The Hungarian Night-O Championships were held last night near Ruzsa. Although, the setting was beautiful, I came home very disappointed. In fact, I did an OK race, quite good to my standards, but I was feeling empty. The most exciting minutes of my race were spent analysing the battery status of my lamp. Will it hold on the whole 14,3 km or should I make a pit stop to change the lamp at the public control at 54% of the course. At the end, I opted to stay with what I had (my SILVA 480), and in fact we managed to scrape through the woods. I was very pleased with the lamp after all the disappointment, I had wit her. I finished 15th out of 29 finishers, a massive 27 minutes behind. I had about 15 minutes of mistakes, and I made four larger errors. I fought 85% of my course on my own. I also managed to narrowly edge out some tough competition, like Oszi (7 seconds), Vöcsök and Antal András, by around a minute each.

Map 1 Map 2

But OK, this has really been a fairy tale story so far, what has gone wrong?

Last year, I was the course setter for the Night-O Champs. I was widely criticised for courses, that were deemed too tough and long. On the contrary, a few people said, that it was great, it offered really challenging orienteering at last. In fact, that was my plan - to offer some real orienteering.

Yesterday, I didn't get this feeling of real orienteering. The terrain was very straightforward with the usual flat forest. I never liked to run in forests like these. The roads were very fast, even after 100 minutes of running, I was still averaging under 4-minute kms on the roads (btw. I was flying in my INOV-8 X-Talon 212s). It was almost always faster to go around on roads, than going over the forest. This made the race very easy, even for a very bad night runner, like me. The terrain and the course didn't give me the challenges I was looking for, so I had to look for them elsewhere. That's why, I was thinking a lot about my lamp, of my shape and form (whether it will last) and also that's why I went over some rough forest a couple of times, just to give myself some mental challenge. To be honest, it was boring. Obviously, I can't remember the last time, I was this bored during a serious orienteering course.

So what was the problem? In my mind, course setting was a bigger problem, than the terrain itself. I have never planned a competition course on such flat terrain, and even last night, I wasn't sure, whether an improvement was possible or not, but now I have a very clear vision about it. Yes, it can be improved. By a lot.

The problem with courses in the plains in Hungary is that we get very much the same all the time. This means mostly middle-length legs, with no change of tempo. You are just grinding and grinding and grinding... and then you finish. Boring. So how is it possible to improve all this stuff?

- break the rhythm! Use very short legs (2-3-4 after each other) + very long legs (up to 3 kms). 

- use as difficult control locations as possible. Forget about white forests and think of green, more than ever! This map would have offered some great possibilities for hidden controls, but it just never happened really.

- use more, than 36 controls for a course! For God's sake, we just simply cannot afford courses like the Ultra-long Champs, with 27 kms and 30 controls. The Federation has SI-chips, that are capable of registering 50 controls. For certain championships, we would be more than happy to hire them for M21E for no price, if it results in better courses!

- last year, some of the courses were gaffled. This year, I seriously lacked gaffling, on a terrain, where gaffling would have not made any compromise to the courses. On the present course, I would have made it something like this: S-3 (straight), 4-11 (gaffle AB), 11-16 (gaffle CD), 16-20 (straight), 20-24 (gaffle AB), 24-28 (gaffle CD), 28-F (straight). Right now, we have some terrific GPS-coverage from for example the Norwegian Night-O Champs, from which we can and must learn! I consider myself a course setter, who is working with a really wide set of ideas, but I always get some great inspiration from races like these!

In general, I'm very far from being satisfied with Hungarian competitions. My biggest problem is with middle distance races. Most course setters are by no means aware of what middle distance means. It is very far from a 35-minute orienteering course. For example, this year we had a middle distance race in the streets of a flat town! I wouldn't even call it sprint orienteering, as it was that straightforward! I'm hoping to make a change of how Hungarian course-setters see this. I'm also hoping, that at least the Middle distance Championships will make it to a high quality event in the long-term.

Because this Night-O course was anything, but high quality.

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