Green:     76.00

Orange:   47.22

Yellow:    26.00

As it was my first effort at planning, the Nower provided me with some interesting challenges.  The primary one was the size of the area, given that the BOF recommended distance for a Green is 3.5km to 5km and the map is only 1.25 km long.  The plentiful path network made the Yellow and Orange courses reasonably straight forward, especially after Gordon corrected my initial over-zealous plans for the Orange.  Use of SportIdent removed a lot of constraint for the Green, but I still felt it was necessary to have a second master map due to the inevitable criss-crossing required to get enough distance in.

 A second constraint was the Hill Race start and finish, and I tried to keep the shorter courses away from the likely approaches to the hill race, which tend to be fast and downhill.  We still got a number of hill race finishers trying to download in the colour coded finish.

 I received a number of comments about the courses at the finish, some complimentary and some not so.  It seems on balance that most enjoyed it.  On reflection, I based my decision about distance for the Green course on previous finish times without allowing for the fact that Green was the longest course available.  Clearly, more faster runners would have run and as a result the course was probably slightly long, even though the winning time was faster than last year.

I would like to thank Mike Elliot for his excellent efforts on Sport Ident and, in particular, Gordon Parker, who went well beyond his duties as controller to ensure the event went well.

 Vince Grealy (MV)

When  I  plan events I  arrange for dry  weather. This  time  I  was not  quite  so  good. It stopped  raining  before  the  event  but  it started  raining  before  the  last  people  finished.  The  wet  weather put  people  off,  as  not  so many  people  came,  which  was  a  shame  as people  said  they  enjoyed  the  course  Vince  had  put  on.

My  thanks  to  everyone  for  their  assistance.

I hoped you enjoyed the courses which Vince planned. It is always difficult to decide on what is the appropriate distance at an event like this as a very wide range of age groups end up competing on the Green course - hopefully we set it broadly at the right distance. Apologies to the late starters on the Green course who had trouble with control 2. This control was moved towards the end of the competition by persons unkown and affected a few people's runs.

 

I would also like to apologise to those who arrived for a run early and had to wait a while - unfortunately due to the low key nature of the event the Mole Valley's usual efficiency was not at full par. However, after this delay and control 2 on the Green course, everything else went very well. Thank you to Mike and his team for the efficient results processing with Sport Ident.

 

 

Gordon Parker (SLOW)