Comments

Planner's Comments

Firstly a big thankyou to all who continued to give your support by attending the Chasing Sprint on the rescheduled date. It was a massive disappointment to have to cancel the original event, so it was great to see so many people enjoying themselves on a nice spring day at the weekend, and combined with the LOC's Graythwaite Regional Event it made a great weekend of orienteering.

Bishop Woods is a fantastic area for an event like this. It is small and compact, but combines fast running in the white forest to the north and middle of the area, with low visibility slow-run in the south, and a variety of rock and contour detail throughout.

In planning the courses my aims were to make them enjoyable, to provide technically challenging orienteering, and in to put in legs that would hopefully split up packs during the chase. With the last one in mind I firstly sketched out the end of each of the chase courses, including a few controls through the low visibility slow-run, and the very last controls in pockets of detail back in open forest where competitors would be running a high speed downhill towards the finish. Many will agree these last few legs did enough to cause a few changes in the placings!

Apart from that, the majority of the difficulties seemed to be encountered in the early legs of the prologue courses, where all but the junior and veteran women had long legs into the detail in the low visibility. The more runnable forest in the rest of the courses provided a more pleasant experience with the contour shapes being easier to visualise from a distance.

The courses ended up with winning times close to what I aimed for (20-25 for prologue, 16-20, for chase). The junior and vet women were slightly quicker than expected, as I estimated their relative running speed, but then didn't take them through the slower low visibility forest. However, I heard few complaints from them after the heard stories of others going into those parts of the forest!

If anyone wants copies of any maps (e.g. didn't pick up part 1 maps, or didn't turn up at all), email me at duncan.archer(at)metaswitch.com, let me know what you want, and I'll send them.

Duncan Archer, JOK