Planner comments:
It is safe to say I probably over think planning these street series events!
Galmington is a surprisingly interesting area with quite a lot of route options and cut throughs. As a planner I find I always have a few key features you want to include (for good or bad) on your course. For this it was the long footpath at the top (with control 67) and the parallel road with the side roads which I cycle down regularly on the school run. Especially on the short course there are several different approaches to try and maximise points without looping back - sneaking up from control 20, ignoring 67 entirely, coming back to it from one end etc.
Another accidental feature of the course was scale - I started with an overly ambitious map area including controls looping around Queens College. Initial tests highlighted it was too large an area (running to all controls took an hour and a half) - so I scaled it back as much as I could without losing some of the elements I thought were fun. The net result was a course where it was very easy to over stretch - I was even late on my own test run! (although Adam’s 1s must hurt!)
In no particular order, some of other elements that went into the planning:
- There are more points in one colour than the other
- The bottom loop below the start was designed to be a red-herring (I think there are quicker ways of getting 80 points)
- The course was originally planned so that the uphill muddy path along the building site was a bad route choice - but I only realise now that I accidentally made it the optimum route choice for the odds (so sorry about that)
- Each ‘quadrant’ of the map has broadly the same value of controls
- Planners tip - if your course is low scoring then you get proportionally a better result as your average score will be higher*
(* we might need to consider a way of adjusting planner scores to take into account variance in scores between events)
Everyone control was visited, there was a huge variation of routes, and I wasn’t at the pub afterwards to hear any complaints, so I am going to call that a success! Now to plan the 2x2 relay.
Thanks to Roger, Judy, Ray and Hazel for helping on the night, Alasdair for the Maprun admin, Jeff for turning around the results quickly, Richard for early testing and the Lipica gang for putting up with me spending an evening clicking refresh on my laptop to view the courses and results.