Street orienteering

According to my long term plan, this autumn includes a gentle reintroduction to orienteering, as I have only been to 3 or 4 events this year until now. So off we went to the Eotvos Cup, which is the regular 2-day badge event of the Budapest University Sports Club. The first day was the Budapest Middle Distance Championships while Sunday was the BP Sprint Champs. Both took place in an urban setting in Obuda, which is the Northern part of Buda - using both streets, parks and in some places a fair amount of climb. Some legs were quite tricky where I had to take my own advice, currently published in an article in Tajolo, the BP Orienteering Association's magazine, of planning legs backwards. Still, the biggest handicap, apart from being very unfit and still recovering from illness, was my failing eyesight. The colour of tarmac being that vague, faint pink is a disaster if you wear glasses, as was the fuzziness of the digital print they used.

Not knowing how I was going to feel on the day as well as not wanting to run a badge course yet, I decided to enter on the day and rolled up on the Saturday wanting to run on a Veteran Open course, which is not normally available, but their web site advertised it specially. Needless to say there was no such course. So muggins ended up running the 4km long Open Technical course, which with an untimed run through of about 800m between parts 1 and 2, as well as many legs taking you rather a long way round, gave me a run of nearly 6km. It took me 55 minutes and I wasn't last.

On Sunday we moved Northwards as the start was at the corner of a housing estate I remember as cabbage fields cultivated by Bulgarian market gardeners. I used to be sent there by my mother when I was a girl shopping for vegetables and the farmer liking me so much that he trusted me to pull out whatever I wanted to buy. The run was flat and fast and as I currently do not do fast and furious yet, I plodded round the best I could. Unfortunately, that day I made one mistake as well (see the leg to 5!) but I still wasn't last.

Next weekend the National Sprint Championships are held just up the road and I am expecting a big crowd to stay the night on Saturday. Apart from the usual suspects, Andor, Laci, Koxi and Ildi, there will be an extended family of orienteers from another club, numbering amongst them the lovely lady who came 5th in the paralympic class at the Trail-O World Champinships in Norway this year. She promised to bring her maps, so we can have a look at her courses and photographs as well.

After all this we are off to Stephen's wedding, so next blog is due after that with the piccies from the Pavilion, assuming they let me take pictures inside it. If not, we'll take them outside.