Training Log Archive: Bruce

Melbourne Forest Loop
My first attempt in 2014. Now that my Sprint season is over, it is time to get some forest strength back.
There was lots of dry grass, but the grass seeds were not too bad. There also seemed to be more fallen trees than I remember last year.
This was a long way off my best time of 35 minutes in 2006 - some of this is due to the course, but more is probably due to my age.

C • Note to Sat race 1

Dozer's Dock run, plus an extra lap of the tan with Racer.

2014 Melbourne Park & Street Championships
A course
1st place 40:21
2nd Peter Hobbs 44mins
3rd Andrew Rowan 44mins



This was a great Park & Street map. For this type of orienteering, the complexity, map reading and detail was intense. After a couple of months of Sprint Orienteering I found this quite easy and I was able to run at full speed. However, I think many of the finalists struggled with the extra complexity and this slowed them down a bit.

Congratulation to Peter Hobbs on his excellent 2nd place. I think that his Sprint Orienteering experiences in Canberra and Brisbane certainly contributed to his great result.

A relaxing day in Brisbane with my family.

NOL Sprint Final
Kelvin Grove
1st in B final and 3rd fastest time in M21E.


This map was used 2 years ago, and I remembered it being very complex. There was construction and we were told that the right hand route to #1 was not passable. The left route looked obvious to me and I didn't even see a right hand route. I even wondered if I had been given the right map, so I did a quick check of the control descriptions.
On the way to #3 I started looking ahead at route choice, and over-ran the control by 10m, losing 10 seconds.
I went left and right to 5 and I probably should have gone right from the start.
At 6 I navigated to the canopy as directed by my control descriptions. The control was misplaced in the clearing down the steps. Most people would have lost at least 10 seconds if they navigated correctly. Oscar commented that Henry happened to go straight to it and Oscar was a bit annoyed.
I approached 7 from the bottom, expecting to find a gap to run up. The container was almost flush against the wall, so I had to go to plan B and run around it.
8 was frustrating. I navigated left around the garden beds, then right around the building through a canopy. This led directly to an unmapped solid wall. I actually had to climb a set of stairs to get through.
Frustrated by these series of events, I then accelerated. I took a good route choice to the right on leg 10 and I started to move through the early starters.
At 12 and 13 I managed to guess the correct levels and waste no time. Luck was finally going my way.
I went left to 14 which involved a lot of stairs. The right route was longer but may ahve been faster by a few seconds.
Again I was slowed by stairs to the left on 15, when right was longer but faster. However, I was navigating very accurately and moving well.
The last loop involved some tricky and dark underpasses. I had a good understanding of what was mapped here, and I went through another 4 or 5 runners that appeared confused. Most of them tagged along but I took the lead and ran away from most of them.

Many control sites felt like they were trying to hide the control, especially those ones in the dark. Ideally I would like to see sprint courses where the emphasis is on route choice rather than searching on multiple levels for control sites that cannot be shown clearly on the map.

C • Controls and Sprint 7