SiTiming from SPORTident
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Late in the event control number 210 was stolen by cutting the gripple wire. Many thanks to Tim O'Donahue who recovered the kite, but the unit is lost. We looked at removing time for the two legs either side of 210. On courses 1, 3, 4, 5 this would have had more significant effect result on unaffected runners than those actually affected, so the results stand. Courses 6 & 7 were mainly juniors running after the relays, and the control was missing for most runners, so we removed the leg. On course 2, the leading results were the same regardless, but many later starters were affected, so we removed the leg.
We think the only people who lost more than one position because of time lost at the missing control were Tim O'Donohue and Hanne Robertson, to whom we apologise.
Thanks to Graeme for producing all the new map (everything east of the railway crossing was brand new) and being such an accommodating controller, Graham and the rest of the organising team for taking care of everything off-course and of course thanks to everyone who came and ran – I hope you enjoyed yourselves!
The main feedback I’ve taken from the experience was that people enjoyed the high number of controls. When I started planning the courses over the summer GG had plans of featuring the event in a GB sprint squad kick-off weekend. As I like to think I have a reasonable idea of what elite sprint orienteers are after I decided to make the Open courses two sprint length & style courses with some easier/longer legs in the middle, allowing those who wanted to to treat it as a training exercise with an easy run joining the high intensity sections together. That meant a lot of controls and naturally that filtered down through all the other courses.
In the end the squad training fell through however only after the courses were essentially finalised. I think the sprint style suits these housing estates best anyway. I hope we can put something on based in the eastern half of the area so that those of you on courses 4-7 can get a chance to run on the area you missed out on this time.
A couple of apologies – firstly to course 5 runners where I neglected to break a red line and obscured a dead-end alleyway. It looked fine on the PDF version of the map files but was ambiguous on the printed version. I can only say sorry to anyone who lost time here. Secondly to anyone who was impacted by the vandalising of the control by the railway station. I think Graeme made a sensible decision on how to treat this in the results – hopefully no one feels too hard done by.
It was great to see so many juniors out competing for their area teams and I was pleased a few managed to squeeze a run round my sprint courses after the relays on Dechmont. The thriving junior scene in Scotland at the moment is a reflection of the great work done by a number of clubs to recruit and develop juniors. The contrast with M/W21s could not be starker – only 3 M/W21s took part. Yes there were clashes with other (non-o) events but that is no excuse. How do we energise senior participation? There are no easy answers but at the moment it isn’t obvious to me that anyone is even asking this question. I think this should be a priority for our sport if we want those excited youngsters to have a sport to enjoy for many years to come.
Anyway, another bit of Livingston mapped means we are one step closer to mapping the whole town. Every time I look at the full OCAD file my mind inevitably starts to wander… when will we put on the (world’s?) first marathon length urban race? Now that would be INTrepid…
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