September, 2009:

Monday 7th September saw the 2nd ESOC ‘Social’ Ultrasprint.  Last year it wasn’t really a true ultrasprint, given that it was a maze on a non-orienteering map (which wasn’t North aligned) but this year I took up the organisation in an attempt to make it a bit more like a true ‘ultrasprint’.

I got the idea from the SYO ‘Garmin Ultrasprint’ that seems to have taken off in the Sheffield area.  What better way than as part of an informal ESOC social of learning the ropes. I loved the concept, but I didn’t like their idea of the ‘maze’ being so open which I felt would lead to a ‘look at map’, ‘look up’, ‘see control’, ‘run to it’ approach.  So I combined this idea with the previous ‘taped maze’ format, where there were dead ends and such like.

After ‘canvassing’ some people in ESOC I came to the conclusion that it needed to more maze, less open field, so I aimed to have only a shortish section of ‘running’ to get the heart rate up with some maze action before and after.  I selected Lauriston Castle as the location as it has a nice open bit of grass with some features on it (a concrete block thingy and a tree) so I could have them in the midst of the maze as well as some vaguely interesting bits of woodland / gardens for running around on.  This required a small number of map corrections which resulted in my first foray into OCAD – which is reasonably simple for changes like adding trees / bushes. What required a bit more thought was how to actually draw the maze on the map.  Obviously I did this in OCAD but should I use the fence symbol?  I played about with it but it simply didn’t look right.  The little dashes you get coming out of the fence line were too distracting from the detail required for the maze.  In the end I went with the small cliff symbol, which has a slightly thicker line and no dashes.  It didn’t make perfect sense from a mapping point of view, but it looked good and was navigable.  Here is the maze at 1:750:

The Maze

Map drawing complete I was ready to design some courses, this was pretty simple as I’ve planned a fair number of courses in my time.  The idea behind my designs were to get little distinction between a difficult route choice legs combined with some easy legs and some faster running outside the maze to get the HR up and make decision making a bit more troublesome.

Start of Course 1

All 3 maps are viewable in their slick-as-you-like Word documents via the link to the ESOC Site. The layout could have been done entirely in Condes or OCAD I guess but I didn’t have much time so I went with the easy option of pasting into Word.  The problem was how to make the maze navigable as well as the entire course.  In the maze there are a lot of controls in a small space so a 1:500/1:750 scale made sense, but this would have been huge for the rest of the course (and unecessary) so I opted for 3 map segments… One with the start, one with the entire course and one with the finish.  The start and finish bits were in the maze so it worked very well.  I guess I could have hidden the controls in the maze on the 1:2000 map, but again laziness / lack of time prevented this.  There were no control descriptions, I wanted people to know they were in the right place rather than find by number, I probably should have puts dots on the precise location on the map but forgot to do this before I printed.  I think, for a basic amount of effort, it looks pretty good and worked well.

End of Course 1

After helping to set out the maze last year I knew it was no easy task.  I decided to leave about 2 hours for it and arrived at 5 with few helpers signed up.  So my Mum and I set out the canes in all the right places and our mini army of Dad, Mark/Emma Wood and Simon set out all the tapes.  Once the canes were in place I set out all the controls (22 in total I think), then set up the download, then test ran one of the courses (!).  I think this was all finished at 7, when the event was due to start, perfect!

And below should be the full course, as you can see the bit in the maze is verging on the illegible, hence the blown up start and finish sections!

Everything after this went very well.  Download was a bit manic, there were a LOT of mispunches and hired cards etc. So glad I was using Autodownload (shameless plug) as with anything else this would have been a nightmare.  I did get to run all 3 courses though, and I made mistakes, big mistakes.  I lost maybe 20 seconds through hesitating / bad route choices on course 1.  I mispunched on course 2… misread the map and went to the wrong control.  oops, bit embarrassing!  Course 3 was pretty much perfect.  I realise I had drawn the map and planned the courses but it was annoying to mispunch as I would have won otherwise.

Ultrasprint Maze - thanks to Crawford for picure

A few people mispunched so I ‘let’ them run the courses again to get a valid time, because I’m so nice!  It was really hard though, so guess I did a good job! It was nice to see some non-ESOC people ask to come who were travelling a bit further, shows they are interested in the format, hopefully they will have been inspired and will put on their own versions!  I’m happy to help with advice too, just ask.

We already have an offer to plan the same social next year, can’t wait!  Would love to see something like this which is a bit more competitive though, hint hint All in all, very fun event, thanks to all who helped make it happen!