O-a-blog™ - bizarre tableness

My orienteering club runs an internal league table, just for fun really. It nominates a number of events, some its own and some at near(-ish-)by clubs - 18 last season, 14 this. Then your best n events (for the last two seasons it's been your best 8) in the season are used, alongside a handicap system, to decide your place in the league.

I am bemused to note that last season I came in the twenties, in close proximity to some people whom I respect very much as orienteers. Does this mean I am really that good? Sadly, no: it is an accident of the handicapping system which aims to reflect historical performance (and hence show improvement) and is I think friendly to bad orienteers and initially at least to those who manage fewer events. So I did not really "beat", say, Hedley C, who has actually tutored me in a training session - I've had beginner benefit from the handicap, is all; and he did not. The more events I get to and the more I appear in the league so the more accurate will my handicap become, so I could not expect an apparently good outcome like this another time round.

My orienteering got off to a bad start this season - I managed a few events in the early autumn then none for ages, then restarted around Christmas. So my league place will still, I suspect, be a bit floaty. On the other hand, since Christmas I have been much better about watching the calendar, getting my entries in punctually^[1], and so I have a much clearer programme of league-featured (and other) events coming up. This should start to nail down my true league performance and I will not then be expecting to see myself in the twenties! At the moment I'm almost in the fifties, with only two qualifying events (should be three but I mispunched^[1] at Eridge! Idiot!!) and I suspect that's maybe a truer picture.

Oh well. It really really doesn't matter. If I did orienteering because I had to win and see myself at the top of league tables it would be different. Fortunately, I do not: indeedy no.

Note:

1. But that's another story.

O-a-blog™ (SAX, Mill Bank & Whitley)

Sunday, 2 March 2008

This was a great Saxons regional event, down near Sevenoaks. Lovely interesting running in a varied landscape. I ran in my correct age class this time and sadly came, er, last in my rather small category! Oops. Oh well.

My downfall was control 14 - I had trouble, to a ridiculous extent, finding this one despite having (I thought) navigated quite well on the way in. Seventeen minutes! I could not find that thing. Works wonders for your temper. And self-esteem. Tsk.

Do please have a look at the map extract here. I was on the track to the east of control 14, having gone pretty much due E from 13 down onto the track bend and thence to the junction. And yes I cut the corner off but this wasn't enough to disorientate me - or so I thought. Where it started to go wrong was when I couldn't see clearly the veg boundaries to my right, then left, along the track, and once I'd lost faith in that I suppose the rest of it just fell apart quite efficiently. I know that I spent a long time looking for the control too far south. One problem was that there seemed to be dozens of things that could have been that path leading west then south by the control, and I must have checked out most of them once I became unsure where I was. How to avoid a mess like this? I am not sure but I suppose that if I had had a really reliable pace-count it would have helped, though to be fair I thought I had - it just wasn't actually very good when put to the test!

Never mind: great courses, lovely place ... and there's always another week!

O-a-blog™ (LOK, Holmbury)

Sunday, 24 February 2008

I was up with the lark (well, almost) and off to the excellent London Orienteering Klubb (LOK) regional event at Holmbury. As I've mentioned before my orienteering is still not yet that well-organized, especially with regard to entering in advance for these bigger events: foolishly, I'm thinking about them days rather than weeks in advance - this does not work well. So I'd missed the deadline, they'd run out of entries for the correct-age courses I should've been looking at, but I still ended up running (in another class) due to the kindness and good organization of the LOK person doing the entries - he was publishing lists of what maps were still available, confirming by email, and so on, pretty much right up to the last minute.

Running out of my class meant I was non-competitive for that event but it's not a huge problem unless you're into badges and leagues and stuff - otherwise a run is a run is a run. Obviously it would be better if I were in the right class, for plenty of reasons, but no great harm is done by the occasional abberation.

It was a nice setup, with good parking, lovely café facilities run by the local school PTA (tea, cake and burgers, basically), loos, a shop and so on. This is one of the advantages of being at a larger event. I mean I like the little local events too, but there's something nice about the sense of occasion, about seeing more people, from a wider range of other clubs (sometimes there are club banners up in the car park too) and so on - it does give me, unusually, a bit of a feeling of belonging. This is particularly so when I'm greeted, by name, by people from my own club, when I'd assumed that I was probably mostly invisible to them. This happened at Holmbury and was very pleasant.

It also gives a bit of an answer to my oft-revisited worry "do I look a twit for wearing a club top?" I mean, yes, of course I do (as in it I resemble half a ton of pork sausages forced into a nylon pillowcase), and I'm not generally into uniforms, DJs for orchestral concerts notwithstanding. But at orienteering events it does identify me as a club member, and indeed (if you can forgive me the er er meta-ness) as someone who wants to be identified as a club member, which I think probably increases the likelihood of my being said hello to, which can, I feel, only be a good thing.

So anyway (anyway) I wandered along to registration - the parking was all spread out along forest roads so it was a fair walk - and claimed my Course 7 place which had been reserved for me by Mr Nice LOK Bloke, then trekked back to the start. I should maybe mention that registration was beautifully quiet, with no queue - on these bigger events most people are pre-registered and pre-paid, so they can just go straight to the start with no further formalities required. Hence registration only has to mop up some EOD people, those who owe money or need to hire a dibber, oddities like me, and so on.

And off we go. It was wonderful. I've left far too long a gap before writing this, so I can't remember that much detail. I do, though, recall that it was a nice and interesting area, with plenty of variety, and that I enjoyed it very much.

With the aid of a quick look in my Magic O Box Of Facts I can add that I wasn't very fast that day, and that even if I'd been competing in the course/class I did, I'd have only scraped into the top 75% - not hugely impressive. Oh well. I seem to have been particularly slow from 11 to 12: please see the picture above - it's a fair distance, yes, but not that far and I wonder whether I perhaps also got lost a bit en route? Hmmm.

The nice thing about going orienteering south of London is that although it's a bit of a trek compared to my local events in Herts, Essex or wherever, it tends to increase my chances of bumping into my Bruvver especially if he has also trekked a mile or several north of his usual SO patch. (Yes, Tamsin dear, this is a good thing - we have not actually fought physically since about 1962, which seems like a reasonably sound basis for a relationship.) And so it was on this occasion - I was just into some complex sequence of Advanced Mobile Telephony when the person whom I was trying to contact just strolled up thereby rendering redundant my technofiddling and permitting a good old gossip of the traditional face-to-face variety. Yeah man.

Chat duly chatted, it was time to bust up the party and head for home. Nice to see you Dr Dave and thank you LOK for a d*mn fine event.

An eventful weekend IV

Sunday, 23 March 2008

Wonderful JK orienteering! You can read up on the annual Jan Kjellström International Festival of Orienteering here or here but it's a great big international orienteering event, one of a small handful taking place annually in the UK. The biggest O event I've been to, by a long way.
JK 2008 took place on four days over Easter at four sites in Surrey and Sussex. Sunday was in the very beautiful Ashdown Forest.
The drive down was a bit horrendous. Snow, tending towards heavy at times; bad visibility. I had unexpectedly to fill the car with oil and water before leaving, so was feeling (quite unnecessarily) anxious about time. And so on.
The last part of the drive was on a tiny narrow road through forest and the whole thing was really very much like a Christmas-card snow scene. Absolutely beautiful but not perfect driving conditions as it was still (very picturesquely) chucking it down.
Got there safely, parked. All very efficient with two shops, two cafes, loos, JK souvenir mugs (yeah I got one), a commentary box with radio controls, a huge collection of club tents, spectator areas, and so on.
Although it was such a big event, it didn't really feel any different once you got going. I don't really know why I'd thought it might: there's no real reason why the people-per-hectare-per-hour count should be any different as long as the course design and starts are working properly. Erm. Is there? I think that's right but I still feel a bit suspicious of my logic. Oh well.
The orienteering was great. It was still quite snowy underfoot, and indeed it snowed a fair bit more while I was running. Very pretty but it does slow me down since I can't see where I'm putting my feet and I don't want to fall over.
I did fall over (of course) but not badly. It was all good challenging interesting stuff and mega-enjoyable despite the dodgy weather.
The very end was hard work. Firstly, I gave up navigating a little prematurely, oops: I could see the finish from about three controls before and there was pretty much a constant line of runners between me and the finish. I did check, roughly, the general direction but, duh, of course that was OK - so I just slotted into the queue. This was a mistake: actually everyone did not have the same penultimate control and mine was a good 50m off the obvious one, for which most people were heading. This threw me a bit but I realized what the problem was in a mere hour or two and was soon on my way to the last control, or rather cluster of controls since all the routes really had united there and it and the finish both had quite a few control boxes so that competitors weren't forced to queue.
From the last control to the finish was a wide taped route, quite a climb over open ground. The earlier steeper part of this felt about the same angle as the side of a house and I was relieved that I wasn't the only one to walk up this bit.
It flattened out a bit as it turned across the hillside in front of the spectator area, towards the finish: like many others I was forced by my pride to run, or at least stumble, along this bit. Strangely, the commentators didn't pick me up. Huh, don't know class when they see it.
Let me explain about radio controls, at least as I understand them. (If you understand more than me, which would not be hard, then please feel free to correct me.) As this was the first event of this size and significance that I'd seen, it was also the first chance that I'd had to see them in use. There were two opportunities for the commentators to pick up individual competitors: one was the finish which I've just described and the other a "spectator control" where on certain courses (not the ones that I do!) a loop of the route is brought back to the assembly area so that the control is under the gaze of the spectators. Thus the competitors dibbing at that control are, like those at the finish, liable - if they are interesting! - to be picked up by the commentators.
The question then arises - how does the commentary box know who's dibbing? Do they know off by heart the appearance of every significant competitor? Well, maybe they do for all I know, but what I do know is that they've certainly got help on hand from the radio controls. As well as recording the competitor's visit in the usual way, these also transmit the details on to the commentary box. Some clever interfacing of systems, I imagine, then tells them all the competitor's details and how they're doing now, and so on. It's all pretty cool.
Having finished I then met my brother David, who wasn't running due to his being ill that weekend, chiz, and we both waited for his daughter Isobel who came storming in like a good 'un. Once I'd dropped some stuff off at my car I went back to meet the group, now augmented by my sister-in-law Amaryllis, and we all went and got lunch from Wilf's Café, one of the two caterers on site. Wilf's is famously good and I've been hearing about it from David for years, so it was great finally to experience it. Wilf's had plain wholesome delicious food in large quantities, nice staff, and ferociously efficient organization, so that the large and initially daunting queue was actually snaking through at an impressive rate. I had delicious chili which was very much just what the doctor ordered.
This was also very nice because we were sitting in their new car, a Toyata Prius (or Pious as Becca's Bad Car Dude friends would cruelly but amusingly have it) and it was good to have a chance to admire (and indeed covet) it.
Eventually it was time for this pleasant interlude to end and for us to go our separate ways - David's family back home and me off to help as I had signed up to do.
My job was to help with relay team entries for the next day. Lots and lots of relay team entries. Many had already been done online but there were amendments to these, as well as late entries and cancellations, so actually there was a huge stack of forms to check and enter.
I must admit that the remainder of the afternoon was not one of the most pleasant of my life. On the positive side, it was very good to be involved and to feel that one was actually helping the JK to happen. There was also a nice sense of cameraderie and teamwork among the helpers, who included several acquaintances from my club, HH. On the negative side - well, everything else really. It was cold and miserable in the tent and when the wind blew it wasn't just a bit blowy, it made you question whether the side of the tent was coming right off. The work itself was OK but the computer system was giving the poor IT people a lot of trouble (hoho, I'm off work today!) and so we had lots of waiting to do. My hands got so cold that they really hurt. It was a great relief when we'd entered and checked everything that could be entered or checked, and were told we could go - so I did. A worthwhile but not pleasurable experience. (I'd do it again, mind you.)
I found my way out, this time avoiding the tiny road which, it turns out, was forbidden to competitors - oops. (Boring discussion deleted.) The Mitsubishi tanked round the M25 like a new car and in no time (crob crob went the mighty chromed twin exhausts etc) I was home and regaling my enchanted family with my dramatic orienteering tales, er, or something.
I ran in the JK! I, me, Vogel, fat'n'fifty, ran in the JK! I am seriously chuffed! Yeah babay.

WeekenDex™

O-a-blog™ (HH, Ashridge South)

Saturday, 2 February 2008

Yesterday I went to a very nice Happy Herts event at the National Trust's very fine Ashridge Estate. It's always a pleasure to orienteer here in these beautiful, amazingly English woods. Great course and organization too.

I did Green. I had a couple of stupid moments and of course was not fast (I really need to do some work on my fitness), but in general I thought I navigated quite well - I was pleased with the number of times I did something slightly the shorter-but-harder way and it actually worked. Possibly my pace-counting and compass work is improving a little with practice - or maybe I just got lucky. But it was certainly nice to be occasionally able to follow it ought to be here somewhere with ah yes, here it is. I think it helped that the woods are so open - your chances of being able to follow a bearing are so much better when you are not getting pushed offline by undergrowth the whole time and you can just choose a point and follow it.

Control 4 on the map extract is an example of this - it's from RouteGadget so the red line is me. I didn't really know what to do other than just take a bearing from the path then count paces, and to my amazement it worked. Woohoo.

It was a beautiful day, and having finished the course I went and had coffee at the very nice snack bar by the NT carpark. This was a lovely place to sit for a few minutes and I chatted to Oscar, a miniature Schnauzer, and his family.

Results: pleasingly, I came not much further than half way down the order, which makes a change at the moment. Onwards and upwards! (Or not.)

O-a-blog™ (DFOK, Darnley Estate, Compass Sport Cup SE)

Well (continuing from yesterday's blogological entity) I did indeed make it. It was a bit of a trek, out along the North Circular then the A13 then across (rather magnificently) the QEII Bridge and eventually down the A2 a bit till it nearly becomes the M2; but, as it turned out, well worth the journey.

I had had nice and encouraging email from a nice entry-sort-out person who advised me to get there early to grab an EOD (entry on the day) slot, as there were around ten left for most courses - so I did. I actually got the first available EOD time for Blue, which was 10.31: quite cool given that first starts were at 10.30. I was there embarrassingly early so I kicked my heels trying to look like a queue while the DFOK people were setting up. I felt a twit but the queuing did have the desired effect.

Having said that, I then nearly messed this bit up: I knew that they were using two starts, called Blue and White, and that White was twenty minutes from the car park and Blue was just five. My subconscious had decided that as I was doing a Blue course I must be going from the Blue start, so I took my time, and phoned Deb for a nice chat, and so on ... yep you guessed it: the start names were "upside down" compared to the course lengths, so the long courses went from White and the short from Blue. Duh, Vogel, silly man. I must add, though, that I am not sure that it's a great idea to use colours, like course names, for the starts, and I would have thought that, even if you did, it would make more sense if they were lined up so that White and Blue courses, and the ones similar to them, would be at the appropriately-named starts. But even better would be calling them North and South or Apple and Pear or Duck and Teal - really pretty much anything else, I'd have thought.

So having suddenly understood all this and realized that I was not quite ready to go and it was past 10.11 and I needed to be gone minutes ago, I went off in a tearing hurry for the two kilometre trek to the White start. 2K! That's longer than some courses I've done! Naturally, I was nearly dead before I got there. I ran much of the way and kept passing alarming signs saying "1000m to go: 10 minutes" and so on. And it doesn't help that my elderly, clockwork, much-loved watch is not actually ruthlessly accurate to the last nanosecond, so there's no real guarantee that the 10.31 for which I am aiming is the same 10.31 as other people know about. So of course I was in total sweaty-panic meltdown, something I do quite well. A nice starter person reassured me that I was OK to start anyway (I'd missed 10.31 by a short sneeze) and tried to encourage me to calm down and get my breath back, a kind approach though if she'd known that it would have really taken an armchair and a large Scotch she may have thought better of the project.

And so away I went. It may have been the rushed start but to cut a long story short I made AN UNBELIEVABLE HORLICKS of the first control, taking over 14 minutes to find it - some kind of personal worst ever, indeed probably a galactic worst ever come to think of it. I cannot think when I was last so panic-stricken, frustrated and angry on a run. I note that someone claiming to be me wrote this:

" – when it’s all going wrong I do sometimes have to make a conscious effort to fight off a depressed and defeatist attitude that can try to flood in but, you know what, I have always been glad, ten minutes later, that I managed to fight it off."

Well, yes, jolly good, but I'd say this was pretty close to the edge, in real danger of entering the non-fighting-it-off zone. If I'd sat down on a tree stump I don't think I'd have got up off it to go orienteering again, but just to give up and go home. Seriously. Real Slough of Despond stuff.

The annoying thing is that it is as if I forgot everything I ever knew about orienteering and maps and was just back to a totally unskilled, unthinking approach. Certainly, that panic-stricken pre-start period did not help, but I am quite disappointed in myself that I let it get so out of hand and let the self-pity nearly win. Once I get started it is powerful stuff: I'm too fat and old, I am no good at this, I am no good at anything, what do I think I am doing out here, I look like a fool, I should give up and go home, I should never do this sport again ... and so on. Not, in fact, a brilliantly good thing to have going on in your head. Do you remember in The NeverEnding Story, when Artax (the only horse that I know of named [almost] after a ceiling finish) "lets the sadness get to him" and sinks into the swamp? I imagine my kids still have nightmares about it - I know I pretty much do. Like that.

The silly thing is that I could and should have stopped and done almost anything and it would have been better than the aimless and depressed wandering that I actually did. For example I could very easily have got back to the path or even right back to the start and tried again, used different features, counted steps more carefully, and so on. (I think the initial problem may have been that I badly miscounted - 100m instead or 200 or something - and this put me in a clearing that seemed right but was actually far too early.) There was a line feature in front of the control that I might well have found, and that would quite likely have nailed it. I cannot offhand remember what the symbol means - I thought "a bit like a Twix" was close - but I am sure it would have been findable and then helpful. And so on.

Anyway, I eventually stumbled upon the control, partly through pure luck and partly through a tiny bit of proper thinking - some of which was navigation and some was where other orienteers seemed to be coming and going, though the latter approach is not that safe, especially as there was another control quite close by which I had already found and checked and established it was no help to me. The real Control 1 seemed a long way further out and north of my line compared to where I had thought, but it was a great relief to find it anyway.

Sadly I wasn't too bright in my approach to the next control either. (This is also on the map fragment at the top.) It was just after a fence junction where fences either side of me gradually came in, like a funnel, and met. The one close on my left (to the east) was just a boundary between the wood and the (out of bounds) fields beyond. The more distant (western) one on my right was an internal boundary within the wood, and had a path running up it - indeed it was the same path where the Start kite was, and the same one to which I should have relocated when Control 1 went all pear-shaped on me. Foolishly, I felt that I would be faster staying off the path and going straight up the eastern fence, whereas with 20/20 hindsight I can say that it would have been much, much faster to go quite directly out to the path at the western fence and run up that. This is so even though it would have been a roundabout route - the speed of progress once on the path would have overridden the directness of the other route. It is a foolish misconception - and I must remember this another time - that a linear feature is necessarily good to make fast progress along. Fences are not necessarily clear to the sides and neither are streams, in fact ditto earth banks and the like. They can be, sure, but there's no guarantee. So I set off up this fence confidently enough, taking insufficient notice of the darkening green on the map, and found myself really fighting my way through bracken, brambles, fallen logs and goodness knows what else, while only a short distance away other runners were blasting cheerfully up the path at full speed. Another silly error, but I was amused that two other runners made their own silly error and followed me through - they must have really been wishing they'd ignored me! This control took me over six minutes, which is around double the mean. So these first two controls took me over twenty minutes, where fast people were doing them in less than five and most people took around seven or eight: not a great start.

After that things started to look up a bit and I felt like I knew what I was doing a bit more. The initial panic had subsided and I had acknowledged that I was going to be well down the list, maybe last, so I thought I might as well just get on and enjoy it and try to be accurate.

It was a nice area. Parts of it were very very muddy - some places that on the map were shown as "rough open" were actually more "mudarama" because they had been cleared, or prepped for forestry, or something, so machines had been in and it was more like a ploughed field. Very very heavy going but quite an interesting challenge to try and make some progress. On the other hand, plenty of the rest of it was great - an interesting mix of parkland, woods and a really strange/interesting wet area that I'll come back to.

At one point in the park bit I found myself running near a big temple thing which was under restoration. As the course unfolded I saw more and more follies and other interesting odds and ends. It turns out that there's a heritage trust which looks after that side of Cobham Hall, the country house (now a school) through whose estate part of the course went. One thing that really caught my eye was the Pump House, a gorgeous building down by a lake. From its information board it appears that it was rescued in a Landmark-Trust-ish manner from the very brink of utter dereliction - walls really very ruined and so on - and now it looks splendid, so well done them. Oh and just before that I had passed another one, "Repton's Seat", which looked very inviting for a breather - but I resisted and kept going.

Some time after this I crossed back into Shorne Wood Country Park, where the course had started - or rather, the 2K shuffle to the White start had. When I say "crossed back" I mean that this course was seriously bisected, having the A2 and HS1 (the new Channel Tunnel high speed railway line) running together right through the middle, separating Cobham Hall and its park from the country park itself. This is I think why they had the long walk to the White start - the unusual layout of the area has required some ingenuity to get good courses, though I would certainly say that they managed very well.

Back in the country park it was very odd and very interesting. Much of it is ex-claypits, and you can really tell - it's glutinous, mossy, very bumpy and wet and generally odd. There are hummocks and hillocks and little pools and paths and interesting corners everywhere. One control was on a little mini-hilltop and it was really quite hairy up there - very slippery with bright green moss everywhere, and the "path" becoming quite dodgy from so many feet. I think it's almost the first time in orienteering that I've though, golly, I could actually fall off here. Then the next control was straight ahead over the top of this little hill and down a very steep slippery clay slope to a pretty pondside place and I wondered if it was actually too dangerous to go that way, but it was OK in the end and actually rather fun. The navigation in this part was quite intricate - not really very hard but certainly interesting and unusual.

Why was I doing Blue, you ask, when I more usually do Green? Well this was a "proper" event with club entries and things, and although I had neglectfully not entered through the club, I vaguely felt it was the right thing in some ill-defined way to enter in the class that I should for a club entry, and all entrants in the 45+ age bracket were supposed to do Blue, and that's me. I mean I could have done Green and no-one would really have known or cared but I would have felt like I was wimping out a little. Or something. And, comfortingly, I had a nice email from the club captain saying I had done the right thing in entering the correct class and that it could even help under certain circumstances: this is not because of the brilliance of my orienteering, I hasten to add, but just to do with occupying places and the way the tables work. I think this, the CompassSport Cup, is the first proper named event I've been in, even though it was a regional heat rather than the final. What a step in my magnificent career.

The results are out now (I'm writing this last bit on Wednesday) and HH were beaten into second place by David's club, Southdowns - I think this happens quite a lot! Sadly my personal score will not have had a huge impact, though fortunately it cannot harm the club's place either. In the What If event I did a bit better having been very efficient about Controls 1 and 2, but in the real world those two took quite a toll and I didn't quite scrape into the top 90% of all competitive starters this time, though I was not last! I do most seriously need to learn and apply the lessons of those first two controls.

O-a-blog™ (SN, Ash South)

I was reflecting on the fact that 2008 is my fifth year of orienteering (though still my zeroth year of being any good at it, but hey).

I agonized over whether to go today - it seemed hard to fit in - but my word I am really pleased that I did. This was a local Southern Navigators event at Ash, down near Aldershot in Surrey. As you can see from the map this is a wooded area with army firing ranges next to it. The red flags were flying and there was indeed shooting going on, but not enough to spoil things. It's a lovely area with lots of interesting valleys and stuff. And it was yet another lovely sunny morning - very difficult to imagine a nicer day or place.

I did a course they called Light Blue. Not one I have encountered before but the only harder-than-Orange courses they had were Light Green and Light Blue. They reckoned their Light Blue was something like Green, indeed I am not quite sure why it wasn't. I orienteered quite well, but slowly. I hope I am not last but, as I have said before, the whole point is that even if it turns out I was, it will not detract even a touch from the enjoyment I've already had. This is one of the big features, for me, of this extraordinary sport.

When I say I did quite well - for example, I made one stupid navigational error of the Route Choice Oops variety. I took what looked like a sensible short route but forget about those little brown wiggly lines - contours I think they call them. Silly Vogel. So I went down a seriously steep descent into a pretty valley, along the bottom of the said valley for a hundred metres, then up out of its other side up another fairly nightmare climb. With just a few nanoseconds' thought I could have got to the same place going round the top end of the same valley with no change in level and maybe just a few metres further, arriving (almost) fresh as a daisy and minutes earlier. Oh well. (6 to 7 on the top map extract.)

At another control I overshot a fair bit, which was silly - I had been counting paces but must have just got a bit confused, and foolishly I did not use other cues which would have double-checked the pace-counting. I then backtracked to the control and found it gone - that is, it has been nicked. Rather annoying, and difficult to see the point - was it vandalism-for-fun, vandalism-to-make-a-point, theft in the hope of profit (do they sell a lot of these down the pub?) or what? Bizarre, and rather sad.

Update: Southern Navigators had three controls stolen that day - they lost a total of £200+ worth of equipment. As I say: bizarre.

On the other hand I was pleased that when the same route choice thing happened again I had wised up sufficiently to find a nice easy route along the contour rather than diving miles down and up again.

There was one control (13) that I found very hard - I got all mixed up coming out of 12 and although I thought I had a strategy it fell apart quite fast under pressure, leaving me quite disorientated. There was a fiddly little network of paths and I found it very hard to see where I was in it. I did then think of an approach which I felt sort of might work, and I ended up, well, not quite where I thought I should be, but in a recognizable and recoverable-from place (the open bit SE of 3) , and thus got it back together, in a way that I found quite pleasing given how clueless I often am in these sticky corners.

Tomorrow I may be going on some slightly more serious-sounding event in Kent. I should have registered for it ages ago but have been a bit out of things. It is possible that I will be able to EOD (enter on the day) if I get there early enough. Let's see if I make it.

Coffee note: I left in such a flap this morning that I had no time to make a flask of coffee, chiz. Afterwards I was gasping for one. I had already noted with some interest that I was driving along near the Basingstoke Canal so when I saw a sign to the Canal Authority's Visitor Centre I followed it hoping to find coffee there. No luck, in fact no luck two ways - it is open weekdays only in winter, plus the Tea Room is currently shut anyway! Oh well. It does, however, look a good place to drop in some time, and the little canal corner it occupies, accompanied by the railway, is very attractive. I drove on, but soon after that I followed a sign to The Quayside. This is a watersports place on an old gravel pit and has a very pleasant bar/restaurant/thing, so I had my coffee looking out over this lovely lake with birdies and what have you. Eleven out of ten.

Results note: I wasn't actually expecting to come first in this one so I find it quite acceptable that I came in the, er, top 90% of my course. Ahem. Yes.

Orienteering: yay, woo, etc... or, to put it another way: O-a-blog™ (HH, Nomansland Common; MV, Epsom and Ashtead Commons)

I was getting worried that I had de facto given up orienteering. I managed one event in September (LOK's rather fun Ally Pally event [should be in a frame, sorry] - just a little park-O yet irresistible because so close to home) but since then I have not been once. Work, health, the news job, family, music, stress etc have all somehow overcome my (usually quite strong) desire to go orienteering and with each event I missed I felt more concerned that it was getting harder to go back.

(Note to self: actually this last idea - 'harder to go back' - is dangerous b*ll*cks and you know it. Kindly recall this the next time the issue comes up. Thank you.)

Finally, though, I have fought back through the er er maelstrom of er er stuff and, greatly encouraged by my family (bless 'em), have done not one but two events this weekend. I am very, very pleased indeed. I am also wrecked and can hardly walk today but ho hum.

Naturally my performances were not good. I came quite near last (but not last!) in a short-green-ish sprint at the Happy Herts event on Saturday at Nomansland Common. Let's face it, something with a word like "sprint" in it is never really going to be my strong suit and I am currently amazingly fat and unfit even by my standards. However it was so good to be orienteering again, and the place is nice and it was a very pleasant sunny morning so I had a great time. It's a quite small area and the navigation needed was precise, even fiddly, and a good turn of speed would have been useful but hey. I even went to the social afterwards and had mince pies and so on. I felt a bit fish-out-of-water as most people were in family groups or long-established friendship groups, and I am a bit abnormally socialized for a situation like that, but some of the people there are really very nice and considerate and went out their way to include me in conversation. I take my hat off especially to Graham P who is either preternaturally nice, or ditto well-brought-up, or both, and who chatted happily to me for ages as if oblivious of the fact that I am a boring and ignorant old person, especially where orienteering is concerned.

Yesterday was a very nice Mole Valley event at Epsom and Ashtead Commons. I did Green, which is what I often aim for nowadays, and had a wonderful time. It was very muddy in places and very brambly in others but it was an absolutely upliftingly beautiful crisp cold sunny morning in a gorgeous location. Much of the course was in semi-open ground with bracken and occasional trees, mostly deciduous or (worryingly) dead so there was a fantastic green/brown/silver thing going on with a stunning blue sky overhead. I almost wished I had a camera, though I would not really want to slow myself down any more! I made some devastatingly stupid route choices and lumbered round on a lot less than full throttle, but came not too far down the bottom third out of sixty so I do not feel disgraced. One or two controls were really hard to find (note to self or to people looking at it on RouteGadget - 6 in particular) in a way that made me wonder if it was quite kosher but I know so little about procedure that I would not like to hazard a guess. I note, in fact, that I did find even the worrying ones, by dint of very careful navigation (and some luck), so maybe I shouldn't be griping as I've proved it works! Certainly one or two were a notch harder than usual, though, I would say. But I take my hat off to MVOC for the great course, organization etc - all really very good indeed.

It was quite a trek to get down there but I was really delighted that I had made it. It was a great pleasure to be out in such a nice place with such classically fabulous English winter weather and I am very pleased that I did not miss it. I now need to resolve to keep this (and indeed me) going.

Update: I searched on terms like "Ashtead Epsom common dead trees" and it appears that I should not be concerned, but rather celebrating the biodiversity it brings. There's lots of interesting stuff online about the management of this area. I still do not (perhaps just because I haven't yet found the right document) understand why I was seeing so many dead trees - it seemed disproportionate compared with what you see elsewhere - but nowhere that I have seen are people talking about it as a problem so I assume that it's normal and that it's my expectations that are skewed. (It wouldn't be the first time.)

Update 2: oops the bracken is bad, it turns out, and I am not supposed to like it. It limits biodiversity and shades out other species. Or maybe it shades out other species and limits biodiversity. Or something. (Jabnaas.) I wish I had known that while I was enjoying charging around in it yesterday. Bad bracken, bad bad Vogel. Tsk.

Update 3: I was a bit miffed yesterday when another competitor, wearing a shirt which to me very clearly implied that she should have known better, told me the location of a control which I was approaching - number 7 on the map to which I linked earlier. This was a nice control, on a little hill by a path triangle, and I was maybe about 10m away from it when she came blasting out of it at impressive speed (she is, as they say, fit). I'd seen her on the way in and at other controls and knew she was good and probably right, and in any case I knew where I was going. I stood aside to let her through the gap we were approaching from opposite sides and as she went through she said "it's round to your left". I assume that this was meant kindly, in thanks for getting out of her way, and I certainly wouldn't have wanted to say anything negative to her, but to be honest with you I wish she'd left it or just smiled at me. I had, after all, managed the rest of the course and even the half kilometre or so into that control from its predecessor, so it's not like I was necessarily in desperate and immediate need of help. No doubt I do look like a clueless old twit when orienteering, but even so. The whole point, or a very large part of it as it seems to me, is to find these things yourself, and the buzz you get when you do so is considerable. Having someone else help you when you're hopelessly lost and a beginner is perhaps one thing, though really I still think my pride (such little as it is) would require me to try to sort it out for myself; but to be told when you are almost on top of the control just seems a little silly. Like I say I am sure it was meant nicely and at worst was thoughtless (in a fairly pure and non-pejorative sense), but I'd still rather find it, yea unto the last metre of confusion and bramble scratches and tripping over and what have you. I am not furious nor deeply offended over this, just slightly engrumped and a touch bemused. Hmmm.

Update 4: let's end on a more positive note. Last night I got out my Orienteering Box - where I somewhat-OCD-ishly (or is it OCAD-ishly? - arf! - falls off chair laughing at own very bad joke) keep all my maps and results. I updated the three events I've done during this "orienteering year" which I suppose is (or feels to me) roughly coterminous with the academic year. This means that each map is marked with the date (it's not always on the map or obvious) the course I did (ditto, ish) and where I came (my place out of n starters). I have also attached the printout you get at the event (with your individual timings and maybe where you were placed at the time of printing), plus the control descriptions if they aren't on the map. The fact is that I deeply love doing this. I now have a collection going right back to that first Southdowns 3-in-1 event in (I think) 2003: it's reasonably complete: in fact to be truthful I am pretty sure it is complete; I just didn't want to sound that nerdy. It's in chronological order, newest on top, so as you burrow down you are going back in time through my orienteering, ah, career. I just sit there sometimes and browse through them, reminiscing about good or bad runs or lovely places, tricky controls, maybe even things that went well. From looking at the map I even just sometimes sit and remember stuff like how it was finding the place at all, were David or Mum or kids or other family there, or how wet I got, or did Daisy come, or whether I had coffee with me or was there a cafe, or what. I'm reconstructing the whole thing like a little personalized documentary film for an audience of one. Is this very very sad? Tell you what, I don't really mind if it is: I just love it anyway. It's like a treasure box. Large grin. Vogel out.

Starting Orienteering at Forty-Something

Here is an article I wrote for my orienteering club's newsletter, Pacemaker. I am a member of the Hertfordshire Orienteering Club, also known as Happy Herts. Please apply all normal self-deprecatory caveats to this article, though I am also vaguely proud of it in a way despite its heavy weight in unhidden agenda and occasionally bad writing. It's also written for existing HH club members which means it uses some jargon and (to a lesser extent) feeble in-jokes: of these the only one of significance that might need clarifying is the reference to "the struggling and little-known Southdowns Orienteers", which is actually a massive, hugely successful and utterly brilliant club so my brother joining turned out to be a big boost to me. M45 and M50 are just age/sex classes and mean respectively male people 45-49 in the current calendar year and male people 50-54 in the ditto ditto ditto. This is what I was when I started (M45) and what I am now (M50). Now read on...

* * *

I discovered orienteering rather late in life. Well, discovered is a silly word for this context: it was there all the time, and all I had to do was stumble over it, or find it on a map, or some combination of the two. By the time you read this I’ll be an M50 and that’ll only be my fourth year in the sport: I do rather wish I’d started ten or twenty or plenty more years ago, but hey, I didn’t, so I’m making the best of it from M45 on.

I’m not exactly a sporting hero: far from it. I come from a seriously non-sporty background, but I love the outdoors and maps, and was taught to map-read, perhaps quite well, by the Air Training Corps when I was a teenager. Had the Russian hordes ever come screaming across the Elbe there’s no doubt that my ability to find the public footpaths around Goblin Combe would have been a serious setback to their plans. Apart from occasional country walks, the only regular exercise I usually get is swimming. At school I was a total games refusenik: I deeply hated the cricket and rugby sessions at the school field. Indeed, the only times I enjoyed school sports were the games lessons from which we escaped: due to seriously negligent supervision it was delightfully easy to sidle off the edge of the field and straight into a little wood, where we’d happily go exploring. Maybe this was fate trying to drop me a hint about approaches to sport but if so I was, sadly, too dim to notice it for about thirty years

Certainly, my school wasn’t, in those days, about to put a lot of effort into sports development for no-hopers like me. Sport was like music or art – either you could already do it, or you couldn’t: end of story. Except it’s not quite the end of the story. Fast forward a couple of decades and suddenly I’m fending off a scary illness, the sort of thing that can really ruin your weekend in a rather permanent sense. Then exactly one year later a dear friend, of much the same age, simply dropped dead one day. This sort of thing concentrates the mind wonderfully and I started thinking about sports and fitness again. I can’t remember when I first became aware of orienteering: maybe it just sidled into my consciousness while I wasn’t paying attention. Looking back over ancient emails I find that it was 1997 when I first started enquiring – rather half-heartedly I fear – about orienteering. Now, writing in 2006, I’m hugely annoyed that I didn’t follow up on it then: my feeble excuses for not doing so would require another ten pages so we’ll skip them but suffice it to say that my very hazy picture of orienteering, and what I might get out of it, wasn’t enough to overcome my strong inhibitions about sport, about joining an organization, about doing something new, about being useless at it, about always coming last; you name it.

This state of affairs continued for some years, with orienteering – whatever it was – somewhere vaguely around as a half-understood idea of something I might want to try one day, if I ever dared. I think this would have continued indefinitely had help not appeared from an unexpected direction: my brother David suddenly (as far as I knew) took up orienteering, joining his local club, which just happened to be the struggling and little-known Southdowns Orienteers. David had inherited all the courage and decisiveness, along with the brains, so he didn’t spend years vacillating about whether or not to do the sport: he just got on and did it. This really changed things for me as I now had a constant stream of information and experiences to share in. This was just what I needed: I’d previously failed to identify anyone I knew who was into it, and this I found crucial. I couldn’t help but notice that SO had a pretty full programme of events, as my brother kindly invited me to many of them, and eventually the day came when I made it to one.

It was a difficult beginning: unfortunately David was badly delayed en route so the planned gentle introduction didn’t really happen and instead I found myself sitting alone in my car feeling seriously cheesed off, wondering whether to give up and go home, feeling like I couldn’t just hang around for another hour doing nothing, and so on. (I should add that this was Southdowns’ rather wonderful 3-in-1 event, which runs for a decently long day, and was therefore a very useful one at which to dither about whether or not to participate.)

In the end I gathered together my last few scraps of courage and went up to some tent or other and said, “er – what do I do?”. I do realize that a huge majority of people reading this will be going, “uh? What’s brave about that?” but believe me, there will be a few others who do recognize the feeling. For a certain personality type, an event like this can seem a pretty scary environment. You don’t know anyone, you don’t know what to do, you’re worried about making a fool of yourself in 93 different ways and your fight-or-flight reaction is kicking in. And since it would seem impolite to thump someone, you’re left with flight: your sofa and telly suddenly start to exert a strange magnetism. Maybe you aren’t meant to be here at all, among these proper sporty people: you are simply too old or fat or foolish or whatever, and you’d be better off at home. I should not, by the way, be portraying myself as a completely non-coping Billy No-Mates, lacking in all competence and confidence. I operate just fine in my native leisure-habitat, orchestral music – it’s really only in the area of sport that I’ve felt always quite such a fish out of water.

Anyway, I did manage, despite the terrible chorus of nagging doubts, to go and ask for help and, as you’d expect, received it in abundance. I still felt pretty clueless, and I’m pretty sure that I carried out the classic Wrong Queue Manoeuvre at least once, but somehow or other I eventually found myself in possession of the right bits of high and low technology, and ready to start. Even starting was a bit of a bafflement, but the nice SO people running it recognized my advanced state of helplessness and got me started in a kind, efficient and painless way, and even pointing in roughly the right direction, as I had by now, in my fright, pretty much forgotten how to use a compass. I even managed to not freak out completely when I realized that I was going to have to copy all those lines and circles and stuff from that map to this one, and I may even have put some of them in the right places, yes indeedy.

And I was off. At that point – and I don’t want to overdo the sentiment here and make Pacemaker’s readers feel too nauseated – my life changed. I suddenly realized that this was the sport I wanted to do, and that I actually could do it. It’s not that I was so great at it, I hasten to add, but rather that it was so great for me. I am not likely, ever, to wildly impress anyone with my results but that wasn’t, and still isn’t, the point – I was just enjoying being out in the woods with a map and trying to figure out where to go next. One of my concerns about orienteering had always been that it would somehow or other feel like a race, an experience from my schooldays that I’d be reluctant to revisit. Until I actually tried the sport I had no idea how it actually felt, and how inclusive it is of all speeds and skill levels. All my worries about this kind of stuff pretty much vanished during that first run. By the time my brother arrived I was utterly blissful, having finished my first course (yellow, since you ask) and was thinking about my next one. I was keen, you see, to go out and do another because even on that initial try I had discovered how easy it is to overshoot a control, even a nice easy one, and be forced to relocate! Whoops. I thought I might get it right a bit more the next time round: indeed I still live in hope of getting it right a bit more, one day.

From there, it was all as it were downhill. I went on attending occasional Southdowns events and then realised that I would need sooner or later to join a club nearer home. As an aside, I should maybe add that one of the things that I found confusing as a would-be orienteer was the role that clubs play. Like, I suspect, many people in my situation, I did not understand that the club in effect is the event: I had maybe thought it was somehow possible to just go and “do orienteering” in the same way that you can just go for a walk. What I hadn’t grasped is how very thoroughly an orienteering event needs to be set up and managed, and what structures need to be behind this. Anyway, I did join a club, but it didn’t really work out (mea culpa), and after a year I was again clubless until I came across Happy Herts. My first nervous email enquiry to the club was again a bit of a make-or-break moment but I am delighted to report that it was met with a charming and encouraging reply and this has been the pattern for my dealings with this club henceforth. I did my first Happy Herts event at Chipperfield Common in May 2005 and have not, metaphorically anyway, looked back since.

When I think about the last few years it really does give me a great deal of pleasure that at my age it is possible to find a new (to me) sport which is such an incredibly good fit with what I needed. I do know that it’s unlikely that I’m going to burn my way up through the rankings and make the national team lose sleep, but the great thing is that I just don’t mind. The level at which I compete with myself is that I would, in a perfect world, quite like to not be last, and anything else is pretty much a bonus. Having said that, I do remember coming back from a WAOC event at Ampthill and saying “I have had a fantastic run, that was a lovely park, great fun etc etc” and guess what, I did indeed come last in that one. The nice thing is that this didn’t make me feel bad, and didn’t have the power to detract from the great day that I had already had: this is a characteristic of orienteering which is almost magical to me. As a general rule I lurk somewhere around the bottom quarter of most events and I am pretty happy there. I did manage last year to come first on a Light Green course in Norfolk but this seems to have been a bizarre fluke, or perhaps just straightforward computer error, and any tendency to move in this direction has in any case been thoroughly countered by my deciding to concentrate on Green as a rule. I still make horrendous, jaw-dropping mistakes and it is not unknown for me to take more time over one control than the fastest competitor has over the entire course. I remember one event last year at which I got so unbelievably lost that eventually, having nearly given up, I was very surprised indeed to almost stumble over the start, which did not seem to be where I had left it. As you might imagine, though, this did get me relocated rather well!

One thing I have had to learn is to tolerate mistakes and to cope with them productively rather than just getting angry and frustrated, which unfortunately is my natural tendency. Since that first event I have never yet given up and walked away, although it has been pretty close once or twice – when it’s all going wrong I do sometimes have to make a conscious effort to fight off a depressed and defeatist attitude that can try to flood in but, you know what, I have always been glad, ten minutes later, that I managed to fight it off. The fact that I’ve kept on coming to events and struggling with my, er, abilities has had a great deal to do with the kindness and encouragement that I have had from HH officers and members. Whether this is deliberate development policy or just that people are naturally nice I am not sure, but it’s working fine anyway: a club’s behaviour towards strangers, visitors and wandering incompetents like myself is the best possible advert for it. People who are already at home in an environment, be it a sporting event or an orchestral rehearsal, may not realise how confidence-sapping it can be to be a newbie/visitor type. Encouraging the non-gung-ho, and paying attention to the unsporty wimps as well as the superheroes is a strategy which I believe does pay dividends. I’ve also had superb support from all my family, who have been incredibly kind and encouraging and even – to my delight – come along sometimes, despite having had to listen to all my panics and crises as well as my wildly exciting control-by-control accounts of, ahem, dramatic woodland action, illustrated by much map-brandishing.

Other things I would regard as milestones in my orienteering “career” thus far are buying my own dibber (thanks Adam and Miranda!) and eventually getting round to having some proper shoes: this latter after an inordinately wet and muddy (but fun) Saxons event at Eridge which I swore was the last ever I would do in trainers, having spent a somewhat difficult morning with remarkably little control over where my feet were going. (Actually, I could write a whole separate article about the phenomenon of Equipment Buildup.) Another way I have branched out recently is trying a couple of Night Orienteering events, starting with our own one at Whippendell Wood: I had previously dismissed the very idea of night-O as being only for diehard nutters, but I had such a completely fantastic time that I have been forced to reassess them, or perhaps myself. Even though I just plod round very safely on a short course, I love it, and I find there’s something very healthy about being forced to rethink things at an age when you perhaps thought all was set and solid. I’ve now also helped on an event, in a very minor capacity, and it was such fun that I have volunteered again for a couple more. Just over a week ago I ran in LOK’s splendid Boxing Day event, a score event and mass start (two things that not long ago I would have done anything to avoid) and was more than rewarded for my dire navigation round the depths of Trent Park with mulled wine.

I don’t really have any serious ambitions about orienteering, just to go on enjoying it. Sure, I would like to get a bit fitter and faster (yes, and thinner) and improve my confidence and competence, but to be honest even if I do not accomplish these goals I will go on having a perfectly good time anyway. This is one of the things I find hard to explain to friends and colleagues who know me only as a fat slob: it’s a sport which I enjoy just fine in my own way and I do not need to aspire to Olympic levels of skill and fitness to do so. Another nice thing, and I guess it is realistic to acknowledge that there may perhaps be an important development issue hovering somewhere here, is that through me, quite a few other people have now tried orienteering who might not have – both family members and friends. I am aware that, in development terms, as a nearly-fifty-year-old bloke I don’t exactly represent exciting new blood, but my kids and my nieces and nephews and a little network of friends and colleagues may be a bit more significant in the longer term. I often find myself proselytising about the sport and I am amazed both by how little most people know about it, and how interested they often are in the idea when they start to understand what I am rambling on about.

If, in conclusion, I can just preach for a minute: I know it’s unlikely but if someone is by any chance reading this who feels a bit like I did and who has not yet tried orienteering, please please come along and give it a go. It took me some effort to get over the initial hump of getting started but I am so pleased that I did. Seriously, I very nearly didn’t do orienteering because it “wasn’t for me” but I now see that really there’s very, very few people whom it’s “not for”. Because it is an unusual, nay unique, sport you have to experience it to understand what goes on and how it feels – if you are wondering, please take it from me and give it a try: you won’t regret it.