Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Sunday, November 10, 2002 Some notes on course settingI'm setting the courses for an upcoming Orienteer Kansas event. We're hosting a short/middle distance race at Clinton State Park the day before the Possum Trot.I've been setting some possible legs on paper. A couple of weeks ago I spent a few hours on the map updating some trails. Gene has also been updating the map. Tomorrow, I'll go to Lawrence to test a few legs and control locations. Poking around the internet, I was happy to bump into some comments about short/middle distance courses on Tore Sandvik's home page. Tore Sandvik on short/middle distance courses I didn't have time or energy to translate the whole thing, but here is a summary of some of Sandvik's comments: A short/middle course should emphasize navigation. It should mostly use small and medium size features. The course can have some route choice, but shouldn't have too much. A good course would have one route choice leg and it shouldn't be longer than 700-800 meters. The course should have lots of direction changes. The course should have lots of variety in leg length. A good short/middle distance course should have a winning time around 22-26 minutes. The course should be in relatively easy to run terrain with plenty of detail. It shouldn't be in a very hilly area. The map should be at a scale of 1:10,000. The starts should be at an interval of two minutes. If you can read Norwegian, you can read Sandvik's article. What would Sandvik think about my course? I'm not sure what Sandvik would think about my course. For one thing, it isn't yet finalized. I'm "violating" at least two of Sandvik's ideas: the race will use a mass start and the course is likely to have one route choice leg of over 1 km. The terrain isn't especially detailed (we don't really have detailed terrain around here), but it is not hilly and the running speed will be high. The courses should have plenty of variety in leg length and direction changes. The map will be 1:10,000. I'll aim for a winning time around 25 minutes. We're using a mass start (the Possum Trot the next day also uses a mass start) and I'm not certain what technique I use to spread the field out a bit. I might begin by having a small area with 4-5 controls that the runners can either take in any order or a requirement that the runners take any two of the 4-5 controls. The ultra-long world cup in Sweden spread out runners by having too few punches at some of the early controls; I don't think I'll do that! posted by Michael | 6:35 PM 
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