| Date | Event | Parking | Organiser |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16-18 October Any time |
Forest Training Mallards Pike South |
GL16 7EL | Maprun Gloucestershire |
As we are unable to organise formal events in the Forest of Dean at present, we have decided to extend our summer series of informal orienteering training activities, but with the added difference that these courses will only be available to run for a 3 day period. We hope to have new courses available each fortnight, and by limiting their availability, we will encourage people to run them while they can, to look forward to the next ones, and perhaps to engender some informal competition between runners in your age classes. That said, these are NOT formal events; you run at your own risk, free of charge, and in accordance with government rules for gathering and social distancing.
Travel and Parking
Parking is at New Fancy Car Park, GL16 7EL. The car park closes at 18:30, but these courses are not suitable for night orienteering!
The Area
Typical Forest of Dean mixed woodland, with many forest blocks dominated by a network of ditches. The courses avoid the areas with worst undergrowth, though the bracken has not really died back yet, and so you will encounter it particularly along the edges of paths and tracks. The courses also avoid areas of ongoing forest operations, and if you find yourself approaching one you are off track, should not enter it, and should seek to re-locate. There is one such area marked as Out of Bounds on the course maps.
The courses also avoid the worst of the hilly bits of the forest! Overall, the going is reasonably good.
The Map
A4 1:10,000 ISOM map, 5m contours, LIDAR 2018 based, and selectively updated for this activity.
PDF versions of the course maps, and control descriptions, will be published here a couple of days or so before the start of the activity. The courses themselves can be downloaded from the UK/Gloucestershire/Training folder on the maprun server, again a couple of days or so before the activity window.
The Courses
We plan to provide the same three courses at each of these training activities, the details for this one being as follows:
- Orange: 3.5km, 25m climb, 10 controls
- Green: 4.8km, 55m climb, 10 controls
- Blue: 6.7km, 120m climb, 14 controls
Maps and Control descriptions can be downloaded and printed from these links:
Orange Green Blue Control Descriptions
The Start is on the track that runs alongside the New Fancy Viewpoint area, connecting it to the Family Cycle Trail. To get to the start, walk down through the lower car park, the one on the left as you drive in, down the slope to the bottom track, and turn sharp left back on yourself along the old railway track. The Start is on the path beside two boulders on the left.
The Finish is on the same track midway between the exit from the car park and the junction with the Family Cycle Trail, which is the final control.
Course Notes
These are GPS courses, using maprun technology, so there is no physical infrastructure on the ground. Controls have generally been carefully chosen so as to avoid possible ambiguity in the control circle, where there may be multiple similar features close to each other, but there is no flag to identify the correct one. The only exception to this is in complex ditch areas, where this isn’t possible. In these cases, the feature is either not a ditch, or if it is a ditch, it has a clear attack point and a linear(ditch!) handrail. The purpose of these courses is to give you a run out, and practise route choice and navigation, not to test the accuracy of your GPS or ability to control pick inside the circle amongst a maze of identical features.
With this in mind, the punch tolerance for all courses will be set at 25m, whilst the controls have in the main been checked using a 5m punch tolerance.
Maprun has various facilities which you can choose to use if you are inexperienced orienteer, or you would like some form of backup on a course with no physical controls to confirm that you have visited the controls.
- The courses are set up to allow you optionally to display your current location and track, should you wish to do so. To use this facility, you simply enable these options by tapping Options and Setting before tapping Go to Start. Note that you cannot enable them once you have tapped Go to Start. You may find this useful as a novice. If more experienced, these options can also be useful in the event that you think you are in the right place, but the phone hasn’t beeped to confirm. You carry your phone hidden away, so not using the location to aid your navigation, but if lost, or if you are sure you are in the right place, you can get your phone out and have a look at where it thinks you are.
- maprun has a facility called HITMO – Hey I Think I Missed One – which you can use post run to add to your result any controls which you believe you visited, but the phone did not record. One of the limitations of GPS and phone technology is that sometimes the phone location will be lagging behind your actual position, and the accuracy of the GPS location is affected by things like tree cover and deep valleys etc. HITMO will check your track against the control locations and will allow you to add ‘punches’ for controls it thinks you visited, but which did not register. You access it from the results screen on your phone, using the menu icon on the top right corner of the screen. So, if you are fast and confident in your navigation, and are sure you are in the right place for a control, there should be no need to loiter waiting for the phone to catch up and beep and tell you so…..you can keep going, and review your track with HITMO after the Finish.
Technology
You will use the maprunF or maprunG app to record your time and punches. If you have not used maprun before, you need to download the app from the relevant app store before you travel to the event. You should also verify that the app is correctly installed on your phone, has the necessary permissions to use the location and storage services, and ideally has been tested by means of a simple local test at home. You can find plenty of information on how to set up and test your phone on the Getting Started page of the Maprun Gloucestershire website.
You should also download the event to your phone before travelling. Whilst the app does not need a phone signal to work, it does clearly need one to download the course, and there is a strong chance that there wont be one in the forest. Note that this is particularly important for maprunG users; maprunG does require a phone signal to download the course to your watch, and to upload it back to your phone afterwards. In that case you may have to wait until you have a signal before uploading.
Timings
These courses will be available to download and run only on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the 16-18th October. After that time they will be taken down from the maprun server, but may be re-published at some future date. You can run them at any time during that period. They are free of charge.
Safety
The courses cross no roads, and are suitable for younger runners if suitably experienced, or accompanied.
You run entirely at your own risk. Bear in mind that you are likely to be off-path for significant parts of the courses, and although this is a fairly populous part of the forest, you could be out of sight of paths and passers by if you were to fall. You are strongly advised, if running alone, to let someone know where you are going, when you will be back, and make arrangements to tell them that you are indeed back safely.
You are likely to encounter walkers and cyclists in the area, and should take appropriate measures to maintain social distances.
Queries
If you have comments or queries on the courses or technology, please email maprun@ngoc.org.uk