Starry, starry street

I ran out of day today. We were orienteering in the very muddy Middleton Woods near Ilkley this morning and went out for a run after doing our helping stint on registration. I enjoyed my course very much. It was middle distance with over twenty controls so there was lots of direction change and controls coming up fast on the 1:5000 scale map. My Boss at work gave me a present of Bill Melville's 'The Perfect Run' some months ago and I think I can say I was closer to the perfect run today than I have been for a long time. The beauty of Bill's book is that his quest is not about winning an orienteering event but about producing a performance in which all aspects: navigation, control flow, route choice, decision making, reading the landscape etc come together. Today I made one careless error where a dodgy route choice took me too low around an area of fight and resulted in me being too far down the hill for the control. Other than that and combatting the mud I felt on form and the controls were where I expected them to be. I also managed to keep ahead of the chap who doggedly hung on after I had caught him up! The last time I looked at the results I was 11th out of 42 which I'm more than happy with.

Tony volunteered to collect controls after the event and then we were further delayed by an older competitor who had been out for a very long time. Thankfully she eventually emerged from the Woods tired, muddy but safe. All this meant that by the time we were heading past the Cow and Calf, the sun had already dipped below the hills and we were too cold and ravenous to consider stopping for a blip.

In between basting the chicken and sorting the Yorkshire Puddings, I took this up t'back of ower street.