Discussion: Course notes after event
in: Teanaway cup (Sep 28–29, 2019 - Cle Elum, WA, US)
Oct 1, 2019 6:31 AM
#
Day1:
http://rg.cascadeoc.org/rg2/#265
Estimate failures:
Einari Heinaro pre-ran the blue course with streamers at 40 minutes with ~3 minutes of hesitations. My assumption was that our local faster guys should match him with better visible controls, hopefully hitting ~38-40 minutes.
I was a bit off at this calculation and underestimated Einari's speed, with Will hitting 46 minutes with 1 minute mistake, so 45 minute course. The length for the course was 5.4km + 200m climb, so 7.4 km flat run equivalent. I should have removed 8 minutes of course, meaning 1.3 km of equivalent - 17% mistake in planning.
Stemming from there, all other courses got messed up. In addition - AliC could not make it, so fastest Red runner was Patrick.
Green and Brown - Oyvind and Dave Enger made 46 minutes both; again I was ~20% off.
This would have been easy to fix - just walk the people in further up the hill.
Course design:
Treating brown to blue as "everything goes" - we got Green to Blue up to big land-slidish area on top of course, while letting brown stay lower.
For the longer courses the flow went like this:
- physically hard uphill climbs section
- dealing with vegetation and complexity of detail section
- fast back-to-finish part in the flatter area.
We also tried to make the courses be subset of each other - enabling comparison across classes and also minimizing the work of course setter.
Legs to notice: Blue course 3-4 - talking to runners it seemed like everyone ended on road (like Einari) so I gathered it be too obvious, but turns out that both Ian and Will ended up not reaching it - so I call it a success.
Legs in flat area - Brown 12-13, Red 14-15, Blue 18-19.
Our first decision for map making was to not draw the smaller cow trails, but I ended up putting them on there. This certainly caused some confusion to sort out what is what with minutes lost.
Finally - only significant time loss of Will, running to the go control. The beginner course had markings to the go control with the markings doing a small zig-zag. Will assumed signs were leasing somewhere else and ended up dropping from the flat area to road level. A win for course setter.
Note for future: there should be "easy long course" somewhere - however, with 50 people in attendance already having 7 courses is a lot. This is a problematic situation as there are not enough maps bridging the gap of park race to a national level race so it is hard for people to make that jump.
Regarding beginner courses:
For white the hardship was to come up with something simple - we ended up marking route for two of the checkpoints, but then realized that the first checkpoint does not match the suggested "make it visible from start" guideline. We mitigated on sport by additional pinflags from start triangle control to the trail where the checkpoint would go to.
Yellow noone ran :(.
Orange - Kyle Hopkins running M16 group did wonderful job there, but very likely I could have made it much easier - his winning time of 1h is way too much. However, the attendance at beginner classes is very random, so what can we do.
More later.
http://rg.cascadeoc.org/rg2/#265
Estimate failures:
Einari Heinaro pre-ran the blue course with streamers at 40 minutes with ~3 minutes of hesitations. My assumption was that our local faster guys should match him with better visible controls, hopefully hitting ~38-40 minutes.
I was a bit off at this calculation and underestimated Einari's speed, with Will hitting 46 minutes with 1 minute mistake, so 45 minute course. The length for the course was 5.4km + 200m climb, so 7.4 km flat run equivalent. I should have removed 8 minutes of course, meaning 1.3 km of equivalent - 17% mistake in planning.
Stemming from there, all other courses got messed up. In addition - AliC could not make it, so fastest Red runner was Patrick.
Green and Brown - Oyvind and Dave Enger made 46 minutes both; again I was ~20% off.
This would have been easy to fix - just walk the people in further up the hill.
Course design:
Treating brown to blue as "everything goes" - we got Green to Blue up to big land-slidish area on top of course, while letting brown stay lower.
For the longer courses the flow went like this:
- physically hard uphill climbs section
- dealing with vegetation and complexity of detail section
- fast back-to-finish part in the flatter area.
We also tried to make the courses be subset of each other - enabling comparison across classes and also minimizing the work of course setter.
Legs to notice: Blue course 3-4 - talking to runners it seemed like everyone ended on road (like Einari) so I gathered it be too obvious, but turns out that both Ian and Will ended up not reaching it - so I call it a success.
Legs in flat area - Brown 12-13, Red 14-15, Blue 18-19.
Our first decision for map making was to not draw the smaller cow trails, but I ended up putting them on there. This certainly caused some confusion to sort out what is what with minutes lost.
Finally - only significant time loss of Will, running to the go control. The beginner course had markings to the go control with the markings doing a small zig-zag. Will assumed signs were leasing somewhere else and ended up dropping from the flat area to road level. A win for course setter.
Note for future: there should be "easy long course" somewhere - however, with 50 people in attendance already having 7 courses is a lot. This is a problematic situation as there are not enough maps bridging the gap of park race to a national level race so it is hard for people to make that jump.
Regarding beginner courses:
For white the hardship was to come up with something simple - we ended up marking route for two of the checkpoints, but then realized that the first checkpoint does not match the suggested "make it visible from start" guideline. We mitigated on sport by additional pinflags from start triangle control to the trail where the checkpoint would go to.
Yellow noone ran :(.
Orange - Kyle Hopkins running M16 group did wonderful job there, but very likely I could have made it much easier - his winning time of 1h is way too much. However, the attendance at beginner classes is very random, so what can we do.
More later.
Oct 3, 2019 4:55 AM
#
Day2, Jack Creek, http://rg.cascadeoc.org/rg2/#266:
We extended the map from some years ago and accommodated the burn that took place in 2017. The estimated time for fastest runner was something around 10min/km, which Eric Bone almost achieved in Blue, finishing 9km course in 1:36h. Dave Enger reached finish in Brown at 1:07h, a bit over the planned time. Green and Red course winning times were larger than I hoped for (1:27 and 1:52). We again missed AliC which would have very likely pushed the Red course to approx 1:20 to 1:30h .
The calculation used for course lengths:
1) with reasonable elevation 10min/km is achievable, make sure Blue gets correct time.
2) move to flat equivalents (distance in km + (elevation in meters)/100) (~11.65 for Blue course)
3) Design Red as 0.75 of Blue (AliC's speed is 0.85 of EricB, winning time is a bit less for Red), Green as 0.43, Brown as 0.32 of Blue.
The distances drop quickly - Red was 6.6, Green 5.1, Brown 3.3 km.
Other course design limitations.
- Finish close to road - since only one access point, then finish is fixed.
- We wanted to use the new areas of map: this kind of dictated the start location. The big hill of N part was not really usable unless we wanted to just add some elevation there (next time?), so starting controls to the south part of area were all rather short. We also wanted to avoid trails as natural route choices for advanced courses (failed at Brown though).
- Match the long legs of all courses (success):
https://attackpoint.org/raceleg.jsp/event_46444/ra...
and
https://attackpoint.org/raceleg.jsp/event_46444/ra... (Nina beats Will, btw).
To increase Blue course distance we pretty much used all available controls, effectively making it a very long middle distance course.
With that in mind Red and Green were probably the nicest courses around, providing the best balance available for short legs and longer ones.
For Brown - delivering people to south side spent enough distance to make South side rather unused. Same for smaller courses.
For white the struggle was to find anything simple, which kind-of limited us to the small trails around + a very long (and marked in miserable cold on Friday evening) marked route out of their CP1 to the road.
Yellow noone used, but Orange had a winning time of 1:13h - so a bit long. This likely needs to be rethought, but I hope everyone had good time there.
Small issues and fun facts:
1) We planned to have the run-in start at the same altitude as checkpoint start, but due to no communication to start volunteer, the race started at the road, adding some 20 meters of climb. oops.
2) There were some interesting checkpoints that more people had trouble with:
- #3 on blue (also #3 on red) was hard to distinguish in nature - the subtle spur is non-distinct from West and the vegetation is non distinct. Some good amount of errors there. (https://attackpoint.org/raceleg.jsp/event_46444/ra...)
- #7 on blue (#6 on red) was not well placed - in the small reentrant, but inside thick bush, hard to see - some folks correctly pointed out that it was a bit of a bingo control;
3) quote heard on road from a green course runner, figuring out whether to go straight across Rye creek or not (from 5-6) - "F* it, I'm going around". A reference to all the bad leafy bush being full of water.
The saddest part of both days - I didn't get to run the courses.
We extended the map from some years ago and accommodated the burn that took place in 2017. The estimated time for fastest runner was something around 10min/km, which Eric Bone almost achieved in Blue, finishing 9km course in 1:36h. Dave Enger reached finish in Brown at 1:07h, a bit over the planned time. Green and Red course winning times were larger than I hoped for (1:27 and 1:52). We again missed AliC which would have very likely pushed the Red course to approx 1:20 to 1:30h .
The calculation used for course lengths:
1) with reasonable elevation 10min/km is achievable, make sure Blue gets correct time.
2) move to flat equivalents (distance in km + (elevation in meters)/100) (~11.65 for Blue course)
3) Design Red as 0.75 of Blue (AliC's speed is 0.85 of EricB, winning time is a bit less for Red), Green as 0.43, Brown as 0.32 of Blue.
The distances drop quickly - Red was 6.6, Green 5.1, Brown 3.3 km.
Other course design limitations.
- Finish close to road - since only one access point, then finish is fixed.
- We wanted to use the new areas of map: this kind of dictated the start location. The big hill of N part was not really usable unless we wanted to just add some elevation there (next time?), so starting controls to the south part of area were all rather short. We also wanted to avoid trails as natural route choices for advanced courses (failed at Brown though).
- Match the long legs of all courses (success):
https://attackpoint.org/raceleg.jsp/event_46444/ra...
and
https://attackpoint.org/raceleg.jsp/event_46444/ra... (Nina beats Will, btw).
To increase Blue course distance we pretty much used all available controls, effectively making it a very long middle distance course.
With that in mind Red and Green were probably the nicest courses around, providing the best balance available for short legs and longer ones.
For Brown - delivering people to south side spent enough distance to make South side rather unused. Same for smaller courses.
For white the struggle was to find anything simple, which kind-of limited us to the small trails around + a very long (and marked in miserable cold on Friday evening) marked route out of their CP1 to the road.
Yellow noone used, but Orange had a winning time of 1:13h - so a bit long. This likely needs to be rethought, but I hope everyone had good time there.
Small issues and fun facts:
1) We planned to have the run-in start at the same altitude as checkpoint start, but due to no communication to start volunteer, the race started at the road, adding some 20 meters of climb. oops.
2) There were some interesting checkpoints that more people had trouble with:
- #3 on blue (also #3 on red) was hard to distinguish in nature - the subtle spur is non-distinct from West and the vegetation is non distinct. Some good amount of errors there. (https://attackpoint.org/raceleg.jsp/event_46444/ra...)
- #7 on blue (#6 on red) was not well placed - in the small reentrant, but inside thick bush, hard to see - some folks correctly pointed out that it was a bit of a bingo control;
3) quote heard on road from a green course runner, figuring out whether to go straight across Rye creek or not (from 5-6) - "F* it, I'm going around". A reference to all the bad leafy bush being full of water.
The saddest part of both days - I didn't get to run the courses.
This discussion thread is closed.