Guildford Orienteers ran an orienteering maze to coincide with the Olympic Torch festivities at Stoke Park. They had an amazing 424 runs through the maze. Linda Pakul’s says, “We were the first pitch the 28,000 horde encountered as they walked up the hill from the entry point and I thought we were pretty impressive with our beautiful feather flags and very visible maze. We were located directly across from the FA pitch which housed the FA Cup for a short period. I have a few more photos which I will send on to some of you. We had a lot of looks but only wary interest to start with until interest caught on, and then we were very busy indeed.

Many of the children ran several times through it. They were finishing one loop, downloading and joining the queue to do it again. We were less successful with parents, who were either afraid to trample the children, afraid of being shown up by the children or just self-conscious at being watched! We maintained a leader board of times during the day and this proved to be very popular with the children, although it did lead to a rash of running under the tapes, leaning over the tapes and just as much as they could get away with in their pursuit to achieve one of the top times. In the end, the fastest loop was 1 minute and 18 seconds, by a girl who was around 10 or 12 years old - a really fast time. In our rehearsals George Simmons (M18) ran the maze with no cheating and achieved 1 minute and 15 seconds, so it just shows you how determined they were.

Each runner received one of the British Orienteering postcards with their name and all the times they achieved written on the back - this whether they completed the course in the right order, cheated, or finished successfully! Every single participant thoroughly enjoyed the event and there was a lot of interest in where they would go to do more of this sort of activity!”

Linda Pakuls

Item posted by Caroline Povey