SELOC Successes
A busy week, with a couple of winter leagues reaching their conclusions. First up was MDOC’s Street League where the 8th event at Gee Cross on Tuesday night saw Matt Driver yet again win by a mile – or 116 points to be strictly accurate, since it was a score event. That now gives him the full set of 4 qualifying results so should see him zoom up the table, but final league tables haven’t yet been published so we may have to wait until the prizegiving event at Urmston on 12 March to find out. Paul Turner was our only other member competing on Tuesday, but he was suffering from a dodgy knee so was unaccustomedly low in the results at 35th.
Saturday night saw the last event of the NW Night League, staged by DEE at Nettleford Wood near Delamere. Only Kev Latham (15th on Blue) and Eric Burton (7th on Green) made it across there and meant Kev had attended all 5 races. Final league positions have been published and should be on the NWOA website before long but Steve Wilson is our best placed man in 3rd on Men’s Open ahead of Mark Sammon in 5th whilst Cath Wilson completed a family double as our top woman, 5th in Women’s Open class from just one race. Kev was SELOC’s best in the M50+ class, coming 9th .
DEE were clearly busy on Saturday with a Schools League event at Little Budworth in the morning that the Williams family got to. Ian ran Green, finishing 7th, whilst Joanne was 26th on Light Green and Rosalind 27th on the White course. PFO had an event the same day at Gawthorpe, near Burnley which brought the Wilson family out in strength. Steve won the “Technical ABC” course while Anna and Daniel did the Yellow, finishing 5th and 11th respectively. John Nuttall ran the Light Green and was placed 7th.
John was back out the following day competing at AIRE’s 50th birthday event on Ilkley Moor where he was 28th on the Green course, well ahead of Steve Round in 49th. But it was Michael Hood who had the best SELOC run, finishing 19th on the Blue course. There was a historical race on offer to show what orienteering was like 50 years ago. A good number tried it (though not our trio from what I can see) using old maps dating back to a 1:25,000 OS map plus old-style ink stamps, pin punches and control cards. I’d half expected the organisers to be still checking control cards, calculating times in their heads and typing up results but they have broken with the spirit and published full results on the internet. No split times though! Wonder if they’ll post out duplicated copies of the full results list in 3 weeks’ time, just to make it fully authentic.
We had more SELOC runners at SROC’s Tim Watkins Trophy event, also on Sunday, at Silver How in the Lakes. This is a tough event by design so appealed more to our mountain marathon runners. Matt Driver had our best result in 5th on Men’s Open, with Mark Sammon in 16th. Kev Latham rounded off a demanding weekend running Men’s Vets, where he finished 32nd while new member Chris Taylor retired from that same MV course – control 5 appears to have cost him lots of time after a promising start.
Upcoming Events
Final event of SROC’s Street League is on Wednesday 6th in Cottam, Preston, with a prizegiving event a week later at Freckleton so let’s see if Matt Driver can hold on to his top spot there, and whether it is Josie and Darren or Ed and Anne that come out ahead on handicap scores in the pairs competition.
Next weekend is the Northern Champs weekend in Sheffield, with a UK Urban League event on Saturday in the interestingly named and intricate Ponderosa estate, but entries for Sunday’s forest event are now only available on non-championship courses. The following weekend is all hands to the pump for our CompassSport Trophy match at Bampton Common, Penrith. Plus don’t forget that 10 March also sees entry fees go up for the British Champs in Yorkshire on 5 May.
Club League
More events have now been identified for the League and tweaks made to the scoring system in light of further suggestions received. Details are on the website The next event is our CompassSport match at Bampton Common so yet another reason to be there.