As the saying goes, 'there are many a slip twixt cup and lip', so even though we had identified and approached Radnage Village hall as a venue many months before the event, we only confirmed it was definitely going ahead the Monday before. As it turned out, we were their grand re-opening event, as the guidelines that British Orienteering had produced, and the successful running of the Effingham event convinced the hall committee that they could safely host us.

While there are plenty of Bridleways and BOATS in the area, they are not particularly concentrated, so we decided to run a standard format event on an A3 map with the event centre pretty much in the middle, and the course heading up to 6km away in most directions. This allowed us to cover some pretty varied terrain, from the short, sharp hills down in the West Wycombe estate up to the edge of the Chilterns near Chinnor.

Making the main roads out of bounds also had the effect of avoiding the towns, and one competitor returned saying that he had pretty much avoided roads for his whole route, which was great to hear.

The only real issue with the event centre location (other than being in the middle of a global pandemic) was that it was more exposed than most of the course, so that while the sun had come out, it was rather windy and this fooled several people into heading out onto the course with more clothes on than they actually needed.

We were pretty sure that we had set a course that would not be cleared, and this turned out to be the case, with the top 5 competitors all leaving 3 or 4 controls unvisited. Even better, there were a decent variety of routes taken, and controls dropped.

Thanks to Tom, Ian C, Nuno, Dave U, Rachel, Liam and the boys for helping collect controls in afterwards, and hopefully we'll be able to use the hall again in future and make better use of all the facilities available!