Results of Local Event at Norman's Law, 4th May 2008

Organiser - Angela Dixon (Organiser's comments);

Planners - Roos Eisma and Peter Clinch (Planner's comments).

Published 1715, 5th May

Yellow Course

Length: 2.0km

Orange Course

Length: ?km

Green Course

Length: ?km

Blue Course

Length: 5.8km

Tay hadn't organised an event here for a while, the map belongs to Interlopers, but it's fairly handy for us so we thought we'd go somewhere different with some of our old favourites out of bounds for TAY09.

There were 8 people to get permission from and after deciding on the date we realised later in the year may have been better as we were restricted in the open areas we could use by Aberdeen Angus calves, the new mums are apparently quite aggressive. Dr Thomson, the farmer at Denmuir farm was very helpful, explaining to me who owned what on the map, pointing out map changes and letting us use his field and barn.

On the day the weather was better than forecast and most people seemed to enjoy their run. The organisation was a bit chaotic at the start when I couldn't find the club dibbers and had a queue of people needing them. I was hoping I hadn't left them at home 50 minutes away but they turned up in the bag of tape left at the finish where I must have casually tossed them when packing the car. Thanks to Pete for a mad sprint to get them. The control descriptions were trotting round the hill in Roos's rucksack as she checked the controls so she had a mad sprint as well.

It was only the second outing for our new simple SI system and it worked well. I was rather anxiously awaiting the arrival of the first finisher as you don't do anything to the system apart from recharge the printer until the finish when you download the results. It worked well though and having a printout with splits is better for competitors than just a punch card. At the end it prints out a list of all the courses in time order which makes writing results easier. You do have to keep copies of individual results though as if someone has only done half a course the results slip thinks you've done it all, so some manual checking is still necessary.

Because of the problem of control 13 on the green course, 11 on the orange being incorrectly placed I did adjust times for those courses omitting that leg so people get an idea of how much time they lost hunting. Some people lost very little time, Janet Clark took less than 3 minutes; where as Duncan Raitt took 23 minutes. Roos says the control was visible from far away and not close up, so more experienced orienteers maybe start looking for the next control earlier in the leg.

We had 56 competitors which is very good for a local event and more than I expected. Well done to Frances Brown who won the green course whilst only a W14. Commiserations to Duncan Francis who would have been second on the blue course if he'd remembered to punch the last control when he passed it!

There were 24 TAY competitors. It's great to see so many of the club turning out.

Angela Dixon

First of all thanks to all the competitors: as Katherine said the amount of work is the same, whether 10 people show up or 50, and we were very pleased with the turnout.

Apologies to the competitors on the green and especially the orange course for the control at the fence end which wasn't at the fence end. When I brought the control in I checked and something isn't right with the map in that area - the relative position of the control to some other landmarks was ok, but it wasn't the end of the fence and not far enough down the hill.

Planning is often about trying to juggle a lot of different constraints and conditions - this time there seemed to be even more puzzle pieces than other events, on top of the normal criteria of what makes a good course:

• We couldn't use the SE area as there were cows with young calves. This meant quite a lot of zigzagging to get enough distance in for the longer courses.
• The farmers wanted us to use the gates to cross the fences as much as possible.
• We should preferably use only the 34 controls the club owns. This means that the 4 courses with 3 different technical levels needed to share a lot of controls. For the orange this meant a mix of controls that were a bit easy (shared with the yellow) and quite hard (shared with blue or green, as there was no light green)
• All courses should have the same start as the club only has a single start SI unit. Similarly for the finish.
• There is no extensive network of paths for the yellow course. Many of the fences and walls are not suitable as line features because of the undergrowth.
• The gorse is not very well mapped, or has changed since mapping. And I didn't want to send competitors through too much gorse anyway :)
• There are a lot more crags than are mapped. Some of the crags I intended to use were not suitable as there was a similar unmapped crag nearby, or a single crag symbol summarises a whole group of crags of different sizes.
• The open area has the usual problems with finding control sites that are not too visible from too far away. On the other hand this helps on the orange course: I could move away a bit more from line features as you can use a fence for navigation even when you're not right next to it, and the cross-field leg from the boulder to the crag was fine because you can see the large crag from the boulder.
• This is an area with a lot of climb. Just getting from the start to the finish takes 100m climb and I tried to add not too much to that. I chose to avoid the top of the hill and instead contour around and use the area with a lot of contour details on the side. I kept the blue and green along the North side when crossing towards the East, as the South side dips down quite a lot and doesn't have many interesting features.

Some thoughts in hindsight:

• On the orange course I didn't compensate enough for the amount of climb and the lack of paths - the course was a bit long (in time rather than distance). Having a misplaced control didn't help either! The lesson is to not focus too much on the distances given in the guidelines: an orange course of less than 3k sounds short but may be appropriate.
• I knew the green was probably a bit long. An earlier draft didn't use the E area and zigzagged more on the main hill. That course was still a bit short however, had too many controls not shared with other courses, and no good long leg. So I decided to take the course into the East.
• The yellow and the blue seemed to work well. I was a bit worried about the second half of the yellow being too much off-road but people seemed to enjoy it.
• Don't put the control descriptions in the rucksack you carry around when putting out the controls!
• Listen to your intuition when you put out a control and something tells you something isn't quite right.... I did notice the fence looked differently when I approached it from the West when I put out the control, compared to when I looked at it coming from the East before, but I was too much in a hurry to do anything about it.
• If you were at the event: please check yourself for ticks. I had 3 small ones on my lower legs and a large one on my neck after putting out the controls in the forest. And that was while wearing full body cover!

Also thanks to Margret, Julian (and daughter) for their assistance during planning and all their help on the day itself.

This was my first time working with an assistant planner and though it was a useful learning experience for everybody I will try a different approach next time! I think it is good to document here what did and didn't work so other planning teams can think about how they do this. Even if it didn't go as planned I think Margret and Julian have now more insight into what is involved in planning and running an event.

The suggested approach was to divide the courses so they would plan the yellow and orange and I the blue and green. This didn't work for a number of reasons:

• To choose the start and finish I needed a full understanding of the limitations and problems for all courses but especially the yellow and orange. And in this area this turned out to be quite tricky. This meant I made late changes to the start to solve a number of problems and changed a lot of both theirs and my proposed courses.
• To keep the number of controls down the 4 courses needed to be closely linked and follow a very similar outline. Again this caused me to make late changes to all 4 courses.
• Planning a course from scratch with limited orienteering experience is maybe too big a step, a more gradual introduction to planning would be better.

Talking to Pete about his planning experiences he mentioned that he learned a lot from going out scouting with me: walking around the area, and thinking out loud about the problems, choices and reasons.

So next time I think I will assign smaller sub-tasks to an assistant: check out the paths and possible controls in an area and report back, walk/run an intended course and see how long it takes, and especially: go out together and talk about the options and choices.

Overall I think we had a good event in an area described by one of the competitors (Martin Dean) on his blog as "small but interesting". The club SI units and download system worked well, though we could have used a few more SI cards (we has to reuse one).

Roos Eisma

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