Wanstead Park (Local)
Results | Routegadget | Report
Organiser, Ray Curtis
Many thanks for helping out at yesterday’s event. Without your help this wouldn’t have happened. Unfortunately the school playground as our event centre was unavailable, yet there were sufficient car parking spaces available nearby and we had a Plan B for download and printing of results. Also the beautiful weather helped.
We had a number of favourable comments at download regarding the courses, so well done to Jacob as it was his first time as planner. Also thanks to Jacob for persuading a number of his fellow runners to orienteer, many for the first time.(Hence the Long Orange course.) Finally, despite the low-ish turnout, this was an international event with a competitor from South Africa and a Swiss family. Not bad for a CHIG local event.
Planner, Jacob Stevens
I hope you enjoyed running in Wanstead Park and Bush Wood. It is a nice varied area, with some potential for moderately technical legs, but almost no white runnable forest, and lots of brambles and dense woodland. So the planning challenge – on the more difficult courses – was to take competitors off the paths where possible (I didn’t want it to be a suburban woodland version of street-O) while avoiding thick undergrowth, as well as including legs requiring careful map reading in the complex path areas to the north and west of the park, and some with route choice. I hope I got the balance right.
I wanted to include areas that were not part of the GLOSS event a couple of years ago: Bush Wood and the SE corner of the park. However, it soon became apparent that the map in these parts was quite out-of-date, having not been used for many years, and my initial ideas for control locations were overrun with brambles. So I set about remapping the vegetation in these parts – which was a great learning experience – and found that the woodland was slightly more runnable in places, and a whole network of small paths had appeared in one block of Bush Wood, which I used for control 195. In hindsight, I should have extended the map south of control 199 a little towards Wanstead Flats: several beginner runners on Long Orange reported wasting a lot of time on this control, as they ran past it and off the map, making relocation difficult.
Things ran smoothly on the day – thanks to all volunteers – with the only problem being the failure of control unit 163 soon after the start. Many thanks to the competitor who came back to inform us of this, so we could replace the unit in time for later runners.
This was my first time planning an official event, so any feedback is welcome, positive or negative! Many thanks to Tony, Ray, Ray and Tim for their invaluable advice and support throughout the process.
