SoSOL 1, Hermitage, 5th October 2008

Results

NB We apologise for the delay and incompleteness of these results, due to a problem with the time of one of the start units and one of the finish units, which has led to several results requiring to be manually edited. Please bear with us as we sort out the situation, keep checking back for up to date results, and do let us know (email dsloan @ computing.dundee.ac.uk in the first instance) if there are any mistakes with your result.

Thanks to Andrew Dalgleish for helping to fix the problem!

Provisional results as at 16:00, 7th October (times for Jeni Rowe and David Downie have been corrected. Other times have still to be adjusted):

• Simple Results;
• Results with Split times;
• String Course;
• Routegadget - coming shortly

NB For newcomers - Routegadget is an online program that allows you to enter the route you took round your course, so that you can compare it with others. It also uses your split time data to give you an animation of your progress around your course.

Planner's Comments

This is the first event I have ever planned, and firstly I must thank Dave Prentice who provided invaluable guidance and advice throughout the whole process. More than once I took a late evening phone call from Dave along the lines of "I've been looking at your Blue course and have a suggestion, only a suggestion, you don't have to take it up but if...". Of course his suggestions were always constructive and the success of the event is really down to his fine tuning of the courses. Although the fine tuning extended to completely redesigning the Red course at the last minute!

The most common comment heard from people returning from their runs was about the toughness of the terrain. Undoubtedly there are a lot of brashings and fallen trees as well as holes and hills. But believe it or not the courses were planned to avoid the worst areas. There is a huge re-entrant just south of the middle of the map into which I considered putting a control until close investigation revealed that it was like Low's Gully (remember the gully in Borneo in which a British Army expedition was lost for 31 days)! The fact that Douglas and James Tullie both completed the brown course (7.4km/385m ascent) in an astonishing 1 hour and a bit, proves that the terrain was not actually that tough.

The excellent path network towards Ossian's Hall and up to the 'Fairy Castle' made the White & Yellow courses relatively easy to plan, and determined the start & finish. I learned very early in the planning process that if everyone is to have the same start then planning the White & Yellow is the first thing to do.

Generally I was happy with all the legs of all the courses. Retrospectively, perhaps the least good was from 11 to 12 on the Green course which followed a fence alongside the A9 – a consequence of the narrowness of the mapped area in the middle.

I'm sorry to those doing Light Green whose control numbers vanished after no. 8. A fault by the map printer, not us.

I have learnt an awful lot in the last few weeks about planning and setting out courses. Made quite a few mistakes (all rectified by Dave) - too many to mention here, but as an example; when putting the controls out "don't make them too difficult to see" – I didn't want people to see the control from too far away so tended to hide them behind trees, down holes, etc. Dave coined these 'Nicoll controls' and correctly suggested that they be more visible. There were however one or two rogue Nicoll controls left – apologies to anyone who didn't see the control behind the tree at no. 6 on the Blue.

As a novice planner feedback would be most welcome, feel free to email me any comments (g.nicoll@virgin.net) and I encourage everyone to sketch their routes into RouteGadget. This will show me where you all went and which were the difficult and easy controls. To anyone who has never been a Planner then I would recommend the experience. It does take up quite a lot of time but is enjoyable, rewarding and I reckon it probably improves your orienteering – gets you inside the mind of the planner.

Finally, thanks to everyone who helped on the day, and another big thanks to Dave P for Organising and keeping the Planner on the right track. And a special mention for Mel, Laura & Alice who organised the superb string course.

Grahame Nicoll

Controller's Comments

Grahame has been magnanimous in his comments regarding my controller's input, but what should be emphasised is the effort and thoroughness he put into planning his first event and the steep learning curve he climbed. On his orienteering CV he can now put ticks against map update survey (he identified most of 50 odd changes which went in); OCAD (at least the basics), Condes and general course planning. In terms of pre-event effort, I should also mention Jane again obliging and getting all the SI kit working and Mel who designed an excellent string course.

The area is physically challenging, yet the lead brown runners were round in the excellent time of just over the hour. The courses were generally within time guidelines, though with light green and blue, the choice was made to provide good courses albeit a little on the long side. On green, the terrain seemed to be a factor in half the times creeping over the recommended 75 mins upper limit.

As with all events, there are things to be learnt. An unanticipated route choice highlighted the fact one control was too close to the edge of the map (map to be extended!); two controls on neighbouring boulders (though > 60 m apart) with similar numbers should have been avoided (thanks Ken for these observations) and of course it saves a lot of work if the times of the SI start and finish units are correct. This was such a shame - all the controls had been time-synchronised but somehow one start and one finish unit had the wrong time, so the moral is to double check the time of these units. Alternatively, perhaps units should always stay at GMT or we should campaign for just BST? Thanks go to Jane, Andrew Dalgleish and David Sloan for sorting this out.

With an 'organiser's hat' on, thanks also to all who generously helped to make the event a success - it was good not to have phone round.

Dave Prentice

String Course results

HOME | ABOUT THE CLUB | LATEST NEWS | FIXTURE LIST | RESULTS | CONTACT

If you have any problems or queries regarding this page or its contents, contact David Sloan - email: sloan758 @gmail.com

Content of this web site ©2000-2011 Tayside Orienteers unless otherwise acknowledged. All rights reserved. Terms of use.