Although I’ve been orinteering for many years now I’ve never participated in an urban event before and so thought I’d give it a try.
Being new to urban events I didn’t really know what to expect but assumed it would be more difficult than Street O, requiring more careful examination of the map and had heard that checking for uncrossable boundaries was very important.
I’d volunteered to help at the start, and for the first shift was responsible for reading out instructions to those just about to start (“Have you read the safety notices? Have you cleared and checked? …”) having repeated that close to 100 times you would have thought it would have sunk in but somehow, I managed to get into the start box without putting my dibber in the check box. Fortunately, Rob McCaffrey asked me the same list of questions, so I realised and quickly headed back to be checked before the timer beeped.
Off to control 1, initially walking to have a proper look at the map, I couldn’t tell if it would be possible to make it to the control from the north side as it wasn’t clear if there was a gap between the OOB and the fence, but I decided to give it a go, running clockwise around the fenced area and that worked out fine.
Controls 2 and 3 were easy enough but control 4 needed a bit more thought as the obvious route was blocked with a black line but there was a way in via a passage to the north. Having got to the right location it wasn’t entirely obvious to me just what was at the middle of the control circle. This was a multi-level area in the shopping centre, so I ended up running around a bit searching but fortunately not for too long.
Controls 5 – 9 all had an obvious route, so by now I was feeling pretty confident.
Heading to control 10 I was again struggling to see exactly what was at the centre of the control circle and my knowledge of control descriptions wasn’t good enough to interpret the symbols:
Sarah Scarborough enlightened me after the event, and the way to read this is:
South-eastern Wall with the control at the north-west foot.
If I’d known that I wouldn’t have been on the wrong side of the fence, at the top instead of the bottom.
The remaining controls were all relatively straight-forward, apart from #15 where I was at the wrong side of the fence – the control description makes this clear if you bother to read it! After control 20 there were a couple of long legs that a fast runner could have made up lots of time, but I was struggling to go any faster than 10min/mile, so it felt like quite a long slog. After the long run to control 21 I was unreasonably annoyed by the black line blocking the obvious route to 22, but at 1:4000 the extra loop wasn’t all that far.
For the very final control I thought I had a good plan to minimise distance by heading west-north-west up a narrow road and then taking a diagonal through the field but was foiled by a hedge and ended up turning back. Whilst doing so I saw another running doing the same thing and thought “he’s in for a surprise”. After looping back, I came into the field along the path to the south of the control and imagine my surprise when I saw the same runner leaving the control before I’d even got there. It turned out that there was a gap in the hedge that is marked on the map if you look carefully enough.
I finished the event thinking I’d done reasonably well with only a few small mistakes, so was a bit disappointed to come 17th of 17. Better nav would have saved a few minutes but not more than ten, so looking at the results I suspect that my errors only cost me one place.
Discussing the event afterwards it was clear I needed to brush up on reading control descriptions. Here are some useful resources, which I’m sure will be useful for anyone else who needs to improve in this area:
https://www.maprunner.co.uk/iof-control-descriptions
I enjoyed my first go at urban orienteering and am sure I’ll be back for more. With Forest O I regularly make nav errors that cost me tens of minutes over the course and so can still believe that with improved nav skills one day I might do well, whereas with Urban the nav errors aren’t particularly significant so I’ll need to get much faster and I don’t think that’s going to happen!