A great day at Fairhill
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Topic created by kathyu on Mon Oct 25, 2010 at 7:49 amThanks to the Deaf and HOH O's for a fun day at Fairhill. The walk to the start was not too bad, everyone was chatting and having a good time. The walk back seemed longer!
The Brown course was interesting and challenging with a little extra challenge finding 7! So thank you Tracy and Billy and everyone on the team and the epunch crew too for a well run event. -
Reply by Sswede on Mon Oct 25, 2010 at 8:36 amI too had a great time. The green course took us through very nice areas of the park, and the weather was perfect. Thanks to Tracy, Billy, and all the volunteers.
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Reply by BobGross on Mon Oct 25, 2010 at 2:01 pmHad a great time on the green course. You made the 6.5 K course as flat as possible only 310 m of climb. I got my money's worth. Thanks for all the hard work that I know went into the meet.
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Reply by sfmones on Mon Oct 25, 2010 at 4:17 pmMy thanks also to Tracy, Billy, and the crew for the Fair Hill event. It was a beautiful fall day and the Brown course was challenging. I saw six deer running across a field, but I do not know what course they were on as they easily outpaced me.
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Reply by browne on Mon Oct 25, 2010 at 7:40 pmI hate being a malcontent (though I probably do) but control placement of #82 was incorrect. The map showed it to be at the junction of the gulley and ditch, and just below the rocks to the northwest and at the same level as the cliffs to the southeast. Actual placement was several contours to the west. Is this just a moot point?
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Reply by edscott on Mon Oct 25, 2010 at 7:58 pmThanks for clearing that up.. I didn't run yesterday, but wondered after seeing the results if the control was misplaced, or stolen and then replaced later in the day.
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Reply by Orienteeringmom on Mon Oct 25, 2010 at 9:28 pmI didn't make it to Fair Hill but I alway look at the results and was extremely surprise to see such long beginner courses with a lot of climb. Was this to have been advertised as the Long Course Champs or something??? 3 and 4 K white and yellow courses with climb well over 100m for white and over 200m for yellow is well over the suggested length on the ED guidelines. I'm just wondering why so long?
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Reply by Trazy on Mon Oct 25, 2010 at 11:48 pmthank you all for your comments. it was a marvelously gorgeous day in oct for an orienteering event. i couldnt have asked for a better day except to not be sick, which i was and beared it thru the entire day some how. this morning my throat hurt so much j i coud barely make it out of bed. went to doc this afternoon and guess what, i have strep throat. anyway, we managed to pull it off pretty well despite a few glitches. many thanks goes to all the volunteers who helped to make this event run smoothly, mark frank for setting up signs and controlling parking traffic, including the young blond lady who came with the franks and helped set the flags all the way from registration to the start/finish site, mary frank for registration, bailey and fred reed for e registration, sandy fillebrown for e results, billy for course design, hanging controls and picking up cocntrols afterwards, plus bringing water to controls points, nate orwaschel, scott thatcher, neely and tom b for picking up the rest of controls and going on search for a couple of lost orienteers. thankfully the lost orienteers found their way safely back to car.i apologize to a couple of runners who wanted to run red or blue but ended up with wrong map. i am not sure how that happened. one way or another, we should always check our maps before taking off just to make sure we got the right course map. somehow some maps got mixed up. as for control no. eighty two, it may have been a printing erro as billy did put down southwest end on the clue sheet but apparently the circle wasnt quite on right place on the map. we apologize for this error and some of you still managed to find it, others were given credit nevertheless for this error. we try our best to be fair to everyone. and yes the courses were a little longer than most standard events. i have noticed that each course designer have their own style in which some like to put in a lot of climbs, or others keep to as little climb as possible, still others like to use old charcoal pits, or other specific features. i find that each course designer give us a veriety of challenges which is not the same from one weekend to the next. this gives us something to look forward to at each event.thanks again for being there, your support, your feedback and good ole orienteering companionships. see you all in the woods next time.
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Reply by Orienteeringmom on Tue Oct 26, 2010 at 8:08 pmTrazy, yes everyone has there own style of setting courses and that is fine but I feel they should stay within the guidelines or make sure that it is published that they have not done so. There are people in our club like the Ringo's that still like to do a course but can't handle, extra length or climb or physical challenge of the advance courses that is why we have the lower lever courses. I will never forget setting a yellow course at Green Lane a number of years ago when I was still new to course setting that Caroline Ringo could do because of her hip problems. It was to steep for her. She gladly helped with the meet while Kent was out but I felt so bad because they had traveled so far and Caroline was not able to orienteer. Also expecting a young famiy of newcomers to walk almost 4K on a white course is not helping our sport to grow. I don't really care what course setter do with the advance courses but I really think that they need to think about all of the possibilities of people doing the white or yellow courses. It was a beauty day to try orienteering on sunday and it would be a shame if someone did come and didn't like it because their children couldn't handle the course or they couldn't themselves and think that this was a typical white course. As far as I'm concerned there was no option for TRUE beginners to try our sport on sunday and that is a real shame. I hope that no one that tried the sport for the first time was turned off by having to walk and climb forever. I'm sorry if I'm a Champion for the beginners and people of different ablilities but I have been working to long to keep our sport going and competitive for everyone to not voice my feelings now. WE can be as friendly and helpful as possible at the registration, start and finish but if the course is not enjoyable to the people doing them, they will most likely not come back again.
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Reply by edscott on Tue Oct 26, 2010 at 8:57 pmThere are a lot of factors here. Course setting does vary from person to person. Course difficulty will also vary a lot from map to map. Easier maps like Fair Hill can support somewhat longer courses. Note that the USOF course specifications are based on time not on distance and climb.However, the white and yellow may have been a bit long. On White, Michelle Frank's time looks to be 10-15 minutes longer than might be predicted. (The real mathematicians will have to verify or refute this) We haven't enough data to really say much more. If it was my course design I'd delete #6 and #7 thus subtracting 600 or so meters of distance. The Yellow results don't really tell us much since none of the finishers appear to have run many yellows before, but again I would have eliminated either control #5 or #7 and perhaps also moved #1 to the SW to the other rootstock closer the trail junction. Either change would reduce the length by a half K or so and eliminated a few meters of climb. I like the route choices to and from 7 for yellow, but 5 is good in that it steers them away from the buildings. Both produced good yellow legs so I understand why they both were kept.
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Reply by kathyu on Wed Oct 27, 2010 at 7:43 amThree suggestions:
One interesting aspect of Sunday at Fairhill is that the event was put on by a SIG, a special interest group. That's something we should do way more often. We are a big club, with lots of SIGs, like elite runners, baby boomers, scouts, parents with kids, teachers, juniors, whatever, and a SIG could completely staff an event.
On to the next point, we are an all volunteer organization, so keeping criticism of a course on the constructive side is important. You don't want people to be reluctant to put on an event for fear of making a mistake. At Fairhill, course length, climb and walk to the start were perfectly clear in advance.
And finally, how about having an experienced armchair vetter who can take a quick look at the courses before they are set in stone and offer suggestions? If I were setting a course (god forbid) I can think of a half-dozen people who would look at my first draft. They'd probably set fire to it, but that's another story!
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Reply by Sswede on Wed Oct 27, 2010 at 8:38 amTracy, I hope you feel better soon! And I have to say that we're a bit spoiled here. In Italy last year, a 1.5 walk to the start was short and it also included stream crossings and lots of climb. We're not used to that here. I always look the course notes prior to driving out to the event to mentally prepare myself for the day and decide beforehand what course I'd like to do. I also like Fair Hill a lot so I didn't mind the extra walking, it was a good warm up while enjoying the views.
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Reply by edscott on Wed Oct 27, 2010 at 9:59 amIt needs to be noted that the long walk to start was not in the plan of the event director or course setter. We are working on ways to streamline the permission process.Paper vetting of courses by a second person is always a good idea. Also there is information on course setting parameters here http://www.dvoa.org/events/evdir/forms/setter.php
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Reply by j-man on Wed Oct 27, 2010 at 10:24 amThanks for the link Ed. Those are very helpful guidelines.
Clem -
Reply by wmallaband on Wed Oct 27, 2010 at 10:52 am
Yes, I had been noticed that all of the courses had bit longer than I expected after Ralph just fixed kilometer correct during he made map copies.
It was bit long story from last May that our event supposed to be on May 23 I think so. They had to postpone the date till October 24 due the park was under construction at the time. Before it happened, an event director Trazi asked me if I am willing to design maps that we have 3 weeks before it started. That’s why I was in the rush to design maps to be done. Before they announced it had to be postponed.I am already aware about the course guides that are what Ed Scott recently had last comment about the link.
Also, the Fair Hill Mason-Dixon was my first time design map. I did design the maps for 4th time. My apologized about misplace 82’s control stand on the ditch till end of day, I came back to check on control’ stand and I realized that it has new trail which map doesn’t have one. Old trail is higher behind the control. It confused me a bit.
I hope next time should get better. At least it was really quite nice weather.
Few days ago, it supposed to be raining on that day but it turned out to being a beautiful day. -
Reply by browne on Wed Oct 27, 2010 at 3:05 pmAll is forgiven about #82. I've done my share of that sort of thing, and others. But now, someone has to take responsibility for my attempting to go from #3 to #5 on brown, omitting#4. If you'll do that, you're more than forgiven.
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Reply by edscott on Wed Oct 27, 2010 at 3:58 pmYes I'd forgotten about the moved trail which probably confused a lot of the runners that had not been on that part of the map recently.
