PDF Summary
Splits by Course
Splits by Unit/Club
Organiser/Planner Comments: When Alex Thompson wrote to me in December asking us to put on a Wednesday League event I knew that BOK/Swerve were organising a Colour Coded event at Gare Hill in March and we could use their courses. After consultation with the 'BOK Barmy Army Gang', which has members from SWOC, NGOC, QO & SARUM as well, I therefore agreed. The Duke of Somerset's Estates always requires payment and I believed it would be best if an army representative rather than me negotiated a fee. I sent Alex the details of contacts and asked him to arrange permission for the 31st March. Unfortunately, due to an oversight or a misunderstanding, permission was not obtained. I only found this out at the beginning of March. Thanks to Dennis Hamment, BOK's Fixture Secretary, and a lot of negotiating by Allan Farrington permission was obtained and a fee agreed just in time to get the 'show on the road'.
I decided that I could not use the BOK/Swerve courses as a number of those who would probably compete at this event had also competed at the previous event. However Ben Chesters and John Rix had done all the leg work selecting controls in the best part of the forest so I was able to mainly use their sites and mix them up to produce different courses, in the main running the opposite way round to previously. I aimed to give you challenging courses as befitted a championship with plenty of route choice on the long legs followed by short changes of direction when both the mind and the legs were tired. Gare Hill is one of the few areas in the SW that a planner is able to do this. A few days before the event I was told that I could not use some of my sites due to harvesting so a further visit was necessary to modify the course just in time for Bob Teed to print the maps. Sorry about the steep climb at the end but there is no way of avoiding this. It is interesting to look at the splits and see that the winners on all three courses did not record a single fastest leg but won by consistency all round the course. There must be a message here.
I did ask if I should put on an easy course, say a runners Red, but was told that as it was a Championship this would not be necessary. As Allan has written, in hindsight we should have done this as many of the newcomers found the navigation on the Green rather difficult and there were many retirials. I hope it does not put them off O in the future.
Many thanks the BOK gang and friends who made the event run so smoothly. We all enjoy being allowed to run at service events and this enabled us to show our appreciation.
And of course the weather helped.
Mike Nelson
17/03/04 16:32:04 eTiming Version 1.7.2 Emit as