Discussion: Programming

The consensus that the planning group arrived at was that there was significant uncertainty in how long you would have to wait crossing South Border Road - the crossing guard certainly couldn't arbitrarily stop traffic how ever many times was necessary for two hundred orienteers to cross twice, but that we didn't want competitors manipulating the voided legs excessively. We decided to publish that we would deduct up to one minute each way, but actually deduct two minutes each way if necessary - we expected high traffic. It is painfully clear that while this strategy might mitigate manipulation, we should have made some measurements before deciding what intervals to publish/deduct. There was only one instance of an orienteer taking longer than two minutes, and from the surrounding legs, it looks like this was reflective of his pace at that point in the race rather than strategy.

Also, the deduction was up to a minute each way. If you prefer, however, I would be happy to deduct that extra second you officially took. :)

Thank-you for reminding me, however; while the impact of the road crossing on competition was within our expectations, I had forgotten to go through the results and constrain the deduction. It's also interesting to note that the speed at which competitors crossed the road was generally a good predictor of result - faster competitors, for whatever reason (maintaining rhythm?) tended to cross the road very quickly (in ten to fifteen seconds) rather than taking advantage of the voided legs.

Seems like I missed the memo about the legs across the road not counting. Perfectly reasonable idea, but I didn't know about it. Was it in the meet notes? I spent some time trying to find useful stuff like whether men were on Green X or Green Y, or where the day 2 site was in the meet notes.

For some strange reason, the road crossing info was in the packet info only. Whereas the directions to the sites and the course descriptions with X vs. Y was only on-line.

I knew about the deduction, so I was relaxed about the crossing. I thought I was being *really* relaxed, but each time I only took about 30 seconds - think of all the recuperation lost by all the people only taking 15 second! (Not that it helped me any.)

What I lost (and not significant, really) was the time to make a good route choice to the next control. On both sides I headed off into the forest a few steps, only to decide to head back to the road to run most of the route there. I was 10s one way and 11s the other, so the deduction certainly wasn't much help.

Evidentally I was too out of it (even going) to make use of say 30-45" of map study opportunity before proceeding into the next group of controls across the street. Forewarning re shared controls would have been helpful. Right off the bat Sat am, I saw '1/16' upside down which was confusing for me, not having done shared-control O in a long time. I still ponder about brain disconnect & MP - don't think it was BG skip philosophy....