This was my first attempt at organising a large scale orienteering event and I must thank all of the volunteers from SUFFOC that helped the event run so smoothly on the day. We were blessed with the weather and the meadows looked beautiful in the spring sunshine.
We had a difficult start to organising this event as approximately 6 weeks before the event we discovered that our original event centre was due to be redeveloped and we could not use it. It was necessary to find another event centre at very short notice. We are very grateful to AFC Sudbury for allowing us to use their car park and to the Bridge Project for use of the toilets and the bar. There were some problems with the parking on the day as the club had a Presentation Day but this was resolved by parking on the access roads. Apologies if you had to walk further than expected.
The movement of the event centre meant that the water meadows had to be incorporated into the map and the courses replanned. Unfortunately as the day progressed it became apparent that an error had been made on the map. The southernmost tunnel on the water meadows had been mapped as impassable when in fact it was passable. A large number of competitors had run through this tunnel and had breached the rules regarding running through features that were marked impassable. A complaint was raised and I investigated the matter. I made a thorough investigation of all of the courses; the split times for all competitors and the affect that the voiding of the leg would have on the overall results. I concluded that only a small number of competitors had been affected by the mapping error and my decision was to let the results stand as this produced the fairest result to all of the competitors. The Controller agreed with my decision and this has been accepted by the Complainant. Apologies to anyone who was affected by this issue.
I must thank Clive Wilkinson for planning all of the courses and making all of the changes at such short notice and to Michael Chopping for controlling the event. Finally a big thank you to Andrew Elliott for preparing the new map of Sudbury centre which received many compliments.
Many thanks to all of you for coming to Suffolk and hope that you had a good weekend.
John
From the Planner:
What lovely weather it was on Saturday. You would not have believed that the meadows and the area around the start was underwater six weeks ago. I hope you all enjoyed my courses , the feedback on the day was generally good. I tried to provide route choice and long legs without too much dead running. I also wanted to bring the old railway line into play as an possible option on many courses. Six weeks before the event we had to totally replan our event as we lost the parking and assembly to the north of the town centre and only parking we could gain at short notice was the football club to the south. Big thanks to them for letting us use their parking. This meant that my hope of having all courses orienteering around the complicated estates to the north of Sudbury was lost. I still managed to get course 1 and 2 into those areas. It meant that the juniors courses I had planned which would have been more interesting than a run round a park had to be planned on the meadows. These are lovely to run round but with restrictions on siting of controls so that they didn’t receive the attentions of the resident cattle, they were of a lower technical difficulty than I would have preferred. A big thank you to Mike for his calm controlling of the last minute changes and also to John and the team for their excellent organising. See you at an urban soon
From the Organiser:
This was my first attempt at organising a large scale orienteering event and I must thank all of the volunteers from SUFFOC that helped the event run so smoothly on the day. We were blessed with the weather and the meadows looked beautiful in the spring sunshine.
We had a difficult start to organising this event as approximately 6 weeks before the event we discovered that our original event centre was due to be redeveloped and we could not use it. It was necessary to find another event centre at very short notice. We are very grateful to AFC Sudbury for allowing us to use their car park and to the Bridge Project for use of the toilets and the bar. There were some problems with the parking on the day as the club had a Presentation Day but this was resolved by parking on the access roads. Apologies if you had to walk further than expected.
The movement of the event centre meant that the water meadows had to be incorporated into the map and the courses replanned. Unfortunately as the day progressed it became apparent that an error had been made on the map. The southernmost tunnel on the water meadows had been mapped as impassable when in fact it was passable. A large number of competitors had run through this tunnel and had breached the rules regarding running through features that were marked impassable. A complaint was raised and I investigated the matter. I made a thorough investigation of all of the courses; the split times for all competitors and the affect that the voiding of the leg would have on the overall results. I concluded that only a small number of competitors had been affected by the mapping error and my decision was to let the results stand as this produced the fairest result to all of the competitors. The Controller agreed with my decision and this has been accepted by the Complainant. Apologies to anyone who was affected by this issue.
I must thank Clive Wilkinson for planning all of the courses and making all of the changes at such short notice and to Michael Chopping for controlling the event. Finally a big thank you to Andrew Elliott for preparing the new map of Sudbury centre which received many compliments.
Many thanks to all of you for coming to Suffolk and hope that you had a good weekend.
John
From the Planner:
What lovely weather it was on Saturday. You would not have believed that the meadows and the area around the start was underwater six weeks ago. I hope you all enjoyed my courses , the feedback on the day was generally good. I tried to provide route choice and long legs without too much dead running. I also wanted to bring the old railway line into play as an possible option on many courses. Six weeks before the event we had to totally replan our event as we lost the parking and assembly to the north of the town centre and only parking we could gain at short notice was the football club to the south. Big thanks to them for letting us use their parking. This meant that my hope of having all courses orienteering around the complicated estates to the north of Sudbury was lost. I still managed to get course 1 and 2 into those areas. It meant that the juniors courses I had planned which would have been more interesting than a run round a park had to be planned on the meadows. These are lovely to run round but with restrictions on siting of controls so that they didn’t receive the attentions of the resident cattle, they were of a lower technical difficulty than I would have preferred. A big thank you to Mike for his calm controlling of the last minute changes and also to John and the team for their excellent organising. See you at an urban soon
Clive