(1) Did the jurisdiction require/insistently suggest no off-trail use in the pretty-hill area of the WRE map, or was that the course setter's approach? The course looks very interesting and I'm curious if the off-trail navigation was rejected because of the constraint or because of philosophy. That hill must have taken quite a while to map!
(2) The use of 512.1 Bridge on the UVic North map... seems to ISSOM, but I as a competitor would have most likely confused it with the impassable wall. Were places you can go under Bridges highlighted with purple "overprint" or not? I have a direct interest in this because the campus map for Sprint Black Diamond is a similar two-level affair and the mapper and I are going to try hard to set courses that aren't overly confusing.
1) The course planners were informed 2 weeks ago that they could no longer go off trail.
2) I, along with several elites, mistook those bridges for walls on the way to #14. and we took much longer routes because of it. I think the consensus was that something should have been done to make it more clear. Either purple passageways, or to use the tunnel symbol (so that it's consistent with the other two bridge/tunnels in the immediate area.
One option in the tunnel/bridge area is to mis-map the upper level, since there's no need to go there. In the bridge bits, remove the bridge symbol and just leave canopy, and then add uncrossable wall symbols (at the start and end of the bridges) to signify you can't reach the upper levels. It's ugly, but...
Alternatively, have a map extract at the start explaining it all, or purple overprinting.
In the map I have for my event, the bridge symbol is used in almost exactly the same fashion as it was at UVic, so I was just going to cross it with purple 708.1.
This is, and has been, my favorite event of the year since I started attending in 2008. Not only are the maps and courses fantastic, but the sense of community at sprint camp is by far the best I've experienced at an orienteering meet. Ever. (It's not even close, really).
One option in the tunnel/bridge area is to mis-map the upper level, since there's no need to go there.
Many people used the upper level from 15-16, so I don't think it would be fair to purposely mismap all of the upper levels. There are 4 bridge/tunnels in the area (one halfway between 14 and 16, one halfway between 15 and 16, one immediately SE of 14, and one between 14 and 15, to the south).
Two of these were mapped with tunnel symbols and two with bridges (with canopies above the bridges). My suggestion is to put the tunnel dashes under all 4, to be consistent in this localized area. The argument against this is that the bridge/tunnels are of varying widths (the two widest are mapped as tunnels, the two narrowest as bridges). I'd favor mapping the passability consistently, rather than being more technically accurate (well, this one is more of a tunnel, and this one is more of a bridge, etc.).
Nice course. I assume that this official restriction came into force for all people. Is this restriction in any way related with private area on top of the hill? What organizers did in last moment: tape, marshals or they just inform runners not to run off trail?
Unedited, unmuted head camp video of the mass start Farsta race at Highrock Park.
Skip to about 0:40 to the start and see the dirty tactics of the competitor to my right.
And yes, thanks to GVOC for another awesome weekend.
Big ups. A very memorable sprint camp in a very memorable series. Wish I could go to a bunch of these every year. Excellent venues, excellent maps all made for this weekend, excellent courses. Definitely worth the extra transportation hassle for us Oaklanders!
<SHAMELESS PLUG>Your next chance to get your Sprint on is this June at some of the most scenic West Coast venues! Details and registration coming this week.</SHAMELESS PLUG>
Great race Pat! So fun to watch this after having made the map and planned the course. Such a cool little area.
Regarding the WRE, the original course still had a long route choice leg to the first control (though it was located off-trail), but then there were more controls on the hill. The motivation for the sudden restriction from the parks people was "sensitive plants". This decision came after the last site visit by the course planner and adviser, so a complete redesign of the courses was not an option. They approved the new course design and asked us to inform runners to stay on the trails. There was no way that we were going to tape and purple slash the whole hill. And we were certainly not going to pull a French-WOC-disaster with marshals on the course. After some discussion we decided to not even mention this restriction to the runners at all, since that would also be very confusing (what constitutes off-trail? will I be dsq if I put one foot off-trail, or several steps?) We argued that almost all runners would stay on the trails anyway as those were the natural choices. We only added the purple slash to avoid shortcuts down to control 2. In the end, I believe we came to the correct compromise and the courses were still good! Though my preference was certainly to have more technical controls in the open rock.
Regarding UVic, it was a little bit more of a last minute deal without controllers or IOF advisers ;) I completely agree that the bridge symbol in ISSOM is too thick to use without other support (such as tunnel dashes, or purple overprint).
I course set (and tweaked the older map in a few places - but I know it still left a bit to be desired) for the setup and chase. When I checked the control locations (no controller ;), it made sense for me... I suppose at low speed and having studied the map beforehand. So I am sorry about the confusion, and hope people had fun anyway. I wanted people to use the overpass from 15-16, and believe it is the best route (so was happy to hear there was a split on this route).
I'm not a huge fan of the dotted black tunnel symbol because it doesn't work for very short tunnels where only one or two dots show up (as would have been the case here). The bridge symbol is clearly also flawed because the ends of it (which differentiate it from any other black line symbol) are sometimes hidden among other symbols (again as is the case here). I've taken to always pairing the dotted black tunnel symbol with the mandatory crossing symbol (ISSOM 2007 708.1) or in cases where that purple line is too thick or obscures other features I'll use a thinner purple line overlapping the dotted black line.
And Louise, I think everyone enjoyed the event despite it perhaps not being perfect. It was a ton of fun and we all understand (I think) the barebones organization of the chase.
I would do the same but I think in these cases runners should be at least informed about existance of out of bounds areas, how they can recognize it in the nature and what is the reason for it (danger, protective area, temporary no pass, ...). I think that out of bounds areas on more important races must be taped and have marshal if it is needed otherwise purple slash can result in a big dispute as it was example in Sweden last year.
One note about control points and organization of start. It is a little bit unusual to see at WRE so many control points and almost half of the course (8 legs) same for M/W21E course. From WinSplits I saw that classes on Women elite course start inside M elite course start block which could gave some advantages to some runners. Running both courses in separately start window would probably be good to avoid undue risks. You probably didn't have any problems but still why not just to prolong start window for additional 15 minutes. Looking from a distance fairness issue is one of the most important part of WRE race so other runners can respect results and points. But on other hand organizing so much races in 3 days is really an achievement worthy of praise.
Thank you so much to Magnus, Louise, Thomas, and everyone for an amazing event. Without a doubt Sprint Camp is my favorite orienteering experience to date (both this year and last). I could care less about the few things that didn't go as planned (horrible trail shoes on my part, big mistakes); I just had an AMAZING time. I hope these events never go away.
RE the U-VIC Sprint course, the ISSOM states this in the specification that these symbols (tunnels) should be highlighted in purple.
This has not been done in numerous important events in the past, we really should be aware that the object is to make the map easy to read for the competitor, not to trick him with unreadable details and confusing symbols.
Wish I lived on the west coast of Canada......................
If you're thinking of coming to the Sprint Camp in the future (you should), consider flying into Seattle and carpooling with the CascadeOC contingent (we had 25+ in attendance this year). Several people have done this in the past, as it's usually cheaper and easier to find flights within the US.
As a rookie to the sprint camp this year I would also like to thank everyone who made it possible. It was a lot of fun. I was just curious approximately how much time went into mapmaking? The maps were really great. I hope to make it back next year.
Here's yet another headcam video of the Farsta race. If you start this one at 12 seconds simultaneously with the other at 51 seconds, you can have dueling videos going. And we were close the entire race.
Also, listen closely if you'd like a rare insight into what goes through an expert orienteer's mind, particularly around 1:00 to 1:30.
I have a question about mapping of UVic North that was used for the Sprint Chase.
In looking at Pat-hetic's video I noticed that the building have quite a bit more detail (ins and outs plus patios,overhangs, etc), that aren't mapped and the buildings are depicted as plain rectangular. As a competitior that's basically all I would be looking for so I don't see a problem. However, as a beginning mapper that has tried to do some basic sprint maps I find that I spend a whole lot of time trying to map and draw all those little ins and outs, etc. Your map seemed to work fine with respect to the buildings so I'm wondering what the norm is? I'm not making an important competition map but I want it to be useable and it would certainly be a lot easier to ignore a lot of those little details.
However, as a beginning mapper that has tried to do some basic sprint maps I find that I spend a whole lot of time trying to map and draw all those little ins and outs, etc.
Does your professional life involve architectural blueprints, by any chance?
Thanks for posting those headcam videos! Really enjoyed them a lot!
Regarding the UVic map, it was actually a conversion job from an old ISOM map, and then touched up a bit. That's probably mostly why it's perhaps a bit less detailed. We really should have started from scratch with a new basemap, like we did with most of the other maps, but we ran out of time.
Here is a very rough edit of some of the footage and interviews of Sprint Camp. I promise that I will actually give the footage to someone who actually knows how to edit videos...but for now this is it.
It's more of a deconstructed argyle pattern. The front has three rows of solid diamonds (two white, one red). However, the front does not have the overlay of intersecting diagonal lines.
The back has the intersecting diagonal lines (half white, half black, over solid red), but it doesn't have any solid diamonds. So really, the two elements that make up a traditional argyle are present on the jersey; one on the front, and one on the back.
However, as a beginning mapper that has tried to do some basic sprint maps I find that I spend a whole lot of time trying to map and draw all those little ins and outs, etc.
The rule of thumb is "what would be significant/noticeable to the competitor at race pace", so I would lean more towards simplification. In an urban area, runners won't care if you don't draw every house's front porch because they can't go through it - and you presumably won't put a control on it - anyway.
Another example is in university campuses, which always tend to have doorways recessed 1m or so creating a little alcove. While you could conceivably map them all, it doesn't add anything to the map except a lot of noise.