| Controlling The World Cup Sprint Races |
|
|
|
Page 1 of 2  My normal experience with controlling is that the planner has a first go at the courses. There is then a reasonably short discussion between planner and controller, and the planner comes up with a second set of courses that are pretty close to the final thing. With these two events it didn't work like that, for many reasons. Planner Andy Jones and I probably went through at least five iterations of course shape to determine start, finish, spectator controls and course flow, before even more detailed reviews of exact courses. Read on to see just some of the problems we had to overcome.
University of SurreyMany of you will have gone through Guildford on the A3 and noticed the somewhat unattractive Cathedral (at least to me, who went to school in the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral and thus is used to better things). But some of you now know that Guildford Cathedral overlooks one of the most complex sprint orienteering areas yet found in this country. It was clear very early on that this was going to be an interesting area. The mapper returned from the first survey visit to say the map was so detailed that it would probably be unreadable at 1:5,000, and recommended we move to 1:4,000. This was just the first of many problems that required extensive debate to get to a final answer that everybody was happy with.The course shape took a little time to settle down. The start and finish were effectively fixed, and the statue was an obvious last control. Early drafts of the courses had a long leg to the spectator control, but this had to be removed since it introduced a route choice that involved runners going back through the finish and start, which was obviously not a good idea. Later drafts sorted this out, but had the Men running up the staircase near the finish and the Women running down it. I suggested we tried to get them all going the same way since when we had all six courses being run at once by the public this was a potential cause of trouble. This was one of the very few cases where the 5-O courses affected the World Cup courses, but I don't think the World Cup courses suffered as a result. One big problem was finding a road crossing that we were happy was safe enough. We didn't expect much traffic, but even so the main road was busy enough to cause concern. We were particularly worried about people running out of the narrow passageways between buildings and straight across a road with no warning to traffic that they were coming. Putting a control by the roadside got around this. We essentially ended up with two controls that were just there to force runners to cross where we wanted them to, but they were cunningly disguised so it didn't really feel like that. Early courses had several controls around the lake, but Andy then spotted the two large scale "which way round the lake" route choice legs that fitted perfectly with the chosen road crossings. These examples do raise a philosophical question. If you have a "right or left" route choice such as this, should the two options be equal, should one be marginally better than the other, or should one be much better than the other? We settled for "one slightly shorter than the other", but the difference may well be less than the overall distortion in the mapping. How do you make this fair? Test running the courses showed the huge variation in technical difficulty and required technique between the parkland and the built-up areas. I would have preferred to finish through the complicated buildings rather than with an all-out sprint around the lake, but this simply didn't fit in with the other constraints. The last control therefore looked like a simple road crossing and all-out sprint across the grass to the statue. The alternative of going back up the metal staircase and into the finish from the south was not only longer, but involved running up the metal staircase that everyone had already been up once and thus knew involved two tight turns that would slow them down. Even so at least one woman decided to go for this route choice, and had a hard time convincing the finish team to let her run backwards through the finish so she could punch the last control. Having said that the statue had been gradually migrating south on various versions of the map as we kept adding further map corrections. After much discussion we decided to stop worrying about dog legs. When you have an area as complicated as this the route choice often came down to decisions about how to get around buildings. Two such legs in a row was a potential dog leg no matter what you did about it. The philosophy was to try to make them read the map as much as possible. My initial reaction on seeing the legs out to the south of the cathedral and back was that they seemed a bit pointless. I test ran the courses and changed my mind, since they provided a good change in speed from the buildings. Andy was keen to show runners the cathedral, but was wary of having too many controls because of vandalism in that area. I have since talked to the control marshal who says that several runners managed to visit the wrong control south of the cathedral, even though they were both trivial. We had great difficulty deciding on course length. Various people tried test running, but even then it was difficult to relate this to World elite speeds in this sort of terrain. We knew the courses were probably marginally longer than we wanted, but the last-minute changes had forced that to some extent. As it was the men were fine and the women were marginally too long. This was at least partially because people were making more mistakes than we expected. |
||||
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
Download copies of the Maprunner Map Symbol sheets