West Midlands Orienteering Association
POTOC District Event
and
West Midlands League Event
Sunday 8th October 2006
The colour name in the first column is a link to the full results for that course, and the time in the last column is a link to the split times for that course.
course winner club class time Yellow Philip Wiegand SYO M10 24:57 Orange Matthew Elkington OD M12 44:37 Light Green Ben Ross OD M14 35:00 Green Robert Smith DVO M40 38:10 Blue Mikey Hopkins WCH M18 64:01 Brown Alex Morgan HOC M40 66:27
There is also a list of String Course competitors.
It was John Pigott who suggested we hold an event on the military training area using Hugh Drummond's map. Hugh willingly allowed us to use the map and permission to access the area for a joint military and civilian event was obtained by Staff Sergeant George Lamplough of 23 Engineering Regiment who is a POTOC member. George could not attend the event as he is serving in Afghanistan and we send him our thanks and best wishes.
Car parking was a difficult issue in this generally wet area until we found Noon Sun Farm and its wonderfully helpful tenant, Les Riley who never flinched, no matter what I asked of him. Add to this the planning talents of Dave Sparks, efficient results from Jill Leventon of WRE and controlling from Andy Yeates who stepped in at virtually the last minute, and we had the makings of a very good event.
There were moments of anxiety! I found out a week ago that, due to a misunderstanding, we had not been allocated the farm at Upper Fleet Green as a base, but a military building on the A53 instead. This had been just resolved when the weather showed its hand and there was a day of heavy rain on the area. This brought up the stream levels, potentially making junior courses difficult and the walk to the start very interesting. We constructed various stepping stones and the weather was kinder, so the water level went down. Weather on the day could not have been better, and I enjoyed ploughing through deep heather on my less than optimum route choice route around the Blue.
We had 203 entrants, which is 10% less than my minimum estimate for the entry on a new area. I would be interested to know why we did not attract more. I hope you all enjoyed your run (when you could run) and will tell your friends you did. We could then consider using the area again!
My special thanks to all the POTOC helpers who did an excellent job on the day.
POTOC would like to thank the following for their generous support:
When I first looked at the area, there had been a long dry spell; but even then some of the marshes (in the deep reentrants) were treacherous. I quickly realised that courses planned to avoid the heather and tussocks would be too short, and settled for courses which were more physical than I would have liked.
There were varied opinions on the best route for leg 6-7 of the Green course. I'd assumed that, after having had a chance to see the depth of the heather, competitors would take the route through the dark yellow. Some took the more southerly route through the heather -- a similar length, with roughly the same amount of descent and ascent, and physically much tougher. Some runners also tried to leave 7 by crossing the steep reentrant on the direct line to 8 (and some, apparently, succeeded). The best route was the dogleg, back to the track in the upper part of the reentrant; there was an alternative route to the East of the reentrant, but this had more climb.
Yellow course competitors may have been taken aback by the lack of paths -- the course followed ruined walls and fences, and earthwalls. The few mapped paths on the area do not form a network, and the usual all-paths Yellow course simply wasn't possible. It also wasn't possible to avoid stream crossings, and Geoff had to put a lot of effort into making the deeper crossing easy enough for young juniors.
The area was always going to be tough, no matter how it was planned. The rain in the week before the event made the going underfoot that slight bit tougher. We can only think ourselves lucky that it didn't rain on the day, or there may not have been any smiles. Geoff and Dave bent over backwards to ensure that everything was as well prepared as it could be, and you were at the forefront of their minds when doing it. They made my job easy, and I thank them for it.