CompassSport Cup Heats 2023

By Mindaugas

One of the most awaited races of the year – CompassSport Trophy – took place on the 12th of March at the Worthlodge Forest. The event gathered (likely) a record size squad of DFOK runners – 42 registered orienteers, with some club members coming even all the way from Sweden. The large “blue/white” crowd gathered by the finish made sure that everyone was cheered on at the end of the race and gave their best for the finishing sprint. On top of that, it was nice of Luke and Antoine to have brought some home-made cookies and crepes for everyone to share and to replenish energy levels post-race.

DFOK ended up taking the second place with 1274 points, only 5 points away from the Saxons club, and 1 point ahead of the Mole Valley club. This would not have been possible without great runs by most of DFOK orienteers, and exceptional runs by Luke and Madeleine who were first not only in their age groups but in the Green Men and Short Green courses overall. Also, great run by club's youngest runner, Isla, who will, hopefully, bring many points in the future CompassSport Trophy races.

The weather was cooperative for the race and, even though, it was cloudy, there was no rain on the day. The forest was quite wet, so the mud played some role, especially when running downhill on the road leading from start as everyone had to run there, but most of the other roads were not too muddy. It was nice that the open areas were quite runnable, and the forest mostly empty of brambles, or at least Brown course did not take to any worse areas.

The Brown course was quite interesting with multiple legs requiring to make route choice decisions as well as to have good execution. To note, for the first checkpoint it was a good decision to immediately run in the forest instead of running downhill the muddy road, as running on the road was slow and made reading the map difficult. Couple interesting legs in terms of route choices to look into for the Brown course were “4 – 5” and “18 – 19”.

For the beginning of leg “4 – 5”, most straight option was to hit the small paths then run through “white” forest and then search for the opening in the crossable fence (blue route). ). The route seems to be quite straight with least distance to run, but if looking more closely, one can see that the paths have a lot of turns, so the route is not necessarily that short, and it requires some precision to find the paths.

In case the paths were missed, it was a risk to get stuck in the 'green' forest patches which might be quite slow to run through. Alternative (red route) was to run around on open areas. This route was slightly longer in distance but required less attention and was easier to execute – the fastest time for the leg in the race was recorded for the variant of the red route.

The leg “18 – 19” was quite straightforward on the first look, but taking into account that it was in the end of the race, with fatigue setting in, the risk of picking non-optimal route was higher than in the start of the race. There were two options to run around either on left (red route) or right (purple route) – the purple route being slightly shorter and having easier attack point to the control than the red one. The third option (blue route) was to go straighter, and was a bit of a gamble on running conditions in the semi-open areas with decent attack point as the border of big semiopen area is marked as visible. The winning split of race winner was by using similar route to the blue one.