Running On Empty

Scott Bakula can't quite believe it either. Well, let's notch that one up to experience. I think it's fair to say that my first ever score event was a disaster. 🙁 With 60 minutes to get as many controls as I could and return to the finish, Google counted past the 5-minute intervals at an alarming rate. But let's rewind. I'd already slightly panicked at the start, fearing that I was taking too long to plan my route (even though I knew I'd feel this way). So I ended up running off, having only really looked at about a quarter of the map. 🤦‍♂️ And despite my preparation being better than ever — I'd actually memorized the map scale for once, calculating 2cm = 200m = 90s — I seemed to reach attack points faster than expected, which dented my confidence in my navigation and distance estimation. One thing led to another and, despite finding the first few controls with relative ease (despite the odd poor choice of route), it came to a head when I wasted almost 10...

Yep, the ranking's been updated, despite the fact it seems my membership has expired. God bless the lax monitoring of that. 😂 I guess 1000 points in an event is effectively the 'pass' mark for that course. And I'm scraping it. So, I've moved up 567 places in the rankings to position 4033. I do wonder where I'd actually make it to if I got the full allowance of 6 events contributing to my score. So... if we say I average 1028 points per event, that would be 6168 in total. Which, at the time of typing, would see me in position 1828 nationally. On page 74 of the results. Barely halfway up the table from where I already am. Wow. 😮 That's pretty depressing! Let's not bother myself with my actual position, eh? Let's just focus on how much it goes up each time I do a ranking event instead. 😂

Wow. Never has 5km felt so hard. In truth, I did 6.5km, but still... it took me over 70 minutes. But it wasn't so much the hills of Simonside that were tiring, it was the fact that the ground was so damned lumpy, and obscured for a lot of the course by dense, clumpy heather. I hope to hell that this was a ranked event, to make it all feel pointful. 😂 Let's go through it one control at a time. Ish. Map for the Blue course. 5.2km, simple enough, right? Have to admit, I got off to a terrible, uncertain start. Given it was open moorland, any sensible person would've used the compass they were carrying to set off in the right direction, going direct to the control. Not me though. I wasn't confident I could use it quickly and accurately, so instead decided to follow line features on the map, like a path followed by an earth bank that should lead directly to the control. But the paths were hardly distinct or distinguishable and the earth bank certainly wasn't...

Following my return to the British Orienteering rankings after the Hexham Urban event , one of my goals for 2024 is to boost that ranking further by attending more ranked events. A while back, I found what I think is a fixture list giving all such events around the UK for the coming year. At least, if "major fixtures" means "ranked events", that's true. Whatever, it's time to get organized! DALL-E, Unsplash and Google Images all failed me. Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay . I'll start by looking for events hosted by my local clubs: NATO (Newcastle and Tyneside Orienteers), NN (Northern Navigators), and CLOK (Cleveland Orienteering Klub). And maybe also BL (Border Liners). I'll probably then whittle that list down by travel time and possibly by event type (forget the team events; too much pressure). My goal's only to get 2 more ranked events done, but the list has plenty more than 2 options in it. And while I started this post in early Januar...

A week or so back, this popped into my inbox: "You were 7th in a time of 00:52:51 on the course '2' at the event 'Hexham Urban' organised by Newcastle and Tyneside Orienteers on Sunday 26 November 2023. You were 00:08:51 behind the winner. Your run scored 1017 ranking points. That is your best ranking score in the last 12 months." Actually, it's not so much my best ranking score in the last 12 months, it's my ONLY ranking score in the last 12 months. 😂 And I knew that because I checked before the event to see where I'd slumped to, only to find out that I wasn't ranked at all . My previous two ranking scores had expired, which was super disappointing. Never mind though. Let Sunday 26th November 2022 be the start of a year-long quest to gain a respectable position in the British Orienteering Federation's rankings . I'm under no illusion that it will require a bit of luck regarding my ability to even attend events, but let's go fo...

Hexham, it turns out, is pretty hilly. It also has lots of walls and fences and stuff that mean some things can be the long way round, even when the control's... just there . Course #2, for Veteran Men and Open Women. Open to what, I'm not sure.  😳 Beyond that, I'm really not sure what I want to write about today. My toe felt a bit off from the off. It was bloomin' cold. The pins and needles I got when my fingers and thumbs finally warmed up was something else. I got absolutely left for dead by a guy doing the same course who started a minute behind me. Just under halfway round, I felt a strain in my back, on the right hand side, which feels more like a karting injury than a running one. (Great timing too, as I have karting coming up this Wed evening! 🙄) Oh, and I ended up 6th out of 9 finishers (though 10 entrants) in my age group, with a time of 52:51, a full 08:51 behind the winner. So, it doesn't feel like I was very fast, but at least today I don't think ...

What a n00b. 🙄 So yeah, I finally got back to the orienteering today, and made yet another of my trademark schoolboy errors in my navigation. At least, it certainly feels like that's what lets me down. Today's course — the blue course, which is one step down from the usual hardest/longest brown course — included something I'd not seen before: the same control being used more than once. So, at different times, you'll exit that control in different directions. Stupid me didn't even notice that, so my first exit from control #3 saw me running off directly for control #7 rather than control #4. Idiot. 🤦‍♂️ 7.84km around the housing estates of Cramlington, including the odd unnecessary detour Once I checked into #7 and saw that its number didn't match what I was expecting, there was a good chunk of me standing around feeling very confused, double-checking the number on both the control descriptions and the control itself, before looking back at the previous control...

It's been a looong time since I last posted about anything orienteering-related and there's a good reason for that: I've not done any for AGES. Daughter the 1st has given up on it and we've even handed back the club top she was borrowing (that was very cringe). I've also been putting all of my efforts into parkrunning instead, as those events are typically closer to home, start and end earlier, and so consume less of a weekend for me (and the family). So... yeah... no orienteering. 😢 No offence meant to this guy, but it's impossible to look cool while orienteering, isn't it? While I suspect this means I won't renew my club or BOF membership for 2024, I do still miss getting out for it occasionally. Maybe next year, I'll try to run once or twice as an independent. Also, 2023 isn't over yet and, looking ahead on the NATO future events page , I see that there's another urban event happening in Cramlington at the start of November. Let's...

Sigh. Another weekend without a parkrun. The hip remains crocked. Still, at least I got a bit of fresh air this morning with the elder daughter as we made our long-awaited orienteering comeback. The map for the yellow course at Prudhoe, marked with our finishing time of 24:37 Of course, you might notice the length of the course (indicated near the top of the bottom-left panel). Yeah, just 1.6km, or 1 mile. Not exactly a stretch for me, but the daughter deserves her moment too and everyone's got their own pace and capabilities, yeah? Of course, this being orienteering, there were also plenty of pauses in this to check the map and get bearings before setting off again. The final time of 24:37 (a 15:23/km pace) might sound slow, but this is a kids' course really. And that time was enough to put us fastest on the course . Winner, winner, chicken dinner. 😛 (Ignore the fact there was only one other runner  — the Weddle Family — on our course.) For me personally, it's always a bi...

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). Panorama of Ouseburn at the eastern extent of the course, courtesy of geograph.co.uk 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 A...

Just a quick post to confirm that I didn’t make it to the orienteering at Newburn this last Sunday . As expected, I was still testing positive for COVID, even if I got my first negative LFT the very next day. Regardless, daughter #2 had tested positive on the Saturday too, and The Wife was also in the thick of it. Reality is that it was never on. Bummer. 😔 Still, my subsequent negative test does at least mean I’m free to rejoin the parkrunning ranks somewhere this coming weekend… provided no other plague befalls this house.