Discussion: Course length
in: Brodie Nank; Brodie Nank > 2014-03-23
Mar 28, 2014 5:47 AM
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As I've noted in a couple of other places, part of the issue with the course lengths is that the setters based them on kilometre rates from courses which were steeper and/or greener than what we had on Sunday. The last three national-level events on Kangaroo Crossing were all at least 1 minute/km slower than Sunday was.
Mar 28, 2014 6:02 AM
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I've seen you mention that a few times Blair and no doubt that is why the mistake was made. Not sure it's a valid excuse though: Jules got round a 6.1km course through much of the same terrain in 5.9mpks in December 2012. And the other bits of the course that we did extra this time were a long path leg, some burnt bush, and downhill. So it wasn't all that surprising how quick it went.
Mar 29, 2014 10:49 AM
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Yes, it's an explanation rather than an excuse (and hopefully a lesson). It also reflects some of the problems we've had in who was responsible for communicating what to whom (hopefully less of a problem now that Nick has clear responsibility for high performance operations, including the NOL) - the organisers didn't know they were organising WOC trials (let alone that there were supposed to be extended winning times for them) until a couple of weeks out when the bulletin came out and Jenny asked them why their courses were so short. (About 1km was added to M/W21E at that stage; don't think any changes were made to the juniors, though). We've already got a template in place for the NOL/WOC trial program for 2015 and 2016 so hopefully that side of things will be better in future.
Apart from not going into the green in the southeast quarter, one of the things which struck me about the course was that almost none of it was in genuinely steep terrain (and that's even more true for M20 because they had no controls below the escarpment). Even in the white, slogging across steep, rocky slopes can be very slow going there.
(Incidentally, the western half of the 2011 map is much greener than its 1984 equivalent, but I'm not sure how much of that is change in vegetation and how much of it is change in mapping).
Apart from not going into the green in the southeast quarter, one of the things which struck me about the course was that almost none of it was in genuinely steep terrain (and that's even more true for M20 because they had no controls below the escarpment). Even in the white, slogging across steep, rocky slopes can be very slow going there.
(Incidentally, the western half of the 2011 map is much greener than its 1984 equivalent, but I'm not sure how much of that is change in vegetation and how much of it is change in mapping).
This discussion thread is closed.