Owls Count

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 go well. For the second control I wasted three minutes looking for the control on the wrong side of the small path that I crossed without noticing. Up on the top of the area I made mistakes on both eight and nine, wasting over ten minutes never really been sure of where I was.

Those are the three big mistakes, but there were also several smaller mistakes. Overall I lost over twenty minutes and finished well down in the results, much to my frustration.

Sunday – 2×2 Relay
This event has the formatting of having two runners, who each run two different courses. The team is supplied with one map, which shows all controls on the area, and four lists, which contain the courses the team has to complete. A handicap is in place, with the older and younger competitors having shorter courses – the guide being that a top competitor in any age class would take about twenty minutes to complete one of his or her courses.

As usual, I was running first and off in the mass start! I started well and lead a group of competitors into the first control. At this point I then stopped and spent nearly a minute searching for the second control on the map. We were near the bottom right and, eventually, I found the next control at the top left. Instinctively this did not seem right and so it proved to be. The planner had made a minor mistake, which added 2km (over 50%) onto the course length. I completed the course ok, but well down on most of the other teams, as only a few teams had competitors on the over long course.

My second run was reasonable, apart from a mistake on the first control, where I wasted a few minutes. Overall I had 85 minutes of orienteering on the sand dunes and it went much better than the previous day.