Harry, Fred and I represented our orienteering club, Claro, in the Compass Sport Cup (an inter-club) competition held at Bramham Park. Harry and Fred had been selected to run Orange and me Brown. This was Fred’s first solo attempt at an Orange and my first attempt at a Brown.
Official results here.
We all had a great time in beautiful weather in lovely woods. Harry did really well coming 8th out of 49 in a time of 24:56. The winner came in at 19:43 but him and the runner up are both in the England squad! He also scored maximum points on the orange course for Claro.
Fred did fantastically; there is a significant step up in difficulty between White / Yellow and Orange – the controls are much better hidden and the navigation between them isn’t solely on paths. He had a bit of a mare on control 5 (funnily enough this was the same as my control 7 which I properly messed up) taking more than 40 minutes, but he still secured 76 points for the club and now there is no looking back to the easier courses.
I had a great run and felt strong. Mucked up 3 controls with either navigational or route planning errors which cost me nearly all my time against the leaders. Still a good 100 mins of training, plenty of bramble scratches, my first brown under my belt and another few lessons learned.
Set off at quite a fast but comfortable pace, but quickly started making a mess of things and faffed around trying to find control 3, then continued in this vein until control 7, where I realised I wasn’t using my head. Until that point, my nav between controls was generally based on taking a simple bearing and running along it, but at night it is much harder to guage the distance you have travelled. From control 7 onwards my nav was much smarter eg, taking a bearing to a point on a stream one side or other from the control (rather than right at it) so that I knew precisely which direction I needed to travel up the stream once I hit it. As a consequence the result 