Training: racing the rustlers

No sooner so I write a post about how it's been ages since I last did any orienteering, and I only go and do a spot of orienteering the next day. Not your traditional orienteering with white and orange kites, mind you; Shaun the Sheep orienteering. 😂

There's one! Shaun the Sheep outside St Nick's.

For the past month or two, 115 Shaun the Sheep sculptures have been dotted around Newcastle, each with a unique code on its base. The idea was that kiddies and their parents would wander the city, collecting all the codes on an app on their phone and getting various "rewards" as they go. All for charity (and marketing), of course.

On Saturday, while killing time with Daughter the Second, I finally decided to get the app and join in. We followed it up with a bit more on Sunday and got ourselves up to 22 out of 115 collected. I suggested to the girls that I could collect more for them on my lunchtime runs from the office and so that's how I came to be doing what was effectively a sheep-based orienteering score event. Only there was a twist: Sunday had actually been the last day of the Shauns and they were starting to be taken away for auction on Monday! 😱

Hence the title of this post: I was in a race against time to get as many as I could before the rustlers got to them. In fact, I only learnt of the rustling when I got to the Cycle Hub and they told me their Shaun had just gone. Still got its code from the lovely people there though. 😁

So, this was a very stop-start run with some very unimpressive split times for me. It reminded me how, on the face of it, orienteering might seem easier than a non-stop run given that you pause to check the map loads — but actually it ruins your rhythm. I was just as tired doing this run as I was doing any normal one.

By the time I'd finished, I'd collected another 21 Shauns over the course of 56 minutes and 8.5km. (Oh, and the rustlers beat me to at least two sculptures, confirmed by staff at those venues.) That's slower for 8.5km than I've been for a regular 10km run. Only one split was below 6:00/km pace, though weirdly that was a 4:48/km pace!

A good chunk of the time I lost was probably down to struggling to find the sculpture when I arrived at where it was marked on the map. The Eldon Square ones were a particular pain, as it wasn't clear which level they were on. It reminded me of the urban orienteering I did in Newcastle last year, where one of the controls near the end was on the skywalks.

Overall though, this was a nice, fun change from the usual lunchtime run and a decent length too. Back to the normal stuff next time though. 🙂