Guard's Wood Evening Event

  • Wednesday, 08 June 2011

Hopefully you all had an enjoyable evening.  The weather remained fair, if a little chilly, for the event.  No-one complained about the courses, which is good. 

We're sorry that some people had to re-cycle maps.  We did print 70 Long/Medium maps (which was 18 more than competed the previous Wednesday at Stickle Pike), but still ran out.  As it happens, there were 70 competitors on the Long/Medium courses, so it looks like a handful of people picked up more than one map.  If anyone wants a copy of the map, email me at RichardLT@coolgreen.ltd.uk and I will email a pdf version.

We've put the event on Routegadget, so you can draw on your routes and compare them with your peers. 

If you did the Long, then you can compare your first and second times round controls 8-11 and 19-22.  On some of the Saturday coaching sessions we have been repeating loops, trying to improve each time, and this is how we justified doing this on the course.  The idea came from a talk on Thierry Geogiou's training, where he tests his fitness levels by racing around the same orienteering loop regularly.  It is interesting to see his routes differ each time as he tries to knock seconds off.

We hope you enjoyed the courses.  With only 4 weeks to go we were told that Millom Park wasn't available.  With 3 weeks to go, we were told we could only use the forest, not the nice intricate fields around the outside, so that explains why you ran round quite a lot.  Just be thankful we didn't print the map at 1:10000 or even 1:15000!

On the Yellow course we had runners turning off a path down a wall twice, from opposite directions.  The guidelines would say that there should be a control at that point.  But it wasn't possible to have a control correctly sited for both legs in the same place.  So, we used two signs showing "Yellow Course - Wall" with an arrow.  Apparently these were helpful.  One competitor was slightly confused by the second, identical sign and thought she might have got back to the first sign.  If we were to do this again, putting the number of the next control on the sign would improve this.

There was some new felling and an extraction track at the East corner of the map which confused at least one orange competitor.  Sorry about that.



Last Modified: Sunday, 20 January 2013