Saturday night saw Harry and I go night orienteering with my friend Dave and one of his son’s Ben. It was an Ebor Orienteers event at Bishopwood South near Selby.
Harry and Ben decided to do the Short course together and Dave and I opted for the Long – it was only 4km after all! I had borrowed one of the Claro head lamps and this was brilliant compared to the use of headlamps on previous night O excursions (Swinsty and Saltaire – both paired up with H).
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 splits show that I was much more competitive in the second half, but ended up 24th out of 30 in 1:02.43, 28.27 behind the winner (but Zac is in the England squad!); not my best, but a good lesson learned.
The other thing was that the woods, despite being flat, were fairly densly covered in brambles. As a result, my legs are absolutely covered in scratchs!
Harry and Ben did well, unfortunately the Short course was a bit too short and fairly simple (equivalent to a Yellow) and all on paths. H finished 3rd out of 9 in 17.54, 1.17 behind the winner.