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ORIENTEERING ZONE

(This is mostly old stuff as I'm winding down my involvement in O unless it's activities I get paid for.  Sorry about that but the apparent and unfortunate reality is that O doesn't have a long term future other than as an old people's sport, and the old people are quite capable of running it to suit themselves whilst most of the young people do other things.  Hence my switch to the MTB scene.)

Travelling photos (on one of these  free sites that insist you allow them to force-feed the surfers adverts, well, if they've giving away 20M of free space on their servers it's only fair.....  This is located in the sports district of the virtual city "Fortune City".  The virtual city is divided up into about 20 districts and there are many streets in each district; in the sports district all the streets are named after sportsmen, so presumably 'Fowler' refers to Robbie Fowler??

WOC99 pictures and H99

Pictures of me (69kb jpg file "quality = 75")(Actually I was quite impressed at the quality given it's only 69kb total size for the whole photomontage)

Picture of Lone ranger Sweden trail-O shoes made with this ridiculous black material that cuts, abrades, and generally starts falling apart immediately it comes into contact with any vegetation more aggressive than mown grass.  Sweden didn't win any medals in WOC99 (unless they did so in the relay, I haven't seen the results) and these shoes wouldn't win any either.  Also a worn-out 'champion'.  The champion is much cheaper than the Sweden yet has taken perhaps 4 times the punishment of the Swedens, The Champions have been worn for a lot of mapping  (which always seems to wear out shoes rapidly) and general training and abused to a certain extent (kicking branches out of the way on the mountain bike trails in star posts) Why did I buy the Sweden?  They were mid price at intersport and quite comfortable with the insoles removed and they fitted correctly.  Why did I buy the champions?  because they were cheap, 3 for SKr500 or something.  Why don't I use the champions for racing?  Because they didn't have the correct size.  I use these with 2 or 3 pairs of socks (and the standard insole).  (I'd be interested to see how comfortable the correct size of this model is.)  Why don't they use something stronger instead of this black stuff for the Sweden?  That's a good question, synthetic suede is a lot stonger, the problem for the shoe makers is that the material has to be strong but flexible, you can see where the champions have worn due to the continual flexing at the natural flex point, which was caused by the fact that the front of the shoes were not as flexible as one would wish   (which also made them less comfortable). 

But leather just can't cope with sharp bits of wood when it gets wet.  My hiking boots have some very nasty looking surface cuts that were caused by just one hike in Norway when I lost the path going down from a peak and had to 'orienteer' through the woods for 1 or 2 kms.  (This was at 0600 at the end of an all-nighter and I wasn't in the mood to b__gger about.)  That kind of nylon webbing stuff covered in a layer of PVC used to last quite a long time  (eg nokia hectors - anyone remember those? probably not).  But it's annoying that the Swedens in the picture still look quite new and are a good shoe: strong, light and comfortable apart from the obvious damage to the leather. (OK I've several times glued the soles down again plus all the usual tricks eg putting glue along all the stitching...)  Still, I'll buy another pair if I can at the same price and try to attach something over the areas where the first pair wore out, when the replacement shoes are still new.

400 gradation compass!  (14k jpeg file) Take a look at this oddity (the only one I've seen in 34

years' orienteering) on condition that you don't post messages to the newsgroup asking does anyone know how to convert the measurements into mils / radians / degrees / points on the 64 point compass etc. 

Famous first British ascent (70k)

The Art of Coarse Orienteering

(A collection of writings accumulated over the past 25 years.  More work is required on this to get it up to scratch, whether this will ever get done remains to be seen.  But if some keen youngster wanted to take these partially successful scans and correct the errors there might be a lift going to Scotland.)  Come to think of it, if someone wanted to climb a few peaks in the Alps......

NB THESE ARE NOT IN HTML; THE IDEA IS YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO READ THEM  OFFLINE.

ch00text.txt  Introduction to the 'Art of Coarse Orienteering' book.
Not really worth reading, but explains some of the background to the book.  Click here for .wri version

ch01text.txt  The Art of Coarse Course Planning.  What the guidelines didn't tell the planner and what the planner didn't include in his comments in the results.  Click here for .wri version

ch02text.txt  Coarse Controlling.      Essential for controllers.  Make sure the other people involved in the event, not yourself, do the jobs they've agreed to do.   Click here for .wri version

ch04text.txt  The art of Coarse Mapping.  How to get a map completed without going mad first   (well, without going madder than you were to take it on in the first place).
Click here  for .wri version

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