‘Michael Brandon’ MITRE 2010 – Organisers Report

Talking to people immediately after they completed the course and reviewing some of the feedback. I get the impression that most people enjoyed the event. However there were a number of points where we could have been better organized.

The distance between the start and the finish was a problem – not least because it meant that those who left items at the clothing dump had a long walk back to get them. The decision to have the clothing dump close to the start was based on the assumption that runners hang around the start for longer than the finish. When the area was last used for an event the start and finish were in similar positions but closer to main paths which may have made the location of the clothing dump less of an issue.

There was some confusion about the initial route to the start through Paradise Wildlife Park. The final details had described the route. In retrospect a few more signs would have been useful.

We were very fortunate to have the use of Paradise Wildlife Park facilities including the car park with marshals. The portakabin allowed the download and registration team to work in the relative warm. A slight downside was that by using the windows for download and registration there was a barrier between the runners and the helpers which may have reduced the friendliness of this aspect of the event.

We ran out of maps for some classes – I am very sorry about this and for those who had to do a harder course than they intended, I hope you enjoyed it! This was a symptom of a bigger issue which was predicting the number of maps to print. The event was intended to be pre-entry only with limited entry on the day. However the use of Fabian4 appears to encourage people to leave booking to the last moment – to an extent that we hadn’t anticipated.

Start times: this is where the organizer has to admit that he hadn’t realised that for regional events individual start times should be issued. After being made aware of this requirement, we did try to issue start times before the event but not everyone received them. Will do better next time!

Some runners may have noticed a slight delay in getting results printed or displayed; this was largely caused by download team facing a steep learning curve with the technology! Please accept my apologies and hopefully next time we will be better trained.

Thanks to the numerous CHIG helpers who helped to make this event happen.

David Lund