I think I’m almost back to being able to run now, although I have dropped in fitness slightly. Here’s my race plan for Spring 2012:

• Tue 10 Jan – SLOW Marylebone Street-O
• Sun 15 Jan – MVOC Holmbush
• Sat 21 Jan – EUOC Edinburgh City Race
• Sun 22 Jan – EUOC Holyrood Park
• Thu 26 Jan – CHIG Victoria Park Street-O
• Sun 29 Jan – BKO Concorde Chase?
• Thu 2 Feb – SAX Sevenoaks Street-O
• Sun 5 Feb – DFOK Chelwood
• Tue 7 Feb – SLOW Brockley Street-O
• Sun 12 Feb – CHIG Claybury
• Sun 19 Feb – CompassSport Cup Qualifier
• Sun 26 Feb – SLOW Wimbledon
• Sat 3 Mar – St Andrews Scottish Sprint Champs
• Sun 4 Mar – St Andrews City Race
• Sat 10 Mar – Varsity Match at Burnham Beeches
• Sun 11 Mar – Varsity Match Relays
• Tue 13 Mar – SLOW Street-O
• Sun 18 Mar – DFOK Mereworth?
• Wed 21 Mar – Possible Munro trip
• Sat 24 Mar – British Sprint Championships, York
• Sun 25 Mar – British Middle Championships, near York
• Sun 1 Apr – Waltham Half Marathon
• W/e 6-9 Apr – JK, Scotland
• Tue 10 Apr – SLOW Street-O
• Sun 15 Apr –
• Sat 21 Apr – JOK Chasing Sprint
• Sun 22 Apr – Back to London to help at the London Marathon?
• Sun 29 Apr –
• Sat 5 May – British Championships, Lake District
• Sun 6 May – British Relays, Lake District

Normally at this time of year I plan out the events I’m thinking of going to, as the UK season gets going again after the summer recess, and “terrain” events start to appear in SE England, following the summer’s Park-O and urban race action (as an aside, my 2004 list contains entirely forest events, how times have changed.) I’ve marked on as NEW the areas I haven’t run on before. My attendance at most of the below depends on weather and hangover, obviously.

• Every Saturday morning that I have free – Hackney Marshes parkrun 5K
• Every Tuesday evening that I have free – City Runners 6.5K club run
• Sun 18 Sept – HAVOC, Weald Country Park – if the weather’s nice (it doesn’t look like it!) Yes
• Sat 24 Sept – DFOK, Lloyd Park NEW No
• Sun 25 Sept – BKO, Hawley Common Yes
• Thu 29 Sept pm – CHIG Street-O, Loughton NEW Yes
• Sat 1 Oct – CHIG, Latton Woods NEW No
• Sun 2 Oct – ?
• Sun 9 Oct – SLOW Trail Challenge Half-Marathon, Richmond Park Yes
• Tue 11 Oct – SLOW Street-O, Putney Yes
• Sun 16 Oct – CompassSport Cup Final, Longshaw NEW Yes
• Sat 22 Oct – CUOC City Race, Cambridge Yes
• Sun 23 Oct – WAOC, Rowney Warren NEW Yes
• Thu 27 Oct – HH Street-O, Winchmore Hill NEW Yes
• Sat 29 + Sun 30 Oct – The OMM NEW Yes
• Sat 5 Nov – OUOC Sprint-O, Shotover? No
• Sun 6 Nov – SOC November Classic? No
• Tue 8 Nov – SLOW Street-O, Aldgate NEW
• Sat 12 + Sun 13 Nov – Venice
• Sun 20 Nov – CHIG, Epping North
• Thu 24 Nov – LOK West End
• Sun 27 Nov – SLOW OK Nuts Trophy, Hankley Common
• Sun 4 Dec – GO, Hascombe NEW
• Sat 10 Dec – Possible date for super-secret race
• Sun 11 Dec – SAX Hindleap Warren
• Tue 13 Dec pm – SLOW Street-O, Clapham NEW
• Sun 18 Dec – TVOC Wendover Woods (nice try MV, but I’m not going anywhere near Ranmore again)
• Tue 20 Dec – SO Brighton City Race
• Wed 28 Dec for a week – JOK New Year, Fort Augustus

I was at The Outdoors Show yesterday, which is taking place over the next few days at the gigantic ExCeL exhibition centre in East London, at the same time as The Bike Show and The Boat Show (the latter, incidentally, being at least three times as large as the others put together.)

British Orienteering are taking part, they are running a “Maze-O” challenge which involves running a short “butterfly”-style gaffled course – distance 0.1km according to the control descriptions! – in a “maze” made out of crowd barriers. The controls have small flags and the standard “slimline” control boxes. I was given a new SI card (Type 8?) to race with, but was a little surprised to find the controls were slow to punch – taking at least a second and occasionally two seconds to bleep.

Despite this delay I managed to do the course in 1:09. The day’s winner, according to the leaderboard, was Ben Stevens, who ran the course in 1:08. This is probably the closest I’ll ever come to beating a former Varsity Match Champion. It probably helped that I was coincidently wearing running shoes. Pete H, who ran a different gaffle at the same time as me (and inadvertently blocked a couple of controls) managed 1:16 in his work brogues.

It being Thursday evening, and the location of the course being somewhat tucked away behind the Bushcraft stand, meant the Maze-O was rather quiet when we visited. However it should be popular with the weekend crowds as long as they can find it – if you coming to The Outdoors Show don’t miss it! You also get map-on-a-postcard to keep, as pioneered at the Trafalgar Square orienteering “art event”.

If you don’t want to know the course in advance, look away now:

Top marks to British Orienteering for organising the event and producing some excellent, professional looking event banners, flag, branded polo-shirts for the marshals, and the map postcards and associated literature. Thanks also to the club volunteers that are manning the stand over the next few days. One thing missing was details of forthcoming local events, but hopefully the maze event will get a few new people to look up the sport and then come along to some club events such as SLOW’s Street-O series.

My strategy was hampered by having a severe hangover from the night before, so I didn’t make it out of the house until 3pm (the game ran from 8pm-8pm) and was pretty dehydrated. It was also a very warm day – and, to make things worse, the phoneboxes themselves acted as heat reservoirs. One City leg went via a supermarket and its chiller cabinet…

In my first session I essentially ran all of the six possible legs between the four phoneboxes, and several extra legs between the two closest ones. In the later session (after my jog around the City) I again aimed to run all six possible legs, getting the fastest split bonus for each, but realised near the end I wasn’t going to make it to/from the far one, so repeated some of the smaller legs. The many people enjoying a cool drink in the garden outside the Royal Inn on the Park, immediately opposite the most southerly phonebox, must have wondered what was going on.

The map below shows the routes I took between the four phoneboxes, marked with green rectangles:

In total I ran around 16.5km (10 miles) in the E9 postcode. The phonebox dialing process meant I essentially had a two minute rest after every leg – the longest of which I did in just under 10 minutes. My shortest leg was 1m 26 – I tried this one again and again but my times kept getting worse with each attempt!

I ran into the last box about 10 seconds before the game closed – I had to push it for this final leg and got bonus points for running this leg in the fastest time. (In fact I think I picked up all six of the fastest leg bonuses during the day.) The Nike team were filming this last phonebox and interviewed me afterwards.

I was extremely unlucky not to win – notice how close I finished to the eventual winner in the leaderboard below. However I did get 110 of my points in the dying seconds of the race. The guy who finished third appeared at the same phonebox a minute later (i.e. too late) and, had our arrivals been reversed, he would have finished in front of me.

Although I didn’t win, a friend won not once but twice in a different postcode, so I’ll at least get to see what prizes I missed out on!

There were some “bugs” in the game – certain phoneboxes in the City had quite unresponsive keypads which made it difficult to clock in at the end of the leg. Quite often, the automated service appeared overloaded and stopped talking half-way through, leaving you wondering whether the run had been correctly logged or not. The game leaderboard was updated in real time, which was impressive, but it was written in Flash so I was unable to see how I was doing on my iPhone. (A dedicated iPhone app would have been cool.) There luckily weren’t many players in my postcode, but many more would have clogged up the system – it took 1-2 minutes in the phonebox to stop and start each leg. Some clarity on how many points were on offer would have helped me refine the strategy, although I suppose part of the challenge is figuring it out for yourself. A couple of “test” 3am short legs I tried on my way back from the pub didn’t count for “early” bonus points, although game messages suggested they would at that time. Finally the maps weren’t too great – some phoneboxes were in the wrong place. I had however done a bit of online research first though and used a marked orienteering map instead, so this didn’t affect me. A friend of mine greatly benefited from one phonebox not being themed – he was the only person in that postcode who realised it was still a game phonebox and so completely destroyed the opposition.

It must have been a nightmare to organise, with nearly 150 postboxes scattered across many miles that needed theming, maps distributed to them, checking and fixing them – not to mention answering the many and varied questions and complaints on the Facebook event page, and writing the software to handle the automatic logging, updating and cheat detection.

Overall I really enjoyed the style of the event. There was definitely something of “The Matrix” about sprinting through the grimy streets to a phonebox (themed in green and black, too!) and breathlessly grabbing the receiver in front of surprised bystanders. All things considering, it was a nice “Real Life 2.0″ take on the street orienteering theme. Not sure we’ll see this repeated – Nike generally organise a “concept” event in London yearly but each year’s idea changes dramatically to keep things fresh – however I would certainly love to try it again.

• 21 November – Sheffield Chasing Sprint – forecast not looking great, but should be a great set of two back-to-back races. Final race in the Nopesport Urban League series.
• 22 November – Epping Forest East – one of my favourite areas, and cycling distance from home.
• 28 November – Finsbury parkrun
• 29 November – OK Nuts Trophy – my club’s biggest terrain event of the year.
• 3 December – Primrose Hill Street-O
• 5 December – Finsbury parkrun
• 6 December – HAVOC Langdon Hills local
• 8 December – Putney Street-O
• 12 December – Finsbury parkrun, or HH Verulamium local
• 13 December – Cannock Chase national or QECP regional
• 19 December – Finsbury parkrun
• 25/26 December – Edinburgh parkrun?
• 27 December – ELO Festive Frolic?
• 1 January – JOK training event in the Highlands?
• 9 January – Finsbury parkrun
• 10 January – Hemsted local
• 12 January – Kingston Street-O
• 16 January – Finsbury parkrun
• 17 January – Sheepleas & Effingham regional
• 23 January – Finsbury parkrun
• 24 January – CSC Qualifiers, Leith Hill?
• 30 January – Edinburgh City Race
• 31 January – JOK Chasing Sprint, Edinburgh
]]> http://blog.oobrien.com/2009/11/20/winter-200910-orienteering/feed/ 0 http://blog.oobrien.com/2009/11/10/carcassonne/ http://blog.oobrien.com/2009/11/10/carcassonne/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:36:41 +0000 Oliver O`Brien http://blog.oobrien.com/?p=1645

I wouldn’t normally fly several hundred miles just to go to an orienteering event – but then, an orienteering event in the Cité de Carcassonne in southern France was never going to to be just another orienteering event.

Actually there were three events in the one weekend, a middle race on the Saturday afternoon, the Carcassonne sprint in the evening, and a long race on the Sunday morning, which made it an even better reason to travel down.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the weekend was that I enjoyed the other two events as much as the “headline” sprint in Carcassonne – indeed, I thought the middle race, held near Montlaur, around 20km away, was on some of the most amazing terrain I have ever run on in fourteen years of competing. It is difficult to describe – imagine tinder-dry bare earth ridges and gullies – stable enough to run on, but often too steep to run off the edge of. The steepest edges, typically those steeper than 45 degrees, were marked with “impassable cliff” lines on the map. There were two pockets of this intense terrain separated by a run through some of the very many vineyards in the area. The bottoms of the gullies tended to be guarded by very prickly bushes, so staying high was the less painful, if more technical, option. I was pleased with my time of just over an hour for the 3.8km course – getting up any speed was difficult in the intensely technical and physical terrain. Orienteering doesn’t really get any technical – or enjoyable – than this. Multiple world-champion and local boy Thierry was also running my course – and finished in exactly half my time – amazing!



I was impressed with the facilities that COORS (the organising club) had laid on for a relatively small-scale event – with commentary, traders and a bar. If only the French had heard of portaloos, it would be a perfectly organised event!

Then in the evening, it was time for the sprint race through the medieval cobbled streets of old Carcassonne. The walled city is quite small but is on a steep hill and has two complete sets of walls, with various doorways, passages and other intricate map detail. Our start times were at nearly 11pm, the reason for the timing of the event became clear the following day – the streets are crammed with tourists during the day. However, the late Saturday night start meant we had to decide if and when to eat and drink. Running on a full stomach and after a few glasses of wine might not be the best idea, but you can’t really go to France and not enjoy the local specialities…

The race itself was short and intense, with 17 controls and 190m of climb in the 2.7km course. The route led in and out of the city several times, including a steep climb up a grassbank, and running through the (dry!) moat to the finish line. The walls are floodlit at night, but there were plenty of dark passages and alleyways where headtorches were needed. I finished 9 minutes down on Thierry, perhaps the only time I’ll be so close to the world’s top orienteer, although to be fair he did get around in 20 minutes.



Unfortunately Jayne twisted her ankle, falling in one of the dark pits on the course, so it looked like getting back to our B&B (in the countryside overlooking the city) could be a challenge, until we managed to persuade an organiser to give us a lift back. By now, the big meal, wine, two races, and 4am start were starting to catch up with me…



Finally, on Sunday, was the long race, back in Montlaur. The distance was less than 10km (with 400m of climb), but I was bracing myself for an epic, and so it proved to be. I made it back in 110 minutes, having spent 15 minutes on the wrong hillside about half-way around the course – one of those awful mistakes compounded by various features apparently fitting to the map. Although the landscape was largely open, it was full of vineyards, a blaze of yellows and reds, but tricky (and painful) to get around. There were some pockets of extreme complexity on the map, and also some epic legs – No. 2 to 3 was 2.2km across the valley and up a hill. Still, a rewarding challenge. Thierry again impressed by running at roughly double my speed.

After the race was the prize ceremony – there were a few other Brits there and impressively, quite of them got prizes – it says a lot about the area that the winners got a bottle of wine and a bottle of pressed apple juice, and the runners up got the bottle of wine.

Then it was time to head back to the airport and back home – but not before a combination of Google Maps missing a major bypass, and the reluctance of the French to sign destinations via their motorway network, on their signs, meant we took an unexpected detour through various villages on our way to Toulouse.

A top quality orienteering weekend.



]]> http://blog.oobrien.com/2009/11/10/carcassonne/feed/ 2 http://blog.oobrien.com/2009/10/19/5-races-in-9-days/ http://blog.oobrien.com/2009/10/19/5-races-in-9-days/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:18:28 +0000 Oliver O`Brien http://blog.oobrien.com/?p=1621

I’ve been doing quite a lot of orienteering/running recently:

• 10 October – Richmond Park second anniversary parkrun
  The first time I’ve done a parkrun not at Bushy Park – Richmond is certainly hillier.
• 11 October – 1st Chester City Race
  Quite a way from London, but I enjoyed running around the ancient streets and The Rows. The pics above and below are from the race route.
• 13 October – Chelsea/Battersea Street-O
  A world away from my Bow Street-O last month, and SLOW’s biggest ever Street-O attendance.
• 17 October – 1st Cambridge City Race
  Delayed from February, finally a chance to run around and through various Cambridge colleges.
• 18 October – CompassSport Cup Final at Fineshade, Peterborough
  A smaller than normal SLOW team came 6th in this brambly area.



]]> http://blog.oobrien.com/2009/10/19/5-races-in-9-days/feed/ 0 http://blog.oobrien.com/2009/07/05/dunwich-dynamo-2009/ http://blog.oobrien.com/2009/07/05/dunwich-dynamo-2009/#comments Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:40:27 +0000 Oliver O`Brien http://blog.oobrien.com/?p=1177
This is an annual 180km self-supported ride from London Fields in Hackney, to the beach at Dunwich in Suffolk. As it’s a free turn-up-and-go event, it’s all quite informal – people just turn up at the Pub in the Park and then start to head off. The catch – it’s a night time event. I started at 8:50pm…

I was riding with Jenn and Michal, also trying out various new accessories I’d bought in the day – a fell-runners’ bag, saddle bag, frame bag, padded shorts, a proper cycling top, cleats and a couple of bike lights (which proved to be woefully underpowered.)

There most have been close to a thousand cyclists in this year’s Dynamo, taking advantage of the calm, dry and clear weather, although it got surprisingly chilly quite quickly.

The pace was far faster than I was expecting – once we had passed the highest point of the route (Epping Forest) the pace really went up and we pushed hard until the food stop at 100km, arriving at around 1:15am. The pace then on was also quite fast, at one point a wonderful 10km with the Dulwich cycling club peloton. Then, as dawn broke properly, we started to tire a lot.



We finally made it to Dunwich at 6:10am (ride time 7h 23, + 2 hours of breaks) where the cooked breakfast in the cafe was very welcome – the rain shower, the first of the night, wasn’t. We took a risk, cycling 8km through the second rain shower to get the first local train of the day. 20 others had the same idea, but the guard let us on, and three hours later we were back in London. An extra 50km to cycle to Ipswich for the main-line trains was thanfully avoided.

The high point was tearing down the Suffolk Coastal District part in the back of a fast-moving (~35km/h) peloton. The low point was definitely waiting for the rain to clear at Dunwich and dreading the cycle to Ipswich. The most memorable sight was seeing a long stream of flashing red lights in front of me, sweeping around invisible corners.

Despite the pain near the end, it was great fun and good training for when I set off to cycle the length of Britain (Thurso to London) in a couple of weeks time.

We spent a couple of hours taking breaks, including nearly an hour at the 100km feed station. The first 100km was virtually without stopping, but the latter section had more frequent stops, as Michal’s bike started to make strange mechanical sounds and so he limited his speed. We also took a couple of wrong turns later on, although we found straightforward shortcuts back onto the main route. At one point, Michal and I thought Jenn, who was generally the fastest of us three and was ahead most of the time, had missed a sharp turn and headed off to the coast 10km south of Dunwich. However, after a bit of worrying, it turned out she had made the turn after all.

On the back of a disturbed night the night before, and obviously no sleep at all last night, I don’t feel too bad right now. However I did nod off numerous times on the packed train back from Ipswich to London.

Drinks-wise I got through 1 litre of Lucozade and around 1 litre of water, + coffee at the feed station and at the cafe at the end. Food I ate included some chewy sweets, three Power-bars and few Clif Shot Bloks. At the half-way point a had a pasta salad plate and a couple of bananas. At the end I had an SIS sport bar and a Clif bar, as well as the cooked breakfast. As a consequence I didn’t bonk at all and feel fine now!



]]> http://blog.oobrien.com/2009/07/05/dunwich-dynamo-2009/feed/ 2 http://blog.oobrien.com/2009/06/03/battersea-park-race/ http://blog.oobrien.com/2009/06/03/battersea-park-race/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:13:05 +0000 Oliver O`Brien http://blog.oobrien.com/?p=924 The second of this summer’s SLOW Park Race Series was last night, at a rather special venue – Battersea Park in south-west London. The last time this area was used for orienteering was at the Sprint finals of the Orienteering World Cup competition in 2005 – if it was good enough for the world’s elite, it was good enough for me!

The park is quite ornamental and I was expecting a run high on dramatic views but short on technicality, however Abi and Matthias planned a excellent Long course which got steadily more technical towards the end – I started making quite a few mistakes after the half-way point, and saw other people making bigger ones. My worst was not reading the control description at No. 14 (it is a sprint area after all!) and going round the Japanese Pagoda rather than up onto its plinth. The hot and humid weather probably didn’t help with the concentration either. There was some excellent long legs allowing for quite a bit of route choice – there’s too much “stuff” in the park to allow running along the leg line, unlike at Clapham Common a couple of weeks ago.

There was a great turnout – over 70 people started the Long course which is definitely a record for this series.

Looking forward to the next one in two weeks in Ravenscourt Park and next week’s Mobile-O (an orienteering race guided by mobile-phone!)

Here’s the map – pic snapped on my iPhone, hence the rubbish quality:


]]> http://blog.oobrien.com/2009/06/03/battersea-park-race/feed/ 0 http://blog.oobrien.com/2008/04/09/lambeth-street-o/ http://blog.oobrien.com/2008/04/09/lambeth-street-o/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:39:07 +0000 Oliver O`Brien http://www.oobrien.com/yepsport/archives/2008/04/09/lambeth-street-o.php Here’s my route around Lambeth last night, during the final SLOW Street-O of the series this year. The race was during daylight hours – which was good, as some of the areas around the bottom of the map are not places I would want to be in after dark.

Highlights included the Oxo Tower and the Oval cricket ground – which I failed to recognise on the map until I got there.

I ran 11.5km, in 60:14 – so incurring a 10 point penalty for being late back. I finished fourth, my best result of the series, although Nick and Paul weren’t running, and Mike was demoted to fifth in somewhat controversial circumstances.

Event Log

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