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Burnham Beeches & Egypt Woods Regional Event, nr Slough, 19/02/06.Next HH Event - Cassiobury Estate Local & Schools' League Event, Watford, 04/03/06. Controller's Comments, Planners' Comments, Organisers' Comments & Road Crossing Leg Statement.
Controller's CommentsAs usual, working with Happy Herts on the Burnham event was a pleasure. The planning team adopted the well-used LOK method of "mentoring" a less experienced planner, and the courses that Rory and Simon produced showed the mix of well established planning techniques, and the flair of ideas from "new blood". The addition of Hanging Wood in the north also introduced a new challenge to one of the most pleasant areas for orienteering in the SE - even if some of you completed courses in very speedy times. Lesley and Eric undertook the organising role with their usual thoroughness and cheer, and it was impossible to guess that they were first-timers to regional event organising. Hopefully, they enjoyed the process enough to continue putting such valuable work into our sport. The road crossing time allowance issue is covered elsewhere, but there is one other issue I would like to raise. With the now regular use of punching at starts, there is a "creeping" attitude amongst competitors that there is no problem turning up late for starts. "It doesn't matter - we can start whenever we want" has even been quoted to me by a fellow LOK member. At a busy event like Burnham, where start lists are virtually full, this attitude puts an unreasonable pressure on start teams trying to fairly incorporate late starters into a packed start list. Mark and the team at the North start did a great job in managing to eventually get everyone a run but this growing problem took the pleasure out of the day for them, and as volunteers in the sport, it is unreasonable to add un-necessarily to their workloads. I would therefore ask that those with this "laissez-faire" attitude please think of the effects of their actions, and make an effort to reach starts by the assigned times. Finally thanks, as always, to Ronan who provides a sounding-board for all orienteering work I do, and who did more of the footwork than expected at Burnham, as a long-term injury curtailed my own physical input. Julie Cleary, LOK
Planners' CommentsBurnham and Egypt has a large expanse of varied runnable woodland with a fairly limited path network. It is one of the best areas the South East can offer, and we set out to plan courses that encouraged you to stay in the forest as much as possible. The area to the north, where you started, has never been used before. It doesn't add much technical challenge, but it does provide even more varieties of runnable woodland. It also allowed us to get in the M21L course without a map exchange. Not many areas can support sensible legs of 1.5km or more, so we took the opportunity to throw these in whenever possible, and also tried to vary leg length and change direction as much as possible. All of this is fairly elementary planning stuff, but it is nice to find an area where you can apply it without worrying too much about the path options that plague many other areas. The runnability often meant that there was limited route choice, with straight being great on most legs as long as you could follow a compass bearing. The courses were planned as a joint effort. Simon planned an initial outline shape for the M21 course, Rory then put together the rough outline of the rest of the courses, and we both then refined them to what you ended up with. This worked relatively smoothly, but things never go quite the way you hope. Some of you will have worked out that the planning is based on a different car park to the one we ended up using, but the cows kept being moved, and in the end we had to go south of the road. The original idea was to park in the long thin field north of the road, and this was still the plan when the courses were finalised. This explains why the string course was where it was, and why you finished on the track when it looked more sensible to finish in the actual car park field. It also explains why the road crossing is at the east, rather than just north of the finish, since we didn't want the road crossing going through the car park entrance. We were worried about the number of runners on some courses, which is why we added an extra TD 5 course and changed the standard class combinations. In doing this we stuck quite closely to the BOF recommended course length ratios. There are all sorts of reasons why we ended up with the course lengths and combinations we did, but essentially it looks like a few of the older L classes were shorter than they could have been. We apologise to those who were left wanting more. From the planning point of view we would like to thank Julie and Ronan Cleary for their calm and efficient controlling and for spotting a couple of things that we let slip through; Susan Marsden for the last-minute tweaks to the map; Eric and Lesley Brown for services over and above those normally expected of the organisers in sorting out the bridge and the fence crossings; and the HH members who helped to hang and then collect in all the controls. Don't miss the opportunity to run here again in March 2007 at the SEOA round of the CompassSport Cup. Simon Errington and Rory Percival
Organisers' CommentsWe were very fortunate with the weather. After fabulous weather in the preceding week, rain was forecast for the Sunday. We were lucky that it held off until 1.20pm precisely! This meant that most of you had a dry day. We hope you enjoyed the event. Thank you to all those who expressed their appreciation - it makes all the hard work that goes into an event like this, worthwhile. Having an event straddling a road - however minor - was always going to raise safety issues. Originally we were given a car park field to the north of Harehatch Lane, adjacent to the String Course. When we discovered a herd of cows churning it up at the beginning of January, the field that we finally used was offered. We had to have work done to the entrance, but this held up very well. (By the way, the cows moved once more over the ensuing weeks, resulting in a change of route to the North start at the last minute!) As always, an event this size would be impossible without the help of willing volunteers - 65 in total. Many thanks to all of them. In particular we would like to thank:
Lesley and Eric Brown
Road Crossing Leg StatementTimes for the road crossing leg have been adjusted as announced in the final details and on notices displayed on the way to and at the start. Times up to 2:30 have been voided, but any time you took over this has been included in your overall time. This has a relatively minor impact on the results, with only a handful of people moving more than one place up or down. After careful consideration we feel this is the fairest solution to adopt. We were aware that 2.30 would be a challenging time for this leg for some people, but equally we did not want to offer the chance for too great a rest for the faster runners. In hindsight it would have been better to have an extra control at the road crossing to allow a shorter leg to be voided, and ensuring that everybody could get within the allowed time. We are also aware that some road marshals may have been encouraging people to slow down. This was purely out of concerns for your safety. We can only apologise if this caused you to go slightly over the allowed time. |