The last time WSX competed in the CompassSport Cup final was all the way back in October 2009. I was only an M16 running Light Green at the time, and some of our Current M/W16s hadn’t even been born yet. The 2009 results are still hosted on Leicester’s website and longstanding members of the club will find some familiar names in there.

Nobody can say we haven’t been trying, we dutifully send a team to the qualifying round every year but have always been pipped to the post by some of the larger ‘small’ clubs. It’s hard when only 1/5 or 1/6 teams can qualify.
This year, after some suggestions I made to the rules committee many years ago, the number of qualifying spots was increased for the ‘small club’ category and we just beat Wimborne in the heats to qualify. The only problem? The final was in Redcar – a mere 330 miles away.

Regardless, the club committee quickly jumped to work gauging interest and booking group transport and accommodation. Special thanks to Bruno and Julie for the admin on the logistics. After some late withdrawals due to injury and other commitments, we were left with a team of 14 people. A couple of runners agreeing to run up a course (or two) gave us exactly the minimum of 13 scores for a full team with one run spare on the junior courses.

The Journey

Seven of the club set off at 8:30 from Poole in a minibus, picking up another three on route. Two travelled down together from Scotland and the final two had made their own way up there to make a weekend of it. After rest stops and the standard British motorway traffic caused by weather conditions, roadworks and other incidents, we finally made it just after 17:00 to the youth hostel on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. By chance, we found most of the rest of the hostel was occupied by Harlequins Orienteering Club.

The whole team met in a local pub for the Saturday evening meal. Fish and chips was the most popular option with two of the team opting for the most prominent item on the pubs menu, the Parmo. For those unfamiliar with this local culinary tradition, the ‘Teeside Parmesan’ is Middlesbrough’s variation of a standard chicken parmesan. It consists of a large breaded cutlet of chicken topped with béchamel sauce and cheese – also served with chips, naturally. Please don’t ask about the calorific or nutritional content.

The Event

The Final was hosted on South Gare, a set of sand dunes rather similar in appearance to Studland with equally complex contour detail. The assembly area was only a short walk along the beach from the parking, and where we discovered the first challenge the planner had in store for us. The finish leg for everyone was a punishing 260 m along the sand, finishing in a slight incline as you ran around the bend into the finish. The CompassSport Cup final has a Golden Boot award for the fastest finish split, just to add some extra motivation. This was won in a blistering time of 43 seconds for the men and 55 seconds for the women.

The weather had been a concern with such an open competition and assembly area, but on the day it turned out very pleasant with no rain, light wind, and even some sunshine. There was a a good atmosphere with all the club tents lining the finish run in and we staked the club banner in prime position on the inside of the bend for maximum visibility. Sadly, we didn’t manage a team photo as we never had everyone together at the same time on the day, but there’s a montage of every participant at the bottom.

Our strategy was simple: get round the course cleanly with no mispunches! We knew that we were never going to challenge for the podium with the smallest complete team, so our aim was to make a good showing and not come last on the leaderboard.

The courses themselves were technically challenging with the added physicality of running on sand for much of the course. There was a large network of small paths across much of the area, but we know from Studland that relying on indistinct paths in dunes can easily lead you astray. Keeping contact with the map was vital. If you lost track of where you were, one bit of dune looked a lot like another and there might not be an easy spot to relocate from without backtracking. Most competitors had a 1:7,500 map, but the longest courses used a 1:10,000 map which added extra challenge in reading the fine detail.

The courses are all up on routegadget for you to look at and judge for yourself how easy it was to go wrong.

The results

In the club results we finished 17th out of 22 teams in the small club (Trophy) competition, and were not the last team with a full set of scores. Most of the teams ahead of us had many more people entered and spare runners whose scores they could discard.

There were a few standout performances in the individual results:

• Lyra Medlock, running up two age classes to compete in Women’s Open (Blue), finished 8/78 (4th among small clubs) – only a few minutes behind some of the country’s top W21s
• Emma Heckford finished 9/26 on Junior Women Short Green (3rd among small clubs)
• Jolyon Medlock, running up to Short Brown, finished 21/92 (10th among small clubs)

Thank you to everyone who took part, fast or slow, for showing up for the team. Everyone completed their course, scored us some points, and I think had a good time.
A big thank you to Jon and Richie for driving us up there, and getting back at 23:00 on Sunday. Any complaints about the choice of music in the minibus on the return journey should be directed to the DJ.

With the rule changes, I hope it will be sooner than 16 years until we next qualify for the final, though we might exercise some discretion on how far we’re willing to travel to go there!