OK Nuts Results – Hankley Common
Routegadget – draw your route!
Official’s Comments
Organiser
It was a great pleasure and privilege organising the OK Nuts National event this year which was also a commemorative event for one of the founders of SLOW, Chris Morris, who sadly passed away this year and was the founder of this event 45 years ago.
Thank you to all the competitors who took part in this event – I hope you all enjoyed the courses and challenges that Andy Jones planned for you on an incredible area of heathland and forest in the South East.
Andy has spent many hours on Hankley Common updating the map and planning the courses having to juggle his visits around access restrictions due to military operations and film production operations. For example, we had no access for most of October due to a film production crew being on site for most of the month! Thank you, Andy.
I would also like to thank our controller, Sue Crickmore from South Downs, who spent many hours considering the courses, checking control sites and map updates within the above restrictions and covering some 20km over the weekend checking everything was in the correct position. Thank you also for your comments and advice to me as organiser. We really appreciate your assistance Sue and hopefully your legs are recovering well.
However, the event would not be possible at all without the effort of the 36 SLOW volunteers who made the day happen and make my life as organiser a lot less eventful than it could have been – thank you all very much.
I would like to offer my congratulations to the OK Nuts trophy winners for 2024 who are:
Men’s Open Harrison McCartney M21 LOK 74:53
Women’s Open Katherine Bett W21 SN 94:36
Junior M16- Jake Hilton M14 SN 45:31
Junior W16- Charlotte Lovegrove W16 SN 65:33
I asked David May to produce a tribute for Chris Morris for this event. You will find this tribute below which not only remembers Chris but also the creation of SLOW itself – Thank you David.
Finally, we could not have had this event without the permission and cooperation of the Army and Landmarc who granted us permission to use the area in conjunction with a military training exercise. Hopefully none of you encountered the military exercises on your courses – I had agreed with them where each of us with be during the day, unlike Sue who found one of the controls in the centre of a military advancement and recovery exercise as she was checking the controls on Sunday morning.
Gordon Parker – SLOW – Organiser
Planner
Planning at Hankley was a great pleasure, enhanced by the option of a 2-hour return bike ride from our house in Guildford on fine weather days. My early visits established that the fire in 2022 had left the 2019 SLOW map significantly out of date. Luckily I then discovered that BAOC had a 2023 Roger Maher update which Colin Dickson kindly let us have. I taped most of the control sites in July and August, most of which survived until the event.
My aim was to plan courses which offered some longer legs with route choices and opportunities to run straight through some of the most runnable terrain. There is some superb woodland on the map, which all courses were designed to visit. The fire cleared much of the undergrowth on the open bowl and the hills to the north, which enabled some long legs with straight running options that haven’t really there before. I enjoyed looking out from Kettlebury ridge during the competition, watching competitors criss-crossing the bowl in fine form. I hope the undergrowth doesn’t grow back too quickly!
The black course was planned for a 65-70 minutes elite winning time, with other course distances in proportion as per the planning guideline ratios. I purposely erred on the long side on account of the good runnability of much (but not all) of the area. There are a small but growing number of older competitors for whom the ratios may not be appropriate – e.g. my calculation is that the W85 target winning time on very short green course 0.28 x black course length would be 99 minutes. I’d be interested in any feedback on this. Some competitors managed to beat their age group target winning times, congratulations! Was this because the black course was too short, or because they are very good orienteers?
I made a few map corrections in the vicinity of control sites, but the green mapping could do with a general update. Apologies to any competitors whose runs were affected by any significant unmapped green. Also shallow gully end no. 211 was further north than shown on the map, which I hadn’t noticed until a competitor pointed it out.
Thanks to all the SLOW members who helped; to my wife Karen, Steph, Simon, Duncan and GO chum Pete who hung and/or woke up all the controls; to Gordon for organising; to Sue for controlling in her very thorough and helpful fashion; and to all competitors for entering, taking part and making our efforts worthwhile.
Andy Jones
Controller
It was an absolute treat to get to run round and control at Hankley, with the glorious patches of mossy woodland being my particular favourite. It was really impressive to climb the hill above assembly and watch runners going in all directions across the bowl, as Andy’s courses made the most of the unusual runnability of the area.
Andy had his courses mostly planned and sites taped by the end of summer, which turned out to be a very good thing when I turned up for a second session of checking to find the film company in the process of taking over the area for a month. This did mean that the final stages of course agreement, map corrections and course file production got compressed into a period of about 5 days. We did make quite a lot of map updates, especially to the vegetation around control sites as some areas of green seemed to have expanded. My apologies for not spotting the extra thicket on a line into 196, which caused problems when combined with the line obscuring a re-entrant and having spent quite a lot of time walking up and down the ditches around 211, I lost sight of the fact that it was all a bit further down the hill than mapped.
Gordon had the organisation superbly under control, which involved a lot of work in liaising with the Army and Landmarc and trying to find out if the foresters were going to come in and start chopping things down just before the event. His use of radio controls meant that we could tell when runners had been through different sections of the courses; particularly useful when a couple of runners had been out a long time.
Most memorable moment: checking control 218 on the morning to find the Army staging a practice attack on it.
Sue Crickmore
Chris Morris
Many of you may not have heard of Chris Morris. This won’t be that surprising since, following a move from London to the Forest of Dean a quarter of a century ago, he left the bulk of his orienteering behind him.
An anti-establishment man, he dropped out of Oxford Physics to become a successful professional photographer and took up orienteering shortly afterwards. He did not get on with the blazer and tie brigade running the sport at the time so, in 1976, he and a few others set up a new club “provisionally known as South London Orienteers and Wayfarers” with the wonderful acronym of SLOW.
Chris had attracted a core of elite runners to the club, one of whom was Mike Wells-Cole whose tragic early death in 1976 was, and still is, commemorated by the OK Nuts Trophy. And, of course, it was Chris Morris who helped instigate the first race in 1977, today’s race being the 45th in the series.
Chris planned various OK Nuts races too. SLOWPRINT records the one in December 84 here at Hankley where he “sadistically planned the run-in as an 80 metre leg with a 30 metre climb”. SLOWPRINT is the club newsletter and was, of course, started by Chris in the early days.
Chris was much more than just this however. He was the ultimate club man, full of ideas for developing SLOW which helped it become one of the very best clubs in the country.
He was a great enthusiast for relays, especially the Harvester, and he would organise club tours to far flung events too. Oh, and he helped Ned Paul start CompassSport alng the way.
Chris’s health deteriorated significantly in his last year or so and he sadly left us in December last year at the age of 82.
The 10th anniversary edition of SLOWPRINT which, of course, Chris set up, started by saying
“There are many individuals without whom SLOW would not have the presence it does today. We will single out the name of Chris Morris for especial thanks …”
So it is particularly appropriate that today’s event is being held in memory of Chris and I hope you can join me now in showing your appreciation for him in the usual way …
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