Lent Term 2013

Races, Championships and Training	Socials
Download termcard for Races, Championships and Training	Download Socials Termcard

Varsity Match, British University Championships, 3 Formals, The Icenian...

This term is going to be HUGE. Be part of it!

Download the Termcard now

---

On 5th January Dan Safka of CUOC and Czech club Kamenice single-handedly organised an excellent race at Velké Popovice, near Prague in his home country. All courses were mass start for maximum racing competition. The A course was 15km and included Control X, an extra control which could be gained at any point along the course; the rest of the points had to be done in order. Winner of this in 1 hour 51 mins was Pavel Procházka, previous guest runner at the Varsity match held in Doksy, CR, in 2010. The race attracted international competition as the 9km B course was won by Tomáš Dlabaja in 1:09, who was part of the winning Czech relay team at the world championships in France this summer. CUOC members Ben Windsor and Zuzka Straková both competed on B, finishing 22nd in 1:32 and 41st in 1:56 respectively. The terrain was steep but mostly runnable, and the prizegiving in the rain included cans of beer from local sponsors Kozel.
Results
Photos

To check for updates, you may need to refresh your browser

Monday 11/12/12 Just in case you were wondering; yes, we did all get back safely. As far as I know. So that's the end of the Tour Blog 2012! Not that we don't all have interesting lives though (Ben's on a foreign mountain somewhere, Dan has skied to the post office, Katrin's about to use her Mathematical Powers to work out how much this whole damn trip cost, and I'm going for a day out in Matlock tomorrow), but you'll have to find out more elsewhere! If you have any comments, please direct them to publicity [(AT)] cuoc ([dot]) org [(dot)] uk.

Happy Christmas!

Friday: TOUR CHAMPIONSHIPS!

Update 5: 21.30 MicrO Results

Results and Splits

Update 4: 21.25 Tour Champs Results

Results and Splits are now available.
Results Analysis:
Winsplits, Splitsbrowser and Routegadget

Update 3: 20.20 Prize giving has just taken place!

Tour Champs

1. Ben Windsor (Prize: Raisins (he doesn't like them) and a potato)
2. Matthew Vokes (Prize: A carton of orange juice and a packet of everyone's least favourite flavour of crisps (pink)).
3. Jamie Parkinson (Prize: a magic onion)

MicrO Championships

1. James Hoad (Prize: a micro Candle)
2. David Maliphant (Prize: a micro bottle cap
3. Dan Safka (Prize: a piece of micro cardboard)

And a special prize (more potatoes) was awarded to the planners, Matthew Vokes and Zuzka Strakova. Matthew has now eaten his potato. Raw. Yuck.

Tom Dobra navigating to the toilet

Update 2: 18:00 The Micro-O is now in full swing. If you haven't done a Micro-O before (and you would have if you went to the CUOC/WAOC Micro-O Champs a few weeks ago!), it's basically indoor orienteering, with controls hidden in all sorts of places. As I write, Ian Cumpstey has just climbed into a cupboard to punch the finish, and Dan Safka is about to run to the kitchen fridge to find the control hidden between two blocks of cheese. James Hoad is currently leading with a time of 07:41, but there's only one (hand-drawn) map so there's a bit of a queue to start.

Update 1: 15.30 Ben Windsor has won the tour championships, beating Matthew Vokes by a single second. Full results, routegadget, splitsbrowser and winsplits to follow.

---

Thursday 6 December: Rest Day / Washout / Silly Run

Update 1: 15:20 The planned rest day turned into a bit of a washout with heavy snow in the morning which turned to heavy rain an hour or two ago. The annual Very Misguided Run carried on regardless up the Fairfield Horseshoe, a marginally more sensible choice than last year's attempted run up Helvellyn in storm-force winds. The running group only were forced to turn down the only clear valley when visibility reduced to less than a metre just short of the top, conveniently ending up in Wilf's. The walking group on the same route took the same decision! Fortunately I can report that everyone is back and nobody is admitting to having hypothermia. Win.

---

Wednesday 5 December: Silver How

After a being flooded, blown over and generally soaked to the skin just trying to leave the accommodation on Silver How day last year, this year's blue sky and good forecast was a pleasant surprise! All the exercises were carried over from last year, so Adam Bennett's (an ex-captain who is now so far out of Cambridge that he's got a proper job and can't go to training tours anymore) courses practising technique selection formed the morning session. The challenging, steep, intricate terrain required careful route choice, as did successfully navigating the numerous frozen bogs!

In the afternoon Tom Dobra planned a Peg Relay (more accurately an Electrical Insulation Tape Relay, but that doesn't sound so good). The aim was that the fastest runners would pick up one of a limited quantity of additional maps at select controls giving them an extra point or two to find. In theory, everyone should finish at the same time but it's not easy to do! But everyone seemed to cope well with one of the rare opportunities to race directly under pressure in orienteering.

Coming straight to you from a very nice youth centre in Rydal, Lake District via a very ropey mobile internet connection!

Tuesday 4 December: The notoriously awesome CUOC training tour (Oxford OC's presence grudgingly endured too) is in full swing after two days of training and a race. But the most exciting news, after two years of staying in hovels of various states of repair, this time we have heating, mobile signal and best of all, CLEAN RUNNING WATER! The smell is positively tolerable.

Half the club travelled to the Lakes via a race on an intricate open mountain moorland with plenty of very confusing contours and more climb than we encountered in all the other races of term put together! Despite this baptism of fire, CUOC had some good results and didn't get beaten by the British Squad (who were there for training) by too much. Results here

Monday training saw a return to Loughrigg, the area CUOC organised the 2012 BUCS competition on back in March. An array of technique-perfecting exercises blew away the Thetford-induced cobwebs and threw the newbies in at the deep end. They all coped very well though! Meanwhile, Matthew enjoyed buying his provisions for the week in Kendal (2 very full trolleys)... Before an evening trip to the best cafe in the world (Wilf's) we had to say goodbye (temporarily) to Tour Organiser Extraordinaire Katrin, who managed to make the trip happen while being ill. Thanks Katrin and get well soon. Guess who took over? Yes, he's the captain and he knows it.

We took a trip to the seaside on Tuesday for a day of VERY difficult training in the incredibly vague and very much flooded sand dunes of Sandscale Haws, including the deepest "seasonal marsh" ever seen (waist deep). A series of proper exercises in the morning practised navigation and control flow, which was followed by an afternoon game of Snooker (Matthew's special variation on a score event). It took some explaining, but once we'd worked out the rules it was a lot of fun.

Check back for more updates later in the week!

~David Matthews

The final training session of term held at Churchill College saw an adventure race consisting of various activities and more from the term. A string course which revealed a hidden code to discover more controls, a control stuck up a tree, a maze, plus some more usual attack points and route choice practice! Next week we're off to the Lake District for some real terrain!

Results available here

Thanks to Tom Dobra for planning some excellent courses on the fantastic new area of the Cambridge Science Park.

Results and Splits are now available.
Results Analysis:
Winsplits and Splitsbrowser

In glorious November sunshine, 8 CUOC athletes ventured into Suffolk for the last East Anglian League race of the year at West Harling Heath. CUOC had some very good results, despite Matthew Vokes being pipped into second (he usually wins everything) on the Brown course by a runner from Norfolk OC. David Maliphant was a few minutes behind in 4th (and wasn't AT ALL annoyed to have been overtaken by Matthew Vokes at no. 23), and Joe Hobbs on only his second-ever Brown came in 17th.

On the Green, Women's Captain Harriet Burdett had an excellent run to come in 6th overall and first woman, despite having been at a 'great party' the night before. Susan and Alice both ran Light Green, coming in 12th and 14th respectively. It wasn't all good news though, with Francis suffering a mid-run severe locational displacement of his pole-directional indicator (he lost his compass) and Tom Dobra being DQ'd due to a mispunch which (he claims) is down to a faulty SI box at the control.

Full Results
Routegadget - draw your route and compare it with others!
Splitalyzer - fun graphs and stuff

Thanks to all that came along to the CUOC and WAOC MicrO Championships tonight, a good test of your fine orienteering skill in a different (indoor) environment to usual!

Results are as follows:
Results and Splits by Course
Final Results and Final Splits by Category
The number of mis-punches is stated (30 seconds penalty time added per offence), a 15 second penalty was also added for any extra controls punched.

Winsplits and Splitsbrowser (nowhere near as useful as normal due to the penalties added for mispunching)
All Controls Map - see where you went wrong and which control you punched instead!

Men's and women's winners: Ben Windsor and Susan Chan triumph for CUOC!

Timelapse video of the evening, with thanks to Matthew Griffiths

It might have been a very wet Shouldham Warren, but this didn't stop 9 intrepid CUOCers venturing to this forest towards Kings Lynn.

Our beginners posted respectable times on their courses, Susan Chan & Fiona Love finishing 11th and 12th on Light Green, James Rickards (pictured left) just outside the top half with 16th on Green and an impressive run from Joe Hobbs to finish 10th on Blue.

CUOC managed to win 4 of the available courses, with captain Matthew Vokes winning Brown by 13 minutes and Tom Dobra winning Short Brown by 7 minutes respectively whilst past captains Ben Windsor (pictured right) and David Maliphant (who both claimed they were injured) dominated the rest of their fields winning Short Blue and Green by 40 and 25 minutes respectively! Captain Harriet Burdett finished 2nd woman on the Green by just 4 minutes.

Full Results

At the most technical and coldest-yet forest of the term (except for the Lake District training tour in December, of course) a CUOC contingent arrived by train.

Naham Clements finished 16th on Green, in the top half on his 3rd ever course while Raphaelle Suard (pictured) finished 9th (unfortunately out of 9) on Light Green with a good run most of the way and an unlucky big mistake. Sarah Gales had a smooth run to finish in 2nd on the same course. Top performances on the longer courses came from captain Matthew Vokes finishing 3rd on Black, unfortunately succumbing to the Dark Side's president by 15 seconds, and Tom Dobra's 6th on Short Brown just over 8 minutes down on the leader.

Full Results
Routegadget - draw your route and compare to others!