Or: what I did on my holidays
It’s not often that a world orienteering championship comes to the UK (though it has happened before), and the chance for the also-ran among us to race on the same terrain and maps (not courses!) as the elite, and with a twist or two, in a fascinating city, is a rare thing. So when I saw the “WOC Tour” offering just that, I started planning…
To cut a long story short, the idea quickly mutated from a few days’ solo trip to Edinburgh to do some orienteering, to a joint holiday in Fife, Edinburgh and Northumberland, which turned out all rather lovely (and mostly dry, except the day we were in an open boat on the Firth of Forth). But you want to know about the orienteering bit, right?
Leaving aside the jokingly named “warm-up” event in Holyrood Park (which with hindsight – and especially with being a bit under the weather at the time – I would have skipped), the first event was a sprint in Leith; the same area the elites had used for individual qualification that morning. (To be strictly accurate, the areas overlapped, and shared a finish run-in).
Here are the elite courses (a little hard to pick apart as all three qualifiers for the men and for the women are shown on one map each!)…
You can see how the small out-of-bounds areas are used either to keep runners out of busy areas or to make route choice more tricky! That was a planning tool used far more in the elite races than the Tour courses. Here’s my course:
Next day (a rest day for the elites) we had something completely different, and new to me – indoor orienteering! I’d often looked at the indoor maps published in Compass Sport – and often found them almost unfathomably hard to find routes through! – fortunately this one didn’t seem anywhere near as tricky, with never more than one change of stairway needed in a single leg. It was great fun, and in fact one of the reasons I wanted to go in the first place. I’d definitely recommended giving it a go if you have the chance.
For Day 3 we were at the Heriot-Watt University campus at Riccarton, where the elites had run their relays in the morning (sorry, I don’t have the elite maps for this one). This was billed as a “middle distance” event (by this time I would happily have taken a sprint distance each day – remember that “warm-up” I said I’d happily have skipped?). Here we had some taped-off out-of-bounds to make things trickier…
Day 4, the last day for me, was for us “Tourists” a full-length urban event in the “old town” area, where the elites had run their individual sprint finals on the afternoon of Day 1. Here are the elite maps:
Note again the tricky temporary out-of-bounds areas, and the fiendish map exchange just before a particularly crucial route choice! Here’s my (rather more benign) course:
Still a few purple hatchings to deal with, but nothing so devilish as the elites had to deal with. Although by this time I was thoroughly exhausted I was still able to enjoy getting to grips with the back-alleys and courtyards that I probably wouldn’t have explored otherwise. And there was an ice-cream van conveniently near the finish.
Richard Rogers, July 2024
