Blog: johnloguk

WARWICK TOWN RACE TODAY

My brain is still hurting from the race today, which tested the mind at least as much as the body. I ran the Men's Open course, which was only officially 7.1km long, but the nature of urban orienteering means that you run a lot more than that. There were also 43 controls to find, which is considerably more than I've ever had on one course ever.

There were many testing legs, where the obvious route led to a dead end, so you had to be on your toes and make sure that you read the detail on the map and planned your route properly. All that and run as fast as you possibly could. The first half of the course took us on a tour of the back alleys and hidden corners of Warwick, interspersed with more traditional sections in city parks, but the real test came towards the end when we went into the castle.

The organising club had quite a coup to get such unfettered access to Warwick Castle, and they made the most of it by using "butterfly" loops. These are where you do a series of loops, returning several times to a central point. The central control just happened to be under a bridge in the castle moat, and after four visits I was knackered from climbing in and out, thank God it wasn't wet!

Several people made a mess of the castle section, even ending up on the battlements looking for controls that were 40 feet below them! In the castle grounds, another control was in one of two caves, where tourists delighted in trying to send orienteers into the wrong one.

World Cup races in Switzerland meant that most of the star names that have dominated the previous races in the series were absent, but the competition was still fierce in all classes.

Provisional results are at http://www.octavian-droobers.org/results07/warcity/index.htm and hopefully photos and more reports will follow. I managed to meet up with Ace at the event, and hopefully he has got some great photos to post on mysportstream too. I had every intention of taking some too, but in the end I ran out of time and had to get ready for my own run.

Only one event in the UK Cities Cup now, Oxford on 10.11.07, details at http://www.citiescup.nopesport.com/ I can't wait.

by johnloguk on 21:51 on 7th October 2007