the control deep inside it. 2 other guys standing 2m from me didn’t see the control, I had to shout it out to them so they would punch (and then follow me). This little loop cost me 2:50s
• 20 was OK if a bit slow in the middle but I think I chose a good attack point for this and made sure to find it before I dove into the complex area, so although a bit slow in the middle but I thought it was good orienteering.

Altogether about 10 and a half minute lost on mistakes then, I am not sure how much on running speed, though…

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This past weekend was very British. Of course, the British championships were held both in Sprint and Middle, but with the added occassion of Queen’s 90th birthday celebration, and the Sprint being held in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, we were entertained by the flypast, as well as quintessentially British weather (meaning: heavy rain).

From a competition perspective, the Heats (where starts were delayed by 20 minutes) were a bit of a letdown – felt too easy, definitely would have been a runners course. The highlight was control 20, which was the Olympic rings:

Whilst navigation was mostly (too) easy, I did make mistakes:

• Coming out of Control 6, I started to plan ahead which meant I noticed too late that I was past the house corner and could now run towards the control.
• Out of 14, I was close to going out of bounds: I was just in time warned by someone (luckily) that I was about to enter the OOB area so I corrected and ran along the seating area, but that meant I was distracted so entered the ditch overgrown with vegetation too low. I had to go back out and look for the control further up.
• There were several places where I had to jog slowly because the logical route was very narrow and I could not pass slower people in front: the pond bank to 12, the bank down and up to/from 18, and to/from 20.

With all of this I wasn’t fully happy and quite sure I left at least a minute in the course, so was very surprised to learn that I won my heat! I am sure the organisers had a nightmare with the park authorities and do not envy the planner – nevertheless I have to say even in hindsight not all the OOB area is clear on the map. For example, near No. 14, the OOB marking is bound by a “vegetation boundary” dotted line, not a solid line. Whilst strictly speaking it isn’t an ISSOM requirement, I think it hinders legibility because the OOB colour is very similar to “rough open”, and on the ground these areas did actually look like the rough open you’d find in marshes, for example – and also looked (at least to me and at sprint speed) like the vegetation in the marshes near 11-12-13 which was a crossable area.

Result for the Heat

I also do not understand the planning of the placement for No. 17: it was at the end of a short “dead end” into an OOB area, but all those OOB marked areas on top of the bridge were similar vegetation areas (like flower beds), so I had to run around the flower bed and double back again. As the strip of the vegetation was very narrow (maybe 1m), it was very inviting to just jump across the OOB flowerbeds, which was of course forbidden, but as the control was clearly visible from the other side, I can not see any other reason for placing the control in there than to tempt people to jump across. There was no added navigation difficulty, nor route choice options, and only added about 10m extra running (if that). I would argue there would be nothing lost if the control was placed on the outer tip of the vegetation.

It is then not surprising that many were disqualified from the heats. Including one of the favourites in our class, Roger G.

All the protests around disqualification etc then pushed the start of the finals out, in the end by more than an hour. This was enough for the very British weather to arrive, with a massive downpour! Whilst I ended up starting in a bit of lull in the rain (it did get going again in the middle of the run), I had to fish out the map from under standing water in the map box.

An appropriate signage next to the start!

The finals were very different from the Heats. We were in the Olympic Park proper and many more navigational challenges were finally introduced:

• I had started slow to make sure I got the planning right, and concluded that I should stay high on the way to No. 2 to avoid the long steps down and up. Now, once I got to No. 1 I noticed that the map wasn’t completely accurate, as the steps weren’t going all the way – in fact it was a lot more runnable with 3 steps and about 10m level pavement alternating. However, part of the plan was to stick to my decisions as a principle as avoiding hesitations is key in sprint.
• No. 3 – I expected the control to be visible from below in the parking lot, but it wasn’t – I then followed an elephant track in the high grass up the bank to the monument even though I suspected it will be too high for the control. Once there, I looked around and could not see the control, I had to jog down and be right next to it before I noticed. A further 15-20s lost, and by this time I was over half a minute down and only 3 controls in the course. This duly caused me to be just a bit off my concentration and for a couple of controls I just lost my flow, and was therefore too hesitant and just too slow.
• I picked it up from No. 11, where exiting the control I saw Geoff chasing me down for 2 minutes as I was running back up the path. This somehow caused me to get myself together, and although knowing his speed I fully expected him to run past before No. 12, I was surprised to see him more behind as I was going back up the bank out of 12 (as he later explained he made a mistake and took a longer route to 12 than I did). I managed to keep him behind me until the underpass between 16-17.
• From here, I tried to keep up with Geoff but was very keen to keep on top of my navigation at the same time. This meant that I was slowly losing touch (he is just too fast for me), last saw him across the bridge on the way to 21.

In summary, this was a final that I ran without any major mistakes, but very hesitant and in a lot of places just not concentrated enough and too slow. I considered it an OK run but not a great performance. So to me great surprise I managed to be placed 2nd and so a silver medalist!

Results for the final

As we all know, vegetation comes in three different thicknesses.

• Pale Green is – Slow Run;
• Middle Green is – Walk;
• Dark Green is – Fight, or Impenetrable, or Impassable.

Each description is normally preceded by the word “forest”. The ‘slow run’ and ‘walk’ colours may also be in stripes indicating that progress in the direction of the stripe is runnable. This is generally labelled ‘runnable in one direction’ and we all know how unreliable this one can be. It is occasionally found in ‘fight’ areas.

I’m not going to mention the various vertical green screens in this article as it’s really a separate subject.

Each of the three green type areas can have a dotted edge to it, or not, to indicate that it is a distinct vegetation boundary. Where there is no dotted edge, it is assumed that the vegetation boundary is indistinct. Distinct vegetation boundary dots may also go through solid areas of all three colours, generally depicting a distinct change of tree type within the block.

What use can we make of these markings to aid our orienteering passage? The dark green of ‘fight’ can be the most useful, especially when it is juxtapositioned alongside a ‘white’ RUN area. In the south, this is frequently rhododendrons or gorse and generally easily spotted. Dark green dots are usually bushes and can be very helpful. Even the edges of indistinct ‘fight’ against the ‘white’ are generally easy to spot and to run along. Too many ‘dot’ bushes are the reverse, as you can get lost amongst them when it becomes impossible to identify each one. In general terms, ‘fight’ is a very helpful navigational aid except perhaps where it adjoins a ‘walk’ area with indistinct joining.

‘Fight’ is always ‘fight’ in any surveyor’s depiction, but ‘slow run’ and ‘walk’ are very much a matter of individual judgement. One man’s ‘run’ is another man’s ‘walk’ and, as in marking an exam paper you have severe markers and lenient markers, we have surveyors who mark vegetation over-severely and those that understate it. One often hears ‘that green stuff was run all the way’, or ‘much of that white area should have damned well been green!’. Thus it is that runners should really check this out early on in their run, before deciding that they can use the coloured boundaries as navigational features, or of course decide whether they would wish to enter therein, in view of the surveyors interpretation of runability.

A ‘dotted’ vegetation boundary is almost always a good thing to navigate along, even where the dotted line is across a ‘white’, ‘run’ area as a change of tree type is pretty easy to see, unless of course its winter, where one deciduous tree may look much like any other without its leaves on.

Light green slow run areas rarely have dotted edges and are the most difficult to interpret and a surveyor’s attempt at defining the need to put it in is very varied. To many there is no significant difference between just running and ‘slow’ running, especially amongst the ageing competitors, so we (oops, there I said it!) scarcely notice the difference. In fact, very few will try to navigate along a pale green boundary unless it is ‘dotted’ against the white.

This leaves the middle green, ‘walk’ colouration. For me, the boundaries of ‘walk’ are normally just as good as fight and can be used to navigate along. The ‘going’ within the middle green area is, again for me, often just as fighty as the ‘fight’ areas.

The means of using these vegetation boundaries to aid navigation is very varied, but following the boundary in the lighter coloured area seems most sensible. Bends, especially sharp bends in a vegetation boundary, make good attack points, but as always when leaving a bend, be it a track or vegetation boundary, care is needed. The dotted boundary usually makes for a good strong catching feature to run onto without very great care and then to slide along it where quite often there are animal track type paths to aid runability.

So; don’t ignore the vegetation boundaries, as they are very useful navigational aids; beware the use of the pale green ‘undotted’ edges and remember to check early in your run on the surveyor’s interpretation of densities that he has given to the different shades of green.

Richard Arman

Each leg of a course can be broken down to bite-size pieces. Too much information just leads to mistakes – make it easy on yourself.

1. Decide what your attack point is.
2. Work back from there using large obvious features.
3. Now the green light is on.
4. Amber is where you need to verify decisions.
5. Red is where you are closely reading map and land, homing in on information. Example below:

1. From No.1 the attack point to No.2 is the path/track junction.
2. Large obvious features are first path and thicket.
3. Run as fast as I can due north to path and onwards until I see large thicket, I am not interested in fine detail, I am not looking at the map, I am in GREEN mode.
4. From the thicket, still running fast, I check the compass to verify running in northerly direction, hit the path, look for the junction. I can see more information, need to verify path directions – I am in AMBER mode.
5. At path/track junction I slow down. I am relying on the compass now, checking off information – I am in RED mode. I see the first pit to my right with a marker in – I DON’T waste time checking it out, I go straight past it to my control a little further on.

EASY PEASY!

Try it, particularly on longer legs. If you want to improve on your times, try not to waste precious minutes reading the finer detail on the map until you absolutely have to. When you can get your “head down” and run – do it!

John & Liz Cook