Newcastle Urban Orienteering, June 2022 (retrospective)
Back in June, I had my best orienteering experience of the year. Over the jubilee weekend, an urban event in Newcastle City Centre was held by my club, Newcastle and Tyneside Orienteers (NATO). To qualify for British Orienteering Federation rankings, I needed to run a course that had an optimal distance of 8km. On the day, Google Fit reckoned I ran about 11.6km, which speaks volumes for both Google Fit's accuracy and my navigational skills. 😂 My time, in the end, was 1:13:58 (trailing the winner in my class by 26:05).
That might not sound brilliant, but by god, it felt like a real achievement. Looking back, the biggest thing about it was just that I'd signed up for it ...and done it. When I'd seen it in NATO's future events list, I'd initially had a typical reaction of "that's not for me", especially given how badly I'd done in a 3.5K event in Cramlington in April. But the closer it got to the day, and the further I progressed through my Couch to 5K, the more I began to believe in myself. And the more I realised I could and should aim higher than I thought I was capable of. 🙂 More and more of the reason for doing Couch to 5K became this event and to improve my orienteering in general.
Anyway, on the day, I don't recall having any particular nerves. I think my major concern was that my 'dibber' (an electronic device, the size of a USB stick, for recording my passage through the checkpoints) wasn't capable of holding enough data for the length of the course I was doing, and so I had to scrounge a fancier one from my club. With that sorted, however, I was just keen to get going in an area I knew reasonably well.
Need to work on that game face, grumpy-pants
Of course, I say I knew it reasonably well, but everything looks odd and different on an orienteering map versus what you know on the ground and I still managed to misinterpret or lose my exact place on the map plenty of times. By the time I'd covered Shieldfield and most of the Ouseburn, I was definitely at the run-a-bit, walk-a-bit stage, but I was loving how I felt. I seem to recall my phone telling me I'd done 6K already as I headed back over the bridge from Byker towards the Hotel du Vin and it just lifted my spirits as I felt so good. Obviously, I didn't feel so good that I could run the whole time, but good that I was still running most of the time.
Definitely by the time I'd hit the 10K mark, however, my legs were feeling it and I was choosing to walk up hills and stairs rather than try to feebly jog up them. But that was fine. One final failure of navigation near the end even meant I'd caught my breath enough that I could give it a bit of a sprint finish. 🙂
But let's not mention the fact that I knackered my coccyx when I sat down on my phone (in the back pocket of my running shorts) with a drink at the end. That, plus a separate but similarly located medical condition, put me out of action for a good couple of weeks afterwards. 🤦♂️
So anyway, that was my orienteering highlight of the year. I mainly go orienteering with my daughter in a bid to rekindle the enjoyment I had with my own dad in the 80s, but... well, it's petering out. Life just gets in the way too often for orienteering and the driveable events for us feel few and far between. If we continue to do it at all in 2023 (I've not renewed my membership yet), it'll never be with the frequency that I manage to do parkruns. Orienteering may have been a motivation to complete the Couch to 5K, but now running has overtaken it as the reason to keep going. And that's ok. Yep, that's just fine.
Comments
Post a Comment