Just finished the Cambridge vs Oxford Varsity match in the amazing Studlands Dunes. Tricky navigation in the dunes and lots of heather and gorse
World Youth Championships 2025 in Czech Republic
Save the date!
2025 will take place July 2 to 6 in Marinsk Lzn, Czech Republic. The progam features two Classic races on 3.5 MHz and 144 MHz and a Sprint race on 3.5 MHz. There is attractive terrain with with many paths and tracks. In 2015, European ARDF Championships took place in that venue.
Sport of Orienteering Taking Off in TaiwanTaiwanPlus News
I think this might be one of the coolest thing I have ever made...
It is a of in for visually impaired, designed as a game. Which one can attach on forearm and rotate.
Sometimes, there are brambles, because while this is the best area available, we have actually nothing I would call 'a good area'. Anyway, running through this in the pitch dark should slow the fast ones down, while it doesn't really affect the slower ones. Appropriately, this is in a shallow depression.
Next, some boulders are just super cute and put there by the universe in order that they can be control sites. Tidy.
GoGain: Orienteering for the 21st Century winter night league race tonight on club's most technical area. I've spent the afternoon hanging and checking, and here's some highlights.
First, a group of 3 are ready to be deployed in the north part of the forest. They're very excited.
This weekend was probably the coldest pair of events I've done. Great turnouts though even at yesterday's family-friendly park event. Today's national event at Epping Forest was very chilly, but that makes it nice and crisp underfoot.
My first trace in 2025, as training !
Are there fans here is looking for peers!
ADORO IL GENIO - ORIENTEERING
Stella Quale stella
This weekend the plan was a two-part night and day event at Temple Newsam near Leeds (150 miles away). Last night's event was not too cold, but very brambly. On the way there, there was a BBC report with severe do-not-travel weather warnings with specific mention of Leeds. So I wasn't too surprised that the main event this morning was cancelled, but peeved that I'd bought a 70 warm running top specifically because they said earlier it was going ahead, but cagoules were mandatory.
Happy New Year ! My personal app project has suffered delays (currently having fever and some kind of flu). But I am very close on shipping next big update push notifications! Stay tuned...
FINISH. The most welcome word after a 1-hour gruelling race through lots of brambles and mud.
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Oh wow, new headcanon: the Kessel Run was a particularly tricky course and Han Solo was boasting about his navigation skills.
race day. Reported back to family after something like "did a 6.2km course in only 7.1km" and then realised how weird that must sound in any other sport, or to anyone who doesn't themselves do it.
A little winter on this
Spot the one idiot who went straight through the thick gorse from 21 to 22
Virtual advent calendar!
'Find North' free challenge game for Apple Watch
You could still put decorations on a tree in the woods (picture is Christmas tree control st an event)
Busy weekend as an owner of a whose wife is away. Worked late into the night migrating customer-facing mail server to from FFS on LVM. This morning had to nip to office to check that the plumbing I did yesterday hadn't flooded the place overnight. Then off to a to relax after going to my old college for breakfast. Unfortunately tomorrow is cancelled because of , so perhaps I'll try to get to grips with
My first attempt at being the organiser for an event today. I've course planned many times before, but need to have organised an event in order to become an accredited controller. The weather was good, the toilets arrived on time, no-one got lost or injured and all my volunteers were great. Best of all, 160+ people enjoyed themselves even if the nettles were a bit aggressive
Rckschau ARDF-EM 2024
Offene Fragerunde
Do, 14.11.24 19.00 Uhr
Zum dritten Mal in vier Jahren sprang kurzfristig als Ausrichter der regionalen Meisterschaft im ein. Team Leader Alex teilt seine Perspektive auf die Wettbewerbe in Primorsko.
Alle Interessierten sind lich eingeladen.
Survived the regular post-orienteering sock clean. I haven't decided if it's better to do pre- or post-wash.
Anecdotally, there seem to be fewer seeds and stickers in them since I started wearing running gaiters.
Friday afternoon is a good time to leave work and go in the woods.
A short, simple course but the map (deliberately) did not have the trails marked, which made it surprisingly more challenging.
My dead-reckoning is still okay. But my distance estimation is still garbage. Any time I tried to do anything slightly more sophisticated than straight-line dead-reckoning, I ended up getting myself into a stupid pickle.
Still. Beautiful autumn day, so who cares.
A delightful, albeit exhausting, day spent marking control sites for the orienteering event I am planning on the Quantocks at the end of the month
But today!!
Terrible photo of "neat the goat" checkpoint
I thought that city sprints are always easy to navigate...
Until today
There is an open air museum of the local villages and life at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Location full of curvy paths with plenty of crossings wooden buildings small fields, yards, fences enhanced with artificial barriers turned out to be pretty insane but super cool.
I managed to get lost right after the start
Anyway all checkpoints punched and I still finish in time limit so success :D
A good thing I forgot to bring my gps watch. The objective track might have been even less flattering than my memory of it.
But it was a great race. There really are some nice runnable forests left in our area.
Some Swedes had joined us, too.
One kind of achievement unlock: A short article about Control in our Finnish magazine Suunnistaja
In the absence of any events in East Anglia this weekend, I went to the Bug Hunter Waters . Just running round a path still seems a bit pointless to me and I feel more comfortable with a map in one hand and a compass in the other. A tarmac path (and a bit of road) meant fast times, but still no PB with a time of 22:12 (I was a younger man then!). On the upside this was the first that actually came up as the full 5k on my Garmin, so I got a new 5k record on that.
And this was the start of the "D-Cup" yesterday, a mixed relay in teams of 5, with the legs between 1.7 and 4.6 kms. If the weather had been better, Festung Knigstein castle would be in the background.
Just back from a memorable, well-organized and fun weekend in and near including my first indoor o competition, which turned out more challenging than expected (took me about an hour!) and was even seasoned with typically saxonian tongue-in-cheek humour on some passages.