Category: Notes

I’m planning to merge YepSport and Yablog back into one weblog.

Why?

* Orienteering is still my principal extra-work activity so I’ll be updating YepSport throughout the year.
* I don’t update Yablog too much these days as I don’t do all that much interesting these days – this ain’t university any more, some of us have to work!
* More people read Yablog than YepSport.
* Some of those people are probably wondering why don’t post too much on Yablog.
* YepSport will be OK as a general blog, I think.

I might still back out from this idea – but it makes a lot of sense. I’ll think about it…

Mapsurfer has an excellent and detailed writeup of the Scottish 6 Days, including full maps for M35L.

31 July – 6 Aug, Royal Deeside. Various times – see articles. P: Mod, T: Hard.
23 July, Thordon North. 61:50 for 6.4km (9.7 m/k.) 137% of win. P: Easy, T: Mod.
5 June, Black Park. 84:34 for 8.7km (9.7 m/k.) 158% of win. P: Easy, T: Mod.
18 May, Bedford’s Park. Modified score event. P: Mod, T: Easy.
3 May, Leith Hill. 71:00 for 6.2km (11.5 m/k.) 200% of win. P: Mod, T: Hard.
1 May, Holmbury Hill. 142:02 for 12.9km (11.0 m/k.) 200% of win. P: Hard, T: Mod.
18 Mar, Järvafältet. 75:12 for 6.1km (12.3 m/k.) 159% of win. P: Mod, T: Mod.
17 Mar, Ängsjö. 114:53 for 9.5km (12.1 m/k.) 157% of win. P: Mod, T: Hard.
6 Mar, Trossachs. 88:30 for 5.3km (16.7 m/k.) 120% of win. P: Hard, T: Hard.
20 Feb, Millwards Park. 66.23 for 8.7km (7.6 m/k.) 131% of win. P: Easy, T: Easy.
30 Jan, Chobham. 67:36 for 7.4km (9.1 m/k.) 140% of win. P: Mod, T: Easy.
9 Jan, Pembury Walks. 91:16 for 8.5km (10.7 m/k.) 142% of win. P: Mod, T: Mod.
4 Dec, Mytchett. 48:23 for 5.6km (8.7 m/k.) X% of win. P: Mod, T: Mod.
24 Oct, Bagshot Heath. 77:00 for 8.0km (9.6 m/k.) X% of win. P: Mod, T: Mod.
17 Oct, Trosley. 68:31 for 6.5km (10.5 min/km.) X% of win. P: Mod, T: Easy.
10 Oct, Eartham Wood. Injured at start.
3 Oct, Newland Park. : X for Xkm (7.6 m/k.) X% of win. P: Easy, T: Easy.
12 Sep, Hampstead Heath. 84:42 for 8.4km (10.1 m/k.) X% of win. P: Mod, T: Easy.

High point of the season: Five great runs, finishing well up the order, at the Scottish 6 Day. Also, finishing a race in the Trossachs for the first time, with a good time to boot! Definitely, Scotland is where I perform best.

Low point of the season: Shockers at the World Orienteering Cup spectator races (200% of winner’s time, Last in the middle distance and second last in the classic.)

Key: m/k = minutes per kilometre. “of win” = of winner’s time. P = physical difficulty. T = technical difficulty. Mod = moderate.

Map of Maps II is on its way, a beta will be released shortly. This article is for comments on Map of Maps II.

I’ve set up an “orienteering” group on Flickr, for all your good orienteering photos. If you haven’t heard of Flickr, it’s best described as a collaborative photo gallery/community.

The group’s website is http://www.flickr.com/groups/orienteering.

If you are already a Flickr member, please join the group! If you aren’t, it’s easy to set up a Flickr account, and the basic accounts (allowing up to 200 photos) are gratis.

The group’s description is:

Photos from the four disciplines of the sport of orienteering – Foot-O, MTB-O, Ski orienteering and Trail-O. Think great areas, great maps, great athletes. Controls amongst scenery that cause even the best to stop and enjoy the view.

[Updated – added link to results] Just back from the varsity match, which was in Stockholm this year. Up to 6 inches of snow on the ground made for physical as well as technical courses, with the temperatures ranging from 2 degrees celsius down to a Baltic (literally) -15. In the event, almost everyone got around their courses, and there were some fine individual performances.

Oxford achieved a “clean sweep” of trophies, for the third time in as many years, moving the Oxford/Cambridge winning totals over the years ever more towards par. Oxford were so confident they didn’t even bring the trophies to Sweden…

Ed Catmur won the Men’s individual for the third time – the first Oxford man to do so, although Cambridge have matched this feat three times. Newcomer (to Oxford, not orienteering!) Cerys Manning won the women’s. Duncan Archer, a former varsity champion himself, got the best time in the Men’s A on the day, running for JOK, the ex-Oxford club. He narrowly beat Nick Barrable.

In the crucial beer race, JOK rightly won back the trophy, having been “won” last year by a suspiciously small tab Cambridge team won last year by Oxford Uni. Finally, the JOK/DRONGO trophy for the best ex-university team was re-awarded to JOK. Hopefully we’ll get around to engraving it this year.

See also:

• Photographs
• Historical Table
• Results (official website)
• Full write ups and map analysis (soon)

In 12 hours, I’m off to Scotland, to conquer some personal orienteering demons at an event in The Trossachs, that most Scandinavian of British maps. Orienteering in the Trossachs is always a challenge, and I’ve never successfully completed a course there, let alone got a good time. The course details for tomorrow give a hint of the terrain – the M21L course has 700m of climb (most of the way up a Munro) while the most junior course (J1) is just 800m long – but even then comes with a warning that the difficulty is harder than would be expected for 10 year olds. Looking forward to it.

In two weeks I’m off to Stockholm in Sweden, for the 34th Oxford vs Cambridge Varsity Orienteering Match. I’m not expecting to do well, but excellent terrain and a good time is a given – although it’ll be even colder than a frozen London.

In eight weeks, I’ll be back in Oxford for the JOK 18th birthday dinner, and maybe a bit of a punt if it isn’t too cold.

In sixteen weeks, I’ll be in Barcelona for a stag do. Should be nice and warm by then!

In twenty weeks, I’ll be back in Scotland, for at least a week this time, for the Scottish 6-Days at Royal Deeside. I made it to the 6-Days in 1997, 1999 and 2001, but missed the last one. I had a good excuse though – I was in New York.

(Cross-posting between Yablog and Yepsport.)

In order to eliminate almost all comment spam on this website (you never see it currently, as the spam gets caught in my moderation queue, but it’s a pain for me to clear out the queue every day…) you need to type the word “yepsport” into one of the boxes when making a comment. This simple extra step breaks the homogenity of WordPress weblogs and should stop the comment spam spiders from leaving their incidious droppings over the place.

As for orienteering – I missed last Sunday’s race due to much of the London Underground network not running. However I did make it (just) to Bagshot the previous weekend, and enjoyed my run in this excellent area. Full writeup to follow.

An planned extension of my Map of Maps project will be a map that “scrapes” the latest BOF fixtures webpage, to graphically indicate where in the country the next weekend’s events will be based. It won’t be pretty (it would be a bit much to ask for BOF to provide an RSS feed of the fixtures page of course…) but it should be doable.

The redesign of this blog was not intentional – a botched software upgrade left the blog looking rather bare, and I hadn’t backed up my primary CSS file. So I’ve used this design, from a WordPress CSS design competition. It looks rather odd in Internet Explorer for PC, but it’ll have to do for now.

Yes I should have been at orienteering events on both Saturday and Sunday. But I forgot about yesterday’s event until too late (I’m not used to events on Saturday!) and realised on the way to today’s event that I had binned both my O-shoes (fell apart in Sweden) and my running shoes (fell apart at Hampstead Heath a couple of weeks back.) And all the sports shops are closed in London on Sunday mornings. So I guess I’ll have to punish myself by doing nothing at all today going on a long bike ride somewhere.