COMMENTS FROM THE OFFICIALS

The event had the advantage of a lovely setting both for the car park and for running where the frost, light fog and shafts of light lent a mysterious atmosphere to the forest. The computing team did a really good job keeping the electronics functioning despite the frost, damp and lack of piped electricity. In addition they printed additional maps on demand, extra control descriptions and result lists.

Most runners want to register at about the same time, although we cannot all start together. Several recent events have had queues at registration - we were not exempt. There are many good sides to SI - results up by supper time for one.

Several club members worked very hard, some doing 3 jobs, for which thank you. There were no major problems although I do hope the small boy who got locked in the portaloo will not be traumatised for life. By luck, I had a screwdriver in my pocket so rescue was fairly prompt.

Janet Phillips, Organiser

and Planner...

The day dawned with perfect weather and all the control boxes came alive at 7.30am just as we were all watching the news of the oil explosion. The area is an interesting mix of woodland, both studded with bracken and with some very nice runnable parts, and I thoroughly enjoyed the days I spent out there. The path grid gave me the most difficult task for all courses - too many for the white and yellow, which resulted in one leg being taped, and too many for the green, blue and brown giving some measure of boring path runs. However, feedback from runners was very encouraging. Everyone enjoyed their runs and found them reasonably challenging.

My thanks go to Neil who helped me with the mapping changes and totally rose to the last minute replan and course printing. I think we replanned, approved and printed all the courses in 48 hours! Thanks to the very experienced GO team who put out and collected the controls: James Crawford, Mark Smith, Iain Cairns and Jim Morris. And my thanks to Charlie for catching the "error" which would have surely spoiled the event.

Linda Pakuls, Planner

and Controller...

Linda and Janet respectively started planning/organising this event with ample time to meet deadlines. However things went astray just eight days before the event when it was realised the 10,000 scale OCAD map was found to be actually an archived 15,000 map, giving a 50% course length error. If the lower technical difficulty courses had been left unaltered they would have been far too long and to enable printing the next day Linda did some rapid replanning of all the courses. In the short period available it was not possible to meet all the BOF planning guidelines and it is realised that some courses could have been shorter/others longer.

The problem of OCAD map scale and incorrect printing scale is as I have now discovered not unique to this event. I was told at the event of one other event where everyone thought they had had brilliant runs, only then to discover that the courses were all shorter than scaled. My learning point from this event is do not assume that the computer is always correct.

I enjoyed working with GO and was fortunate to have a planner who was able to give so much time to making sure that the day was successful. I must also thank Neil Harwood for his patience in sorting out a revised printing programme and Janet for her role as organiser. This was a first time for Janet and it certainly did not show.

Charlie Turner (SLOW), Controller