With urban orienteering becoming very popular in the UK, Walton Chasers has, for a while, been trying to prioritise ideas for areas to map. An obvious area to start with are the dense blocks of housing estates ranging from those built in the 60s through to very recent ones centred on the heartland of Chasers – Walton High School in Stafford.
Tuesdays normal gym training was cancelled due to exams, so Cath decided to organise a trial Urban-O using a cobbled together map to evaluate the area . As the snow fell it looked like I might be the only competitor, but in the end 15 souls braved the sub zero temperatures to slip and slide their way around a course designed with controls in the gardens of member’s houses.
There was much chat pre-start about which shoes would be best in the snow; trainers, fell running or dobspiked orienteering shoes. I opted for dobbed and my Spiked VJ Supras gave perfect traction, the tungsten spikes gripping on even the most slippery surfaces.
I started well, not going too fast, and ran cleanly making no navigational mistakes until I lost time on a duff route choice from 6 to 7, and then managed to disqualify myself. I didn’t realise there were control descriptions on the map with the house numbers where the controls were located. At number 8 I ran along until I saw a WCH sticker in the rear window of a car I knew and then started searching their garden in vain. After a minute I eventually gave up thinking the control had been taken in, the owner assuming everyone had gone through. When I finished everyone else pointed out I should have been in the next door neighbour’s garden as they are also members – doh!
Towards the end of the race my legs started to feel the constant impact of running in offroad shoes on hard surfaces. A closed locked gate back into the school that many jumped over forced me to run all around the school trying to find a way in, eventually climbing the hill to the top of the school losing a couple of minutes, but also pulling a calf muscle in the process.
It was a great way to spend an evening and I’m sure it will be repeated whenever the Gym is closed in the future.