Owls Count

I decided to take a day off work this week and used it to go to the BAOC summer series event at Sandhurst. At the event there were four courses to choose from – a long and a short in the forest and a long and a short urban race in the military academy grounds. [...]

A couple of weekends ago, I went to the Berkshire Fetch Mile – these events are organised through the Fetcheveryone website. I had had vague thoughts about doing one of the local parkruns before but decided, instead, to have a welcome lie in. I travelled by train to Thatcham and then had a pleasant couple [...]

For the mid summer weekend I travelled to south Wales for a further opportunity to orienteer on sand dunes. This time I got an opportunity to go to Merthyr Mawr, which has the highest individual sand dune in Europe – often referred to as the big dipper. Saturday – Individual Oh dear, this did not [...]

Following on from Winchester was the British Age Class Sprint Orienteering Championships, which took place at HMS Sultan. The elite championships took place early in the year so, while there was a race for the open men category, it was not surprising that the turn out in my category was low. Due to reasons I [...]

I have ended up with a backlog of orienteering events to post about. Since the Tamar Triple I have orienteered six times and I am only now finding time to mention the events. Of course, I will definitely be saying that this backlog has been caused by being busy working and training, and that it [...]

Last weekend I travelled to Cornwall to compete in the Tamar Triple weekend of orienteering events, which took place on Penhale – an area of sand dunes situated to the south of Newquay.

The UK is currently enjoying a heatwave. Over the weekend temperatures climbed to 10C warmer than average for this time of year. It was hot when I set off from home, on Saturday morning, to run up to an orienteering event taking place at the University of Reading – i.e at the place where I [...]

Sunday saw a trip to Hawley for some orienteering. I had been to a wedding the day before, which involved a rather good ‘wedding cake’ made of rounds of cheese and also a rather late bedtime. Consequently, I was not at my best on Sunday and decided to do a shorter course than normal. I [...]

On Sunday I ran the Bracknell Half Marathon. I had, early in the year, made plans to attempt to run a PB at this race. In the last few weeks I decided that I was not in the best of shape and shelved the plans for a future day. I did not think much to [...]

Last Friday I travelled down to Dorset and took part in the first race of Poole Runners Summer Series. This race was two laps of Upton Country Park. The Garmin track of my run shows how close we pass to the Holes Bay part of Poole Harbour. I had a reasonable run. I started slightly [...]

This year the Jan Kjellström (JK) Festival of Orienteering took place, over the Easter Weekend, in Devon and was hosted by the South West Orienteering Association, of which my orienteering club is a member. I was attached to the junior squad and, so, spent part of each day parking cars.

The laptop I have been using as my main machine for a few years now has been struggling – it is four and a half years old – and I decided that it would be best to replace it before it failed. I have been looking at options for a while and I decided that [...]

Last Saturday I went on a Performance Coaching Day, organised by the British Army Orienteering Club. Over twenty members of Wimborne Orienteers, my club, spent the day in a series of orienteering activities. I have had little formal orienteering coaching before and it was good to spend some time concentrating on specific tasks, which should [...]

When writing about the Wokingham Half Marathon I mentioned that I had arrived back in the UK, from Santa Fe, shortly before the race, but I failed to mention why I had been away. At the beginning of February I started a new job, in the Evolutionary Biology Group, which is in the School of [...]

This past weekend I travelled down to Cornwall for the Duchy Marathon. My preparation for this race had been mixed. During January I did a decent amount of training, with some good long runs. The lack of running in February, however, meant that I had effectively had a five week taper. My plan was to [...]

On arriving back into the UK yesterday, after two weeks in Santa Fe, NM, I decided that I would run a half marathon. With the lack of sleep and the hours of travelling, I decided that I would run at an easy pace and then pick up the speed towards the end if I felt [...]

This past weekend I travelled down to Dorset again. The main reason was to meet my nephew, who is nine days old today. However, while down I decided that I would make it to the Poole Runners’ Boscombe 5k. My preparation was not great for this race – I finished my old job on Friday [...]

Last weekend I travelled to the New Forest, to compete for my club in the south central and south west Compass Sport Trophy round at Hampton Ridge – the inter-club competition for small, UK orienteering clubs. (There is a Compass Sport Cup for the larger clubs.) In addition to the orienteering I wanted to extend [...]

A few weeks ago I decided that it would be a good idea to backup all my photos. Currently I have over 4000 photos, which amounts to 6 GB. So the question was what was the best method? This task went on the todo list and I pondered the best way to go about this. [...]