Results, kindly generated by Robin Strain and hosted on the ESOA web site:
When I agreed to do the Xmas event I hadn't anticipated it being quite so much work. I'd helped Dave Prentice a bit last year but now realise how much he did and that my input was a bit pathetic. Dave had planned to be back to help a bit but in the end decided he was having too much fun on his exotic holiday. His parting words to me before he left a month ago were "you may want to do something about the rhododendron bushes near the drive. They've grown a bit."
This induced major panic as I realised I'd have to learn how to work OCAD as well as Condes and the SI stuff, as well as having a week's holiday in Skye and decorating the sitting room and work. All in a month!
My first lesson was that the OCAD demo is purely decorative. I had downloaded Condes to the home computer a few months before when organising a Norman's Law event. I'd seen OCAD appear on the computer and presumed I had OCAD as well. I didn't, just the demo which didn't do much, so I had to get the club computer to do a few basic map changes. Removing fences and jumps was easy. Adding point features was easy. Changing background colours and making larger curly shapes was very difficult and in the end I did the easy bit and sent the amended OCAD map to Steve Barrett at Stirling Surveys who did the difficult bits for me, although most of the rhododendron growth I decided to ignore and just use other features for the controls.
Using Condes was easier and I liked the facility to break up control circles so you can see the underlying map. The last course I had planned was a couple of years ago at the Ochils and that had just been a 'red biro circles on a map and send it to Harvey's' type of planning. Unfortunately I couldn’t then get the Condes map into a jpeg format to send to Scone Palace for approval so I had to do the map course again on OCAD as I could convert that to jpeg. I couldn’t work out how to break the circles on OCAD though.
Putting the courses on the SI score computer in the right format was a bit tricky. The KFO website was helpful there and Robin Strain was very good at helping me with any queries and I sent him a copy of the event file before so he could check it was OK.
I tried having a go at setting up the SI units myself but got very confused. I was using some of our finish controls and some SOA ones and we’d had a problem at the Hermitage of mixing units and them having different time zones. There was also the problem that one of our units (we didn't know which) had been beeping and we might have a flat battery. Robin guided me through setting them up on the phone.
I then read a few fairy tales for the questions.
The Scone Palace map is a nice varied area with good open running and plenty of places to site controls. It isn't a big area though. To stop the fast folk coming back after 20 minutes I decided to go for an odd then even control (or even then odd) so people had to run twice round the map. You could do as many of 1 type of control as you liked but once you had switched to the other you couldn’t switch back. The alternative was 45 miniutes to get as many controls but in any order.
This seemed to keep everyone busy although 9 people managed to get to all the controls, 5 within the time limit. The fastest times were Andrew Llewellyn of NOC in 45.34, Fraser Purves (FVO) in 47:00 and Andrew Dalgleish of ESOC in 49.53.
The 14 year old Lindsay twins from ESOC who also visited all controls but a bit slower ended up winning because they were better at the questions. It was great to have a junior girl as winner of a long score event. Well done Rona Lindsay!
In the 45 minute event the first 3 placings are unchanged if you just add the control points, although Mel and Laura Nicoll's excellent fairytale and fantasy knowledge propelled them from 9th to 4th place and got them a prize for highest points on the questions.
I had been wondering how I would decide who won the TAY championships with 2 different races; we had decided that only the orienteering points should count for this, as the club championships are usually held at an ordinary orienteering event. I decided to just add up points as the 60 minuters had more time but a trickier format, and Paul Grace won with 570 points, with Grahame Nicoll close behind on 540.
The TAY women made things easier by all doing the 60 minute event, and Elaine Simpson with 510 points just beat Elaine Gillies with 500 points. Duncan Raitt age 12 won TAY junior male with 310 points. Callum Reid age 8 got more points with 360 points but apparently spotted his parents and then stuck with them the rest of the way round. Perhaps he should have got the TAY junior prize for initiative though, that and being able to keep up with Stewart. I get the feeling all the elite orienteers just chase each other round the courses anyway, the rest of us don't win because we're not fast enough to keep up with them.
We didn't have an unaccompanied TAY junior female, or not one that I know of - if there was one I missed out let me know.
Most people seemed to enjoy themselves and I didn't get any moans. We had 67 lots of folk going out, although some of the juniors with just 1 name had an adult with them and I'm not sure how big some of the groups were. A palace official said he had counted over 110 which is an excellent field for a local-ish event with a last minute date and venue change.
The Palace staff were excellent and kindly lent us the use of the Old Kitchen as a registration and results venue and didn't mind me running around the place. I think I even met Lady Mansfield as I was loading the controls into the car. Everyone there was very helpful. The weather was good and much better than the snow and rain I'd been mapping and putting out controls in.
Thanks to Moira and Katherine for helping with the set-up, registration and results, to the TAY folk who helped add up the points for the questions and to Moira for helping remove the controls before it got dark.
The only thing I feel a bit uncomfortable about is something I was discussing with Katherine Melville at lunchtime.
What would we do without Robin?
I am partly serious as I type this. 21st century orienteering is heavily dependent on electronic gadgetry and only a handful of people know how to work it well. Does the gadget dependency discourage people from planning events? The results are much faster and I love seeing split times and watching the Route gadget pacmen chase each other round the courses but it does mean a lot more time is spent by the planners and organisers before the course and the day of the event can be quite stressful.
Do we need more SOA courses on how to work the SI system, OCAD and CONDES?
I've written enough now. Hope you enjoyed your runs, now I can start thinking about Christmas!
Angela Dixon
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