Orienteering during lockdown – a progress report
The last traditional orienteering events that WIM have been able to hold were a night event around Fordingbridge in late January and a TrailO event in Thorncombe Wood in late February. We lost our regional event at Ocknell because the area was dangerously under water.
The last traditional event we were all able to compete in was the regional qualifying round for the CompassSport Cup in late March.
Since then, during lockdown, everything has been on hold. Its entirely possible that the first major event we will be able to go to is the CompassSport Cup finals in Sutton Park, in mid-October: that is if the government has made its mind up by then on the allowable size of mass participation sporting events and if Birmingham City Council are prepared to allow us to run in Sutton Park.
Don’t think that BO are doing nothing at the moment: the CEO, Peter Hart, attended part of a Zoom meeting of the BOF TrailO Group on Saturday and his frustration with officialdom was palpable. Hopefully the Board of British Orienteering are meeting shortly and they will be able to announce the next steps on getting the sport going again.
WIM & WSX have had to postpone what would have been our big joint event of the year, the Caddihoe, which should have been held at the beginning of October, but fortunately we’re being allowed to re-stage it next year, and Devon have moved their running of the Caddihoe to 2022. We’re hoping to hold a couple of low-key events over that October weekend, but can’t do much until things are clarified nationally.
Meanwhile WIM and WSX, like many clubs, have co-operated in planning a series of mainly urban local MapRun training courses, together with an informal League, in which you have just over a week to run a nominated course (more than once if you want). So far, we’ve had four stages, and there are a further eight to go, taking us to the end of August, by which, hopefully we might be able to revert to a more traditional version of our sport. Currently there are around 50 runners taking part regularly, and with eight more events to go and the best 6 runs to count, it’s not too late for others to join in. There are also a few more MapRun courses which we haven’t incorporated in the league, and also a couple of shorter courses, not using public roads, and suitable for younger juniors.
As lockdown has eased, we’ve also noted an increase in the number of people running our various permanent courses using the OrientO app and posting their results online.
Of course, not everyone wants to use their smartphone as a dibber, (but its actually pretty easy) and some of us may have had to isolate. Nationwide this has led to many different innovative examples of ‘virtual orienteering’. There’s even been a virtual JK & British Championships, with all sorts of different disciplines, including route choice competitions, events using the ‘Catching Features’ game and various examples of TrailO, both PreO & TempO.
In February of this year I was selected to compete for Great Britain in the European TrailO Champs which should have been held in Finland at the end of May. At the end of March, this event was postponed until next year, but three months on, I’m still waiting for Finnair to refund my air tickets.
The international TrailO community has had great fun concocting Virtual events, including the TORUS Cup, a series of eight events held over four weeks in May and June, which attracted nearly 500 participants worldwide (and during which we discovered Ben Kyd, a junior from MDOC who won two of the last three rounds and came 2nd in the other. Clearly a future international for us).
I was going to write something for Waffle about these events, but then Clive Allen (SN) wrote a piece for the IOF website and for Southern Navigators website, which he’s happy to be republished.
I urge you to read his article and then have a go at Virtual TrailO: there’s lots of training examples mentioned in Clive’s article.
Meanwhile, I’m off (virtually of course) to Hong Kong for an event there, and then to the Wawel Cup in Poland later this week.
Dick Keighley