Cambridge University
Orienteering Club

Today was the last day of training tour, which meant everyone spent the morning finding easy things to clean so that we were too busy to clean the hard things. Eventually this didn't work any more, so we did the hard cleaning: scraping pans, fixing the forever-flushing toilet, and decontaminating the main room of suit-dresses. Having sterilised the area of residual sartorial crime, we went to the cars and drove out of Wales. In Harry's car, the navigator fell asleep, so they arrived in the right place at the right time. Heather's car was not so fortunate - Paul remained fully conscious and was thus able to make a subtle diversion to the wrong side of the Severn Estuary. Satisfied that Wales had not detached itself from the rest of the country since last weekend, Paul and Heather turned around, headed to the Forest of Dean, and promptly ran out of fuel. This was adjudged to be a Bad Thing, but there was a tour champs to be run, so it was forgotten about for the time being.

The tour champs proceeded thusly. Paul went first with all the kites, dropping them at allegedly non-random locations in the feature-free forest. Heather, Harry, James, Jeremy, and Ben followed, miraculously all finding all of the controls, and Zuzka collected. CUOC recommends that allowing the first starter to choose where the controls are and forcing the last starter to carry them all the way round the course is a good way to neutralise the late-start advantage. The forest was very squidgy, completely devoid of map detail, and only moderately peng in places. This was good, because we had spent too much time on the slidey, intricate, utterly pengaluscious dunes of the Gower*, and needed to be reminded that for every sandy paradise there are many more mediocre English skogs. The results in full are below, listed in order of response to Paul's question on the group chat:

Therefore Ben wins for being the only person to record a time, while James also wins for naming the smallest number. Harry and Heather both win a little bit for reporting their numbers to 2 decimal places. Jeremy, Paul and Zuzka do not win.

Aidan also claimed to have "bashed out a cheeky 28min on the way back home yesterday" but we aren't sure if that refers to his course time or the amount of extra sleep he actually got by leaving a day early. If he indeed did run the course that fast just days before his BIG target race**, CUOC recommends he wear an additional pair of Vaporflys to offset any tiredness in his legs. In any case, Aidan was disqualified for not visiting any of the flags, all of which were still in the bunkhouse.

Once the tour champs was over we got changed, ate rice sandwiches, and explained to Ben how he could make the sky more rad even though its already his full time job. Then we all went our separate ways, two cars fueled by petrol and one by pure Northern grit.

*Cefn Bryn not included.

**That race is the poultry run (the dictionary definition of a 'tepid veggie's' race), a race in which fleshing out every last morsel of training can really chew away at those beefy PBs. If Aidan (tou)can have a swift run to duck across the line and finches first, that would be a pheasant surprise. It would make his larking around, fowl-ly leaving early, a less bitter pill to swallow, and we'll stop grousing about him being such a bustard.