A message from Gavin:

Stan Smith the American tennis player of the 70s and 80s used to say: “Experience tells you what to do, confidence allows you to do it”. This definitely applies to my orienteering. I enjoyed my night league run at Upton back on 19^th October, made a few mistakes and as I had my watch set on pause (for those that don’t use sport watches you can set it to stop recording your run time every time you stop running, hence you get a true record of how long you have been running) – but this is no help for a score event when you need to know the elapsed time. Consequently, I returned too soon, having left out a few controls towards the end to ensure I wasn’t over time. Disappointing but plenty of ‘if only’ moments to consider. I was then pleasantly surprised to find they were using exactly the same course for the Winter map run league. My Upton route was good, I tweaking it a bit and sorted out the route for those last few controls. Having done that, I was confident of collecting all the controls within the hour. I ran round with no errors to speak of in under 58 mins – job done. Then we get to the night league race at Beggarwood on 30 October. Incidentally Jason did an excellent write up of this event, which is on the BADO website if you haven’t read it. I had sorted out my initial strategy and was up and running. My eighth control was where I would need to make some decisions. Not sure why but I wasn’t confident I was going to get all the controls within the 60 minutes. Consequently I spent over two minutes trying to focus on a suitable route – probably was overthinking and made the wrong choice, had to keep refreshing and changing the route and missing out controls. My minutes per k time tumbled and I ended up well down the field. If I had just had the confidence to go for it rather than faff around, I would have done so much better. Lockdown 2.0 seems even more weird than the first lockdown. At least we have maprun to keep us interested. Yes, it’s not proper O but it does get you out with a map in hand and in my case where I only have a few opportunities to run them, it means I sometimes have to go out in the wind and the rain – so real training! St Ives this week (bit of a cul-de-sac fest) and Ferndown next week. Have a go if you haven’t already.