Dales Trails Trip Out - what's not to love on Valentine's Day ?!

Seized a 'window of opportunity' between the wind, rain and snow and child care, to have a run around the Dales trails, starting from Reeth on a cool but mostly bright day. I'm thinking of doing some races around here this season, so we used the DT20 route as a starting point for our run. It was nice to run along some interesting new trails, test out my map reading skills and have a natter with Jane. A breath of fresh air that we both needed followed by egg and muffins at a lovely cafe in Reeth village square! 

Half term holiday fun - contours, cake and clarts!

Another great little orienteering event on Sat morning, organised by the NATO team, and very local too - Prudhoe East. I helped the girls get round the yellow course in lovely muddy conditions! We managed to get the best of the weather as the sleet kindly stopped whilst where we were out with our map. Great excitement today as it was the punch-type controls which Cutie tried to work out what patterns the punches were making at every control!! Some ambitious navigating (!?!) saw us cut through the woods and off the path, following a straight line to control 4. The slight uphill was no surprise but the abrupt end to the rise and the rather too steep for tiny legs downhill meant that we had to side-step a bit to find a safer descent. So Joe was correct "contours are crucial"!

We successfully found all of our controls, brought home our fair share of mud and got some more points in the league.

http://www.newcastleorienteering.org.uk/evres/1516/Winter16/Prudhoe0213.pdf

 Following on from this, an uncharacteristic baking session resulted in a yummy banana loaf which should provide a bit of energy for more half term fun 😋

#supersaturday

Urban Orienteering at Cramlington

Really enjoying orienteering at the minute. It's a great way of getting out for a run without focussing purely on "how far, how fast" . I haven't got much enthusiasm for going out for long road runs and the weather out and about on the fells is still not much fun, so orienteering is ticking the boxes for me at the minute.

On Sunday, it was urban orienteering at Cramlington. I was slightly nervous of getting ridiculously 'lost' ( i.e. not finding the controls) as I had tried some street orienteering in Prudhoe before and found it rather challenging!! 

The scale of the map is such that the distances are tiny and the detail is incredible - you have all of the tiny paths between houses and individual trees marked on! 

My course had a whopping (for me! ) 25 controls in just over 5km. This is straight line distance, I believe, and the actual distance was said to be up to 50% more depending on route choice.

I was delighted to find all of the controls and had a fair idea where I was and where I was heading, most of the time! 

On analysing the results, it is clear that it takes me longer to get going than everyone else but I'm generally not too far off the pace for the majority of the controls. I had a tricky control where I knew what I was looking for but as I approached from the 'wrong' side, the kite was not obvious as it was tucked into a hedge around a corner and was obscured from my view. 

http://www.newcastleorienteering.org.uk/evres/1516/Cramlington0207/topindex.html

I learned some more symbols, met an old colleague and had a good fartlek-type training run! What's not to like?! I'm already looking forward to taking the girls to the next Saturday event at Prudhoe.