The OO Cup kicked off in Killarney with a warm-up indoor event at St Brendan’s College. As we were staying in Killarney for the OO Cup week Christine and I thought we would give this a go. Billed as the Kerry Festival of Orienteering the event saw over 400 take part in an indoor/outdoor multi-level event with numerous artificial barriers, one way entrances/exits and alphabetically labelled stairwells, some of which were also one way up or down. Courses were short, in fact very short, but were billed as “complex”. They were not wrong.
Starting off outside the main 3-level building, the first thing all participants did was go indoors & immediately upstairs to level 2 to get to the maps & reach the start kite, throwing an element of confusion straight into the mix. My number 1 appeared to be something like 20m away from the start kite but on the floor below. However, it took me 5 minutes 31 seconds, several sets of stairs, mostly incorrect ones, and some disorientated head scratching before I was able to succeed in reaching it.
See if you can see the best route….. I clearly didn’t!
Controls 2 & 3 were on the same level as control 1 and I picked up both of these easily. You can guess what then came next. Thinking I had cracked reading the map at this scale (1:700) I then found out the hard way that I hadn’t, making quite large errors 3 to 4 and 4 to 5. After that I decided it best to slow down leaving controls, ie walk, and work out a route before dashing off. Also stairwell F proved to be both central and pivotal to many of the multiple level route choices. That technique seemed to work for most of the rest of the course. At the end I was pipped into 2nd place on M65, taking 29:24 to cover what Garmin tracked as 2.2km, probably one of my slowest runs for a long time. Christine also finished 2nd taking 34:02 for her course.
Indoor O requires solving navigational problems in 3-D. It can be fun and frustrating in equal measures. With route decision making required every few metres it’s certainly immersive and the time simply runs away with you. Keith
Border Liners Orienteering Club 