York City Park Race
Bank holiday Monday saw the annual York City Park race taking place and Jonny made the trip across the water to compete. Organised by Eborienteers, the race started with a Trail-O competition around Yorks railway museum, this is an un-timed stage where competitors make there way around an orienteering course. At each checkpoint they are confronted with a choice of four controls, centimetres apart, and have to identify from the map which control is in fact at the correct location.
Competitors then moved on to the start of the actual race where they had their Trail-O marked and were penalised 10 seconds for each wrong answer. Jonny had one wrong answer and thus sat out a 10 second penalty before setting off. Having never run using a city orienteering map before the first few controls were collected cautiously whilst getting used to the map. Plenty of route choice was offered between controls and the fast nature of the event meant you paid significantly for small mistakes. A mistake at control number 8 meant Jonny dropped 21 places down to 40th place. One feature of these events different from normal orienteering is that competitors are not permitted to cross ’black line features’ and Jonny’s unawareness of this rule not only got him a slap on the wrist from some narky OAP, but also meant he lost more time while she had to get her point across – you live and learn not only to not jump over walls but also to carry a Werthers original to keep an old dear happy should it be needed! Running at a later start time than other competitors meant that the streets had filled up with more shoppers later in the day, dodging some of them proved tricky, and the clear narrow ally ways were welcome space in which to run flat out away from the busy main streets.
The top two runners came in around the half hour mark two minutes clear of third place with Jonny finishing a further 6-7mins behind in 36th place out of 113 runners. Disappointing not to make the top 20, but an excellent race non the less and looking forward to doing similar events in the future.
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