6th February 2011
Planner's Comments
The first thing to say is a thank you to everyone who competed for turning up and making it all worthwhile. I early on decided to only use the
Southern part of Salcey forest for the event to avoid long path runs on the longer courses. There's just as much forest further North though
possibly the best terrain is in the area we used.
Salcey has a few nice corners, lots of 'challenging' terrain with perhaps more than it's fair share of thorns and some truly nasty areas. Unless
you got badly lost you shouldn't have found any of the truly nasty bits. To a certain extent planning consisted of finding reasonable routes
between the nicer blocks.
I was at the start for a while and it was encouraging to see that lots of competitors where finding the first control not so easy to find. The
variable runnability and low visibility make using a bearing difficult. However, Salcey's ditches are admirably well mapped and so long as
you don't lose count they can be relied on for navigation.
Thanks are due to Robert Dove and the other mappers who have mapped all those ditches so well and kept the map right up-to-date. I'd also like to
thank Roger Edwards for controlling the event and keeping us on the right track. His suggestions and comments where always to the point.
Steve Hardy SMOC
Controller's Comments
Events successes are judged by competitors. Most of those I talked had positive comments on their courses and constructive feedback where there
were things could have been done better. A look at the routes on the technical courses loaded into RouteGadget, shows that the runners were
choosing similar routes and staying on the paths where possible even though the courses were designed to encourage woodland routes.
The Level B rules require some small changes that were not in their forerunners so it’s easy to over look some of the less important points.
E.g. the need to have back up punches at control sites.
So well done to SMOC for putting on another good event and arranging for some good but windy weather.
Roger Edwards LEI