With Sprint the Bay looming this coming weekend, one of the Organisers, Matt Ogden, provided us with some handy after work training to get us thinking STB.  Using the Unitec map, Matt set a number of courses that focused on different skills we would need for the weekend including fine navigation, route choice and control punching.  This was a very valuable evening with the first long course on the "long route choice" map in particular simulating a sprint course similar to what we can expect this weekend.
I completed all the courses with my running pace getting slower and slower all evening.  This is not surprising as I see that I ran over 10km, most of them at sprint pace.  The final activity of the evening was the micro-sprint using SportIdent; unfortunately a problem with the start control meant we didn't get the opportunity to compare results on this.

So it appears that the days of having a reasonably short Course 1 at Summer Series events are now long behind us with tonights course clocking in at 9.6km according to the map or 11.3km when mostly following tracks according to my GPS watch.  The course consisted of a number of loops around Churchill Park with an extension to the coast around Tamaki River to the south and another extension along the streets to the north.

Churchill Park is well known for its cows and, in  particular, for the difficult conditions underfoot where the cows have churned up the terrain.  I dealt with this by sticking to the tracks whereever possible, even when this meant quite a long detour from the direct route.  I could certainly feel the difference as I slowed right down when crossing the paddocks.  However, many others (including Jonty) took the straight options and this, though less comfortable, appeared to be quicker.

The first leg of any note would be from 7 to 8.  Matt Ogden had ovvertaken me at 4 and I wasn't too far behind him as I ran from 6 to 7.  I was in time to see him take a route choice back to 8 that followed the southern (true right) bank of the (uncrossable) stream.  It looked a bit dodgy to me so I took the street option instead.  At the finish Jonty confirmed that he had also taken the south bank option and had ended up with wet feet when the stream cut into the obvious fence / vegetation corner and he didn't want to backtrack.  The controls themselves were fairly easy to find with many of them obvious because someone else was already there - reflecting the good turnout to tonight's event.  The only control I had any problem with was 20 when I ran past it for some reason and continued 50m down the stream before realising my mistake.  I did make a couple of poor route choices; firstly from 14 to 15 where I ran northwest along the path to the second bridge before cutting up when the best option was to go straight and secondly from 17 to 18 where I should have stayed in the park and exited to Riddell Rd from just beyond control 22 but chose to exit west immediately and run the roads instead.

These errors cost me dearly, a fact reflected in my 1 hr 13 min time for the course and the fact that Jonty beat me by 5 minutes (usually we are within a minute or so of each other).  He was particularly chuffed as I had recorded the head to head scores on this blog last week and he wishes me to repeat them now.  So, for the record, the score for this year is Steve 1 Jonty 1, for this year's Summer Series 5 -2 and since I started this blog 7 -2.  I suspect it will get closer yet as Sprint The Bay is only two weeks away and Jonty has had a better record than me at both previous editions.  Either way, I'll report it here.

The results of this event can be found on the Auckland Club website here.
If you aren't doing anything on February 4, 5 and 6, you can follow our progress at Sprint The Bay via live video, audio and results from their website.

The new year is upon us and we're back into Summer Series Orienteering.  The first thing you will notice is that the map shown above has a new bit of functionality that isn't present on the maps in last year's blog posts.  This is due to Santa and Quick Route.  At Christmas Santa, in the form of my mother, was generous enough to present me with a Garmin Forerunner 410 GPS watch.  This watch allows me to capture information about the exact route I took during my run and how fast I was going at each point.  I can load that information up into Quick Route software along with a scan of the map and the result you can see above.  As well as the extra line on the map indicating my route, if you look carefully you will see that it changes colour to indicate my speed; green when I was running faster, yellow and then red as I slowed down.  I'll be playing with this software over the next few months and, all going well, may decide to introduce a DOMA (digital orienteering map archive) sometime later this year so you can all load your routes on my maps.

Enough of this technology talk, back to the real point of this blog.  The first Summer Series event of the year was held on the Carrington map based at Unitec on Carrington Rd in Mt Albert.  The weather had been dodgy most of the day but it wasn't raining buckets.  The Unitec campus at Carrington is ideal for Summer Series orienteering as the map is big enough to accommodate most courses without having to leave the confines of the campus.  Course 1, however, usually needs to loop around a few times to get up to a decent distance but it does mean that we get to visit most of the disparate parts of the map at some stage during the run.  This time Kieran used a pivot control in the centre of the map to form three distinct loops.  The distance quoted was 8.2km and was very close to the 8.3km that I actually ran.

The first loop took us down to Phyllis St Reserve in the south with a fast flat run to the first control.  We then crossed over Oakley Creek and up to Great North Rd on the other side before crossing back to the pivot control.  A loop around the central part of the map brought us back to the pivot before the final loop around the northern end.  This loop started by dropping us down the escarpement to the creek again.  I hit the top of the hill exactly where I wanted but I couldn't see an obvious route down through the very long grass so angled along the top to the north before descending with the help of a conveniently placed bamboo tree.  After blasting along the creek path to control 10, the long grass from 10 to the road aorund the buildings sapped both my strangth and my speed.  None of the controls were difficult to find but many of them offered some good route choices, particularly 18 to 19 where I chose to run the straight lines through the buildings rather than the shorter grassed route around the outside.  The last control is worthy of mention as it was described as "Garden" and was mapped as green.  And green it was, although it was easy enough to find once you took the plunge and forced your way into the undergrowth.

Overall, I was happy with my time and with beating Jonty by two and a half minutes in the first event of the year.  For those of you who are keeping count, that puts me 1-0 up for the year, 5-1 up for this season's Summer Series and 7-1 up in all events since I started this blog.

Results can be found on the Auckland Club website here.