You can't beat good weather and a nice spacious assembly area near the car park. Coupled with the as ever well-oiled GO machine, including an expert Planner and a friendly Controller, and my life as Organiser was a joy.

We have started a tradition (if it can be called that so soon) of naming a "man of the match" who we deem to show outstanding O-ness. It's hard to choose - Nick Barrable's 4.2 mins/km was surely outstanding. So were the performances of all top 3 placings in each of the 4 categories of the OO Trophy competition, being closely spaced in points, which just goes to underline the excellent performances of the 4 Trophy winners, Sarah, Mike, Nicola and Nicholas who all retained their Trophies having won them last year. But after much discussion our accolade goes to David Abrams, who as an M16 competed in the OO Trophy on the Brown course (a double run-up from Green) and took 3rd place in the Junior Men's Trophy. That's a spirit I admire.

You may have noticed we were using software that registered you as you downloaded, removing the need for registration in advance. This software works most smoothly if people are running with their own dibber and that dibber's (correct) details are registered with BOF/SportIdent, otherwise we still have to manually enter details at download time. It was fun to see some of your pleasantly surprised faces when you downloaded and got your splits printed immediately with name etc automatically drawn from the SI database and your course automatically inferred from the controls you had visited!

Jeremy Wilde, Organiser

and Planner...

Just run at the deer and they’ll move out of the way. That’s what I was told. It felt strange planning courses that allowed few areas of refuge for the deer but they are clearly used to the public. Putting controls out in the morning there seemed to be more deer than I had seen at earlier visits, indicating that during the main part of the day parts of the herd move to less conspicuous parts of the park.

Petworth is never really going to provide a tough technical challenge so courses were planned at the top end of guidelines on length. Looking at the times it seems that they might have been even longer! White was won in less than 9 minutes whilst brown was completed in 42 minutes. For anyone interested in my time, on the first version of the 10km course I did just less than 55 minutes, so Nick Barrable was running at over 1 minute per kilometer faster.

Having been established as formal gardens and then landscaped by Capability Brown in the 1750s Petworth has been managed parkland for centuries. It had been open to the public for some time and is a really nice area to jog/walk around. I enjoyed planning the courses. Robin made some very helpful suggestions, and of course thanks should go to my control hangers & collectors.

Keith Tonkin, Planner

and Controller...

With such an experienced planner as Keith, I never really expected to be anything other than a 'token' controller - which I was. However, it's still a good idea having an independent non-involved person to do a check, whatever the standard of event or officials.

The only adverse competitor comment I was aware of was the incorrect mapping of the re-entrant which contained 190. Oh, and SI units that only flashed and did not beep, thereby causing competitors to punch maps unnecessarily as it turned out. Are the units slowing dying or was it just battery life?

Robin Smith (SO), Controller