This weekend started extremely early, with a 7:30am pick up at campus. Alexandra struggled to walk down to the Sainsbury's with somehow even more bags than usual. Once we had got on the road, the jam was started meaning Joel and Alexandra tried to get as much Hozier on as possible whilst Adam combatted this with The Wurzels. Katie hadn’t parted her hair, which turned into a group effort to do so. Alexandra did her best but it turns out that Katie can part hair better without seeing than a whole MPV combined – in Alexandra’s defence she was in the back on the van and had to reach over the seat! Our race preparation started off strong in the MPV with some map analysis, trying to decipher where the planners might send us and cleared our dibbers with the clear SI box Harry BH had stolen from BOK (gasp!). Katie and James (the resident Welshies) decided that we needed some club remixes of Sosban Fach and Calon Lan, much to the lack of interest from anyone else. Harry introduced the group to the existence of an orienteering themed songs, which Adam became very interested in and put them on regularly for the rest of the trip – one for the MPV Classics playlist? I think so! Only downside to this is that the rest of us were singing “You and Me (Orienteering Version)” as we ran our courses in the hail on Carreg Goch.
After some interesting parking from Ethan whilst James and Katie pointed out all of their friends from SBOC, we got to the arena to set up the tent, and most importantly: the feather flag! With a steep climb to the start, we set off early to give enough time to fold waterproofs for streamlined running, warming up and having a look at the example maps. We all came back alive, despite the weather doing its best to knock us down. Joel successfully completed the most difficult course (over 14 kms!), with Katie, James, Harry, Tom, and Adam also completing their courses! Alexandra and Ethan strategically skipped parts of the course to prevent further injury and not lose any limbs to frostbite in the hail. After a week full of exercise, Anna took on the role of content creator for this race, getting some fab videos and pictures of BUMC athletes at the start as she was very wisely saving her legs for the next day’s relay. Most people stayed upright on their courses, which is quite an impressive feat considering the steep and rocky terrain. James and Katie were roped into helping out with handing out prizes for every category, in a sport with competitors from the age of 10-90 years old that’s a lot of prizes – safe to say they were very busy before and after they raced. Back at the arena, Alexandra said hi to practically everyone that she had ever met when she was a junior orienteer, some considered testing out the zip line (might also have been Alexandra) and others went to greet the menagerie of animals at the campsite/arena – this included goats and emus!
More Orienteering songs were listened to on the way to the scout hut, and our drivers were once again challenged with the tight entrance to the track for the car park. We dumped our stuff in the hut and began to prep for dinner. Alexandra accidently bought too much pasta but we had all run a lot in the hail on a Welsh mountain so we were very hungry. Guess how many university students it takes to turn on an oven? Somehow 2 Engineers and a BioMed student had to put their brains together for a sophisticated plan – we just pressed all the buttons in a variety of orders, do not try this at home, you could blow up your house! We were just very committed to the garlic bread. Adam decided to eat all of the pasta that was bought and then he went to Morrisons for some trifle (he has a trifle eating problem apparently – caused by the Traitors somehow). We shared the trifle while sitting on our camping mats as ShUOC took over the table causing Adam to learn how to cross his legs for the first time since primary school. Alexandra remembered for once that she is, in fact, lactose intolerant and denied having some trifle or tiramisu but she did not forget to mess up her geography, tiramisu is French, right? Harry decided that this was the perfect time to complete some of his coursework and Anna filled us in on the goings-ons in Bear Flat like a true Facebook mum. To finish off the evening, we played some Katie in the middle with a bag of clothes before all promptly falling asleep, tired from a long day.
Due to no one setting an alarm, we all slept through our intended wake up time and we did not have any nearly as interesting breakfasts on this trip (no Eva means no odd breakfasts it seems?) but Tom completed his carb-loading with a whole bagel and some honey. Harry decided that sleep was not over yet so went to brush his teeth while still in his sleeping bag. Anna started her pre-race prep early with a quick demonstration of some running around the scout hut. Our extra sleep did not affect the schedule for the day and we left at 8am, leaving ShUOC to clean up the scout hut. Sadly this event arena had no exotic animals or ziplines, instead it had mud, a LOT of mud. We found somewhere reasonably dry to pitch our tent after much deliberation on what classed as “way higher bits of ground” in a relatively flat field before our first leg runners of the Men’s Premier (Ethan and Harry) got ready for the mass start. Even with it being Ethan’s first relay mass start and mass starts being generally the most stressful thing ever (Alexandra’s personal opinion), both had great runs! Katie was our first leg runner on the Women’s Premier and she also had a fabulous run even with some ditch related issues at the end; doing a run in with only one shoe could be a skill for the CV (or even Mahara…). All of the rest of our runners had great but very muddy runs with it being many people’s first ever Category A relay event – great experience of climbing steep hills and falling in various muddy puddles for all (except Adam and Tom, they apparently “stayed upright” though we’re not sure if that is very believable). Alexandra made sure to make a fool of herself like usual and deck it on the run in – in front of everyone who was watching prize giving.
With all of us getting very muddy, we were not allowed into the MPV until we were in slightly cleaner clothes meaning that, like true orienteers, we changed in a car park. We had a slight set back with Joel losing his phone in the arena, and the organisers being selective about the information of the phone they had found – is it a Samsung with a navy and black case or not? Once we got on the road it was fairly uneventful - probably because we all wanted to get home quickly for a shower. There was of course some more MPV classics including the newly discovered orienteering songs and Welsh club songs played on the way home. The city dwellers were dropped off at Sainsburys which left our lovely MPV drivers with the exciting job of cleaning up a muddy MPV and taking home any dirty gear that needed washing.
Hopefully everyone got all their laundry done,
Alexandra
Orienteering Captain 25/26