Do you like your orienteering rough and tough or is fast and furious more your thing? There were events to suit everyone this weekend…..
Five BL members went to the Lakeland Warrior Weekend in the South Lakes. Saturday’s event at Simpson Ground offered the choice of a mass start one-person relay with multiple gaffled loops or a conventional course. The terrain description from the event details sums up the area well: “Plantation forest and semi-open scrub. Not too hilly, but tough in every other way –young trees, dead bracken, wet marshes, fallen trees” . To add to the challenge, the weather was overcast and drizzly making it very hard to read the map in the dark woodland, especially for those wearing glasses. Of course none of this stopped the elite youngsters getting round unbelievably fast.
Sunday’s Warrior event at Eggerslack near Grange offered a different challenge – the forest was largely deciduous without much undergrowth but as the event details said “There is a lot of deadly limestone pavement around the courses, including straight from the start. It consists of narrow rock blades separated by leg-eating cracks. It will be slippery with moss and dead leaves“. Complex contour detail added to the fun.
In total contrast was a North West Urban League event at Morecambe – an area not previously used for orienteering. It provided a mixture of pedestrian town centre, residential streets and sea-front promenade (and the pavements definitely weren’t limestone ones). Eight BL members attended with the best result coming from Stella Lewsley who ran up an age group and won the Women Supervet (55+) class.
To add to the weekend’s variety there was also a North West Night League event on Saturday evening at Nicky Nook, an area of mostly open fell near Garstang. Four BL member were there and all ran well. The highest placing was from Alan Hartley who was third on the Blue course.
Border Liners Orienteering Club 