For the last four weeks or so,during February and early March, we’ve had more than our fair share of rain, and its affected the sport in many different ways.
A month ago, some of us went to a small event which QO held on Ham Hill near Yeovil. Now Ham Hill, or most of it, is a delightful area. The hill having been quarried for hundreds of years to provide the lovely yellowish “Ham” stone with which the villages around it have been built, the top is a maze of humps and hollows, great technical orienteering which hosted the British Short Race Championships a few years ago. To the west is a wooded spur which is usually fine and which provides a change from the technical stuff. Unfortunately, in wet weather it is very muddy, and because it is so steep, progress down the hill, particularly on the paths, proceeds in a series of glissades, as on a snow slope.
As any mountaineer knows, there are three types of glissade, the standing, the sitting and the involuntary, and they usually follow each other in rapid order. The less agile amongst us wondered why the planner hadn’t made greater use of the the top of the hill and less use of the less technical, steeper slopes, but then, he wasn’t gifted with hindsight. There were lots of mud covered runners in the car park at the end of the event. Lynn Branford, her back resplendently mud covered from shoulder to knee, asked the question which heads this article. She wasn’t the only one.
The following week, our regional event at Ibsley was lucky to be held in dry weather. What is more, we had the use of parking on hard standing in an industrial estate. We hadn’t been able to find a suitable parking field for the event and had to resort to using buses. The only downside in bussing competitors to the start is the problems it causes families with young children who need split starts, but in the middle of a very wet month we were lucky – if we had been using a field for parking, there was no way it would have been possible.
The week after, those club members who went to the national event at White Downs near Dorking had the same trouble with the involuntary glissading on the steep slopes as we’d had at Ham Hill. They also had to undergo bussing to the event and ran in continuous rain and their waterproof maps also managed to absorb at least some of the mud every time they fell, which meant that they were getting difficult to read by the end. They were, however, mollified by the provision of hot showers back at the parking area.
I wasn’t there, choosing instead to visit the Forest of Dean to complete the planning of one of the Trail-O courses Keith Henderson and I are doing for the JK at Easter. It didn’t rain, but there was plenty of mud. At one point I had to cross an area next to a forest road which contractors felling an area had churned up so that it resembled the Somme and I managed a spectacular pratfall headfirst into a muddy puddle.It was my turn to have mud in my ear. Fortunately I met no-one in the forest and had dried out by the time I got back to the car.
Finally, last week, with the help of Lynn Branford, I controlled the SOC colour coded event associated with the annual New Forest Long-O. Although the heavy rain had left areas of the forest looking like the Florida Everglades, putting out and checking the controls in the sunshine on the Saturday was a joy. Sadly, on the day of the event, the heavens wept all day, the rain beginning as the officials began setting up at 8.00am and continuing relentlessly thereafter. But it remained warm and those people who did turn up (I guess the attendance was almost halved because of the weather) knew what they were in for before they started, dressed accordingly and finished all smiles at the relief of having survived.
I’m hoping for better conditions these next few weeks. But the waterproofs are in the car boot just in case.
