Thanks to Rob for organising/planning. Full results are HERE

Thank you to the small band of enthusiastic folk who turned out at Selkirk Hill on a beautiful evening. The area is a lovely spot at this time of year although much of the vegetation is very jaggy and best given a wide berth.   In hindsight the course was a tad too long but thanks for the positive comments and I was pleased to hear there  were a variety of routes chosen.

As ever it was very much a team effort to make the event happen.  Thanks to Lindsey, for the technical stuff, including help with the course planning software, dealing with entries and producing results as they happened.  Tidying up after the event  was done in quick time, thanks to Eileen, Judith and Paul for volunteering to do this without hesitation.

Rob

Full results are HERE

Thanks to Eb and Robin for a joint effort of planning and organising. You’ll see a negative split time to the Finish – caused by the time on the last control drifting a bit since it was programmed, all now fixed for next time.

Next up is Selkirk Hill on 21/5, get your entries in by breakfast time on Thursday morning (15/5). See the event page for full details.

Full results are HERE

Thanks to Robin for organising/planning the first of the sprint series – he even managed a lovely sunny evening !

Planner’s Report: Thanks to all who came to the first of the RR Summer Sprints at Gordon Community Woods. Several folk commented on how the woodlands are becoming more open and pleasant for orienteering as the years go by. Congratulations to Ian Maxwell for storming round the course in under twenty minutes – and this despite the planner putting a control in the wrong place. Apologies for that, and the lesson is always to check the location of a control site from more than one direction! Hope it was still an enjoyable run for those who participated.

Thanks to everyone who came along to our Sprint event at Tweedbank. It’s not often that we can offer a event which was so convenient for public transport. We strongly believe in supporting local businesses so our prizes were all sourced locally – Tempest Brewery in Tweedbank and Simply Delicious (Tablet) in Melrose.

Although we now have mapped many urban areas all across the Borders, Tweedbank was our very first urban area (in 1989) and I do hope you can now see why.

Come and join us in May if you can for our series of 4 Wednesday evening sprint events in a range of woodland and parkland settings.

Andrew Armstrong, Organiser

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I managed to get the winning times fairly close to the 12-15 minute guideline for all courses so I was happy with that.

The Championship courses were deliberately fairly straightforward in the first half, tempting runners into running too hard or getting complacent, but you still had to stay in control and leave enough in the tank for the hill and some tricky navigation in the second half. The SOUL courses tried not to be a re-run of the first race so everyone had different controls for this, and most courses visited new areas of the map which I used to inject some long legs with at least 2 route choices.

I’ve dug out the 1989 version of the map, a handrawn 1:5000 affair with the only housing being north of the pond. The houses at the south-west corner were under construction but there were only fields between the pond and the industrial estate. No railway station of course ! It’s been an ongoing mapping project for various club members for the past 36 years and it’s still ongoing with the industrial estate constantly changing but it remains one of our prime areas.

A few thanks: Tweedbank Primary School, the Animal & Plant Health Agency (next to the Finish), various residents and businesses that let me put controls on their property, John Tullie for pre-running some provisional courses and finding routes I hadn’t anticipated, Paul McGreal RR for manning the computers which allowed me to plan for a change, Allie Wilson Craw for Controlling, and all the RRs who helped on the day.

Lindsey Knox, Planner

Results: