Hello. Its been a busy few days for me this is a round up of last Saturday, Sunday and Yesterdays Night League Event 1. In 2004-2008 my first o club was South Midlands based around North Bucks, after getting involved with them I quickly got roped into helping at events which was fine as I couldn’t believe there was a sport that involved maps and running after years of running around on O.S maps. S.M.O.C deserve mentioning as they have a regular set of park events called ‘Keyne O’ around Milton Keynes Parks that have hundreds of local non club members taking part- they were doing these long before park run started. Parks Depts help them promote heavily and for many families its their main chance of getting outdoors at the weekend.  So they contacted me and asked for some coaching in the New Forest, after some dialogue with Colin Hicks we decided on an area at Salisbury Trench to run some coaching, very special thanks to Colin for all the communication on this, as you know its getting harder to receive permissions for anything you want to do hence the rise in Urban O, thats for another post sometime. Saturday I gave the group of 12 a corridor O activity concentrating on them and their taking compass bearing ability, also two other activities to add to their confidence and skills. Weekend after this is the November classic that many of these runners will be taking part in- and while we are on it have you got your entry in yet? Its our Club Champs. Sunday again was a lovely day and the group enjoyed my first activity which was going into the forest and taking a piece of map with only the index contours left on it, they had to walk the track up and down its entirety looking and visualizing the missing contours- then draw on where they thought they were. This piece of map had 4 contours missing, so a 25 metre height gain/descent in total, they then were showed the complete map picture. Pleased to say that worked really well for them to be able to see the difference in how spurs and re-entrants appear in contours and they did well on it. Great weekend in all thanks to Debbie Charlton for asking me to run it, and Julie for Sundays help getting out there too.

Skip to Monday and after my school coaching at St Ives primary in the afternoon it was back to Poole to set up the first of the Night League Season. I planned this year with some new locations and some we have used before, the map never lets you down as its one of the first Urban quality maps to have been made in 2012 by Gavin Clegg the founder of the WSX NL. Poole town is like a big island with water around 3 sides which you dont really percieve when travelling through it. We had 53 people come down with some new faces welcome to you – hope to see you again at Wareham in two weeks time. My course was cleared by 18 of the 49 names registered in the hour, not sure how the fastest were recording only 8 KM as I ran it and recorded just under 10! but theirs must have been better route choice…. Anyway if you check the splits youll see that this one really does give so many options that I challenge you to find 2 runners that went around this map the same way? The Night League has started then- lots to race for and out of all the events a proportion count as your score overall, next 5 months of Winter really have a nice focus with these that are very social and often based from a pub. As always the WSX team set up and took down smoothly and thanks to those who stayed after for helping. Photos show our new member Harriet getting ready to race- grinners are winners 🙂

I hear that Lyra has a column in the Compass Sport Cup latest edition- anyone want to send me it?

Tonight- the last time this year we go onto the Heath for tuesday training, from next week it will be hill reps on the old Alder hills road and area, so its K.M reps- and as always- start training and start seeing your abilities improve on the races. Oh, and Dylans the Student bar is open again now too for post running drinks.

Lastly special shout out to Andrew Beldowski one of our founding members resident in France- he always emails me to say hes reading- you never had it so good.