Training Log Archive: slow-twitch

As far as I could tell, nobody else turned up for the informal o training (if that's what a 'U-Max' actually is??), or only Germans did so that in arriving a few minutes late for the meeting time I missed them all. So after waiting a polite half hour+ I just went for a hopefully inertia-busting run. From the north end of the Kelson flats to Melling Bridge and return, both sides of the river. A little bit of knee soreness but really only apparent on hard surface (so should have stayed on the west side of the river where the city council hasn't 'helpfully' paved the river trails).

Musings on Oceania Middle.
Quite a different experience from the other 'big event' course setting I've done previously (NZ and NISS relays). A long and at times stressful and frustrating process, but by the time the day was over it all seemed worthwhile. So, yes I would do it again but definitely NOT from a distance (which is where most of the frustration came in). Also for anything anywhere near this scale I'd want to know right from the start who else is involved in the event organisation, whether I'm going to need to communicate with them at all, and if so, at what stage in the process (a few too many peripheral matters that first I heard of was the last minute!).

But it's actually the course setting I want to comment on here, not get sidetracked with the background picture... Positives first:

Red course winning times were pretty much all in the 35-28 minute range I was aiming for. There was the odd outlier in the low 20s but in each case it was the kind of person that if they had a clean run you'd expect them to be super quick (Dani Goodall, Marike Vanjuk, Gillian Ingham, casser are the ones I remember) and you only needed to go to 2nd or 3rd to get times in the appropriate part of the range. In those grades where I have a fairly good idea of who's who, it was people that I really respect as orienteers in the top few placings (if you'd asked me beforehand who the 3 best technical orienteers in this part of the world are, I would have named the eventual top 3 M21E, so that's one result I'm particularly stoked by) My overall impression is that the remainder of runners were mostly tightly grouped, so that one or two mistakes could make a significant difference in placing, which personally I think is good middle distance orienteering.

Two things I didn't enjoy much about the 2015 NZ middle distance champs (in almost the identical area) were that controls in and around the canyons were a bit of a lottery; and that in the final loop above the event centre (at least on my course that day) there was unnecessary climb. So that shaped my setting somewhat. The canyons featured only as a route choice problem on some of the courses, so it became less crucial trying to figure out what was up and what was down. I still tried to give everyone at least one short 'maze' leg in the rockery though to negate the standard rock terrain technique of staying out of the detail as much as possible, but keeping the actual sites fair. So I was particularly pleased with this unsolicited comment from bozzy: "Challenging legs but without stooping to a boulder treasure hunt" (It wasn't intentional, but I think my mates in M45 probably got the most full-on technical course)

Regarding climb, I think the new start area helped a lot, especially with the 'oldies' courses where keeping climb to a minimum is so important - and hard on a relatively steep map. My main measure though is that longest courses were significantly longer than nationals but winning times were about the same.

I also wanted (for the courses that were long enough) to change terrain type/orienteering style several times, which is why anyone who expected a full-on rock-fest will have been disappointed, but hopefully also thrown off their stride a bit! This was one of the reasons for having the start in terrain 'unrepresentative' of the rest of the map. So successful competitors would have had to adjust speed and technique several times throughout the course of the run. From what I've seen so far on route-gadget (shameless hint for you to add your route), while 'time loss incidents' are mostly concentrated around the rockery and other 'intense' parts of the terrain, people have certainly found ways to make mistakes in the more innocuous looking parts of the map as well, which I put down in part to relaxing too much - just as I planned [evil laugh].

The 'less positives'/learnings:
When choosing control sites (particularly for an event with such large fields, and in potentially hazardous terrain) I need to put just as much thought into exit directions as approach/control finding. There were at least 4 sites that shouldn't have been used either at all or for particular/less courses - if this had been realised earlier there might have been a bit less 'safety tape' out there, which I understand caused a few competitors a bit of distraction/confusion (although IMO it's better to suffer from distraction than a broken leg or neck!)

I always check the splits for blow-outs on the easier courses to identify if anything was too hard. I'm mostly happy in this respect, although it looks like the (less obvious in the real world than on the map) track between 10 & 11 on the white course was not a strong enough handrail (the girls mostly handled it but too many of the M10s lost time here for my liking). I wasn't sure about this but it seemed excessive to tape it - perhaps breaking the leg up with another control (visible from 10) was required?

The thing I really struggled with, was with 25 courses (including 21 red level), it was really difficult to keep track of whether a control location change made for the benefit of one course had positive or negative impact on others. Setting-from-a-distance definitely didn't help here - if a decision made in the field turned out not to work on further reflection, I couldn't exactly pop out to check other potential sites.

In this respect, I'm not really happy with the final W21E course (course 3). I've seen so many times in international races where the women's course is a pale imitation of the men's, and did NOT want to be guilty about this. But I realised too late that in a number of cases where we'd made either a late change to a control location or altered things to manage competitor loading through particular controls, that it was often the women's course that had suffered as a result and the cumulative effects left something a fair bit weaker than what I was intending. I'd be particularly interested in feedback from anyone who ran that course as to whether they feel the same way and/or whether they still feel the resulting course was worthy of an international championship.

But on the whole, feedback I've had so far has been overwhelmingly positive - most of the negative I've seen or heard has been regarding the weather related issues, which I don't have a big enough god-complex to feel responsible for! Would love to hear more thoughts - including critical ones!