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February, 2012:

Scottish CompassSport Cup Heat

Feb 21st, 2012
by Andrew.
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Last Sunday was the Scottish heat for the CompassSport cup. ESOC have a love/hate relationship with this event, we love to enter it and win the heat but have in recent years failed to get a team to go to the final. This has usually been down to the distance to travel as the final is usually held in deepest, darkest England. This year the final is in Scotland, only an hour or so South of Edinburgh. As a result of this we were keen to qualify but then so were the other clubs! This resulted in 3 clubs vying for a single spot in the final; ESOC, GRAMP and MAROC. We knew it was going to be a close run thing so Crawford had rallied the troops in order to get a strong team to show and we were quietly confident…

I was running the brown course (Open Men basically) and knew with a good run I could possibly sneak the 100 points for the win which would have helped as us fast ‘young men’ are not a strong point in ESOC. I actually had a fairly inconsistent run. Loads of mistakes in the circle cost me lots of time. Looking at the Overall Results I should have been more than capable of being around the same time as Roger Goddard. Because there are two competitions in points for the Brown Cup course I would have been very happy with 2nd (no idea who this Felix chap is, he’s quite fast) but am much less happy with 6th.

I videod the whole thing, again trying to play with my new headcam to try and figure it out. Bonus points if you watch it all ;)

The good thing is that we qualified! It was a very very close thing with only a few points between ourselves and MAROC. A bit of recalculation shows that the result could have been very very different very very easily. We will see all those pesky English teams in the final! :)

GoPro camera and my latest geekery

Feb 8th, 2012
by Andrew.
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I have been meaning to get a headcam for a while now, but watching the XGames a few weeks ago made me want one even more! They filmed some very cool footage there, mostly made even more cool by how steady the camera was which was always going to be a problem for a running based sport. Nevertheless I decided it was time to get one so I splurged on the new GoPro Hero2. Then I rocked around the ESOC Sprint O with it attached to my head (albeit at a really crappy angle, sorry!).GoPro Hero2

As the angle the camera needs to be at isn’t something I’ve perfected yet I decided not to upload any files that were too large, so the quality isn’t great. Thankfully attackpoint has a really great feature of being able to link your gps data to both a youtube video and a QuickRoute map which then gets overlaid onto Google Earth. You can see this for the ESOC Sprint O here: Prologue and Chase

The other thing I experimented with was the nifty bit of software Jarkko (of Routegadget fame) wrote to combine the video with a map overlay. I definitely didn’t get the config quite right but as it takes time to process I didn’t want to do it all again with such a rubbish quality video. It also makes use of a VirtualDub plugin called Deshaker to remove the shakiness of the video at the expense of adding a black border that wobbles about. I think it makes it much more viewable but it’ll be way more effective when I get a better camera angle.

I really just bought this as a toy and something to analyse my orienteering. I can think of a view other uses though.. I’d like to create some sort of promotional video (who for, I don’t know, ESOC?) with filming from the St Andrews weekend. I’m also keen to try out the WiFi addon for it that comes out later this year. Live streaming to the arena at O races, anyone?

In other news I set a new 5k PB at the Edinburgh parkrun last week, 18.59. Not super fast but definitely something to step forward from, especially as I now have a place in the Great North Run in September to look forward to!