March Social 2024Newington, Tuesday 19th March
Vicente Lopez reports:
It was a lovely evening at the Clarks' house, where the start, finish line, and post-event were located for this social, with the race going through Newington and Mayfield. A remarkable number of ESOC runners, dressed in the green, red, and white to celebrate this Italian-themed event, came to take part.
It was great to see people of all different ages. After a briefing, half in Italian and half in English, we were ready to start with the orienteering.
The race was a one-hour score event consisting of 41 controls, with each control worth a different number of points. For example, control 10 was 10 points, control 20 was 20 points, etc. There were some artificial barriers marked on the map with pizza boxes. When you got to the control, you found a tape with either a motivational sentence in Italian or, at ten of the controls, the name of a kind of pizza. Each pizza name gave you 20 extra points, but you had to remember them at the end, which was an extra challenge. Also, a few of the controls had an Italian flag, which gave you 50 extra points, but each runner was only allowed to take one flag during the race.
Once we finished, we enjoyed some Italian drinks and pizza at the Clarks' house, followed by the prize giving. Helen made a great route choice and demonstrating how strong a runner she is, came home in first place with a considerable difference compared to Vicente and Rachel+Jo, who came in second and third place respectively. It was great to see a junior in the top 3! All 3 received some tasty chocolates to share with others, or more likely - demolish themselves!
During the prize giving, Jim Bailey was officially introduced as ESOC Club Development Manager to the club members. Welcome, Jim!
Rachel Rose was also awarded a certificate for having achieved the milestone of 100 events - well done Rachel!
Thanks to the Clark family for hosting this amazing event and offering us a great time at their abode.
Grazie a tutti per essere venuti, ci vediamo al prossimo evento sociale!
Mark Rowe reports on the Turf event:
As we have become accustomed to, a 60 minute Turf event ran at the same time as the orienteering activity and then we all gathered afterwards to devour the pizza in record time. ESOCWalter had planned the event where, taking the Italian theme to the max, the zones were pizza slice shaped and all 70 zones were ingeniously named after a pizza topping or type. Between you and me I think ESOCWalter must be an absolute pizza connoisseur!
Onto the event and a very pleasant evening weather wise greeted us; the zones were spread in normal fashion, reasonably far apart, over the The Grange area, but on the Meadows it was a different story. Here the zones were densely populated (with an eye to keeping the juniors safe off the roads) and those eager for a podium position quickly gravitated towards this area. It was pleasing to see some Turfers attending who we tend to see less often at events such as Cubist, Boneshaker, FeGran - well done all and hopefully see you again soon! The juniors acquitted themselves very well indeed and ran the adults very close; congratulations to the super enthusiastic HedwigOwls on a fabulous 4th place overall, bythesea in 3rd, CoolEsocAds in 2nd who pushed the eventual winner ESOC-Q all the way to the closing moments. In total, a very pleasing 14 turfers took part. Naturally the winners took home some chocolate (if it made it that far) just like the orienteers.
I’d just like to reiterate the thanks above from Vicente towards the organisation and hospitality from the Clark family - a fab night all round!
Full results and details of the Turf event can be seen on the ESOC FTT#15 event page of the Turf website.
See this document for a description of how a Turf event works: Participating in a Turf Event