Training Log Archive: wilsmith

Sigh. Where to even begin to comment about this....???

In my mind, this was categorically NOT a championship race - how in the heck could we, in good conscience, contemplate handing out medals based on this competition? The race was rife with problems, right from the get-go, and clearly the effects of the problems A) were of significant proportion to distort the final results of the race, and B) were clearly unequal for all athletes participating, through no fault of their own - given the map and control placement, it was not possible to cleanly locate all the controls.

Whatever. Call yourself a medallist in the short distance if you want, but there will always be an asterix beside the result in my mind.

As described elsewhere, the race was a disaster, a fiasco, or one of many other descriptors. The start was delayed, initially by 30 minutes, then by an hour. And then it was delayed by a further hour (though I had no way of knowing this, since I was stuck in the car with Mia, given the inaccessibility of the start/finish areas for easy spectating). Katta had to move up her start to "0" and go without any warmup, just to make it back in time to feed a hungry and screaming baby. And even then I barely made it to my own start, despite running hard from the parking area.

On the way to the first control already it was clear that the map was going to be very dodgy at best. There was one large unmarked re-entrant (and a couple of other smaller ones that would also have been marked by all but the most careless of mappers) - I initially thought they might have drawn the start triangle in the wrong area, as I had just left the start and the terrain matched the map so poorly....

The white/green in the beginning of the course was not correct (what season was this map rechecked, if ever?), and there were clear errors in the contours on the way to #4. I lost no time there, but Katta lost 2+ minutes because of this (she's used to accurate maps, and dealing with a map with this "accuracy" is not something that is routinely practiced by the Swedish national team, for some strange reason). Control #7 was clearly not hung in the right spot and wasn't even in the circle - leading to a further mistake on #8 since the "small" reentrants mapped along the way are actually larger than mapped and our starting point was well off. Number 9 also a bit dodgy mapping, and then the area on the way to #11 definitely did not appear as mapped - certainly did not have 2 small hills as mapped, with a shallow re-entrant. Number 12 was also mis-hung, as the description and control circle indicated the top of a spur but the flag was in the reentrant beside it.....

You get the picture. By this time all interest in racing in such a farce was gone. Call me a prima donna if you like, but if the map is crap AND the controls are mis-hung, well, is it really a championship event?

Glaring mapping omissions around #15 (advertised as a subtle reentrant in a yellowish area, which in reality contained not only another mappable reentrant but also several distinct copses) iced the cake for me and it was time to go home. Of course I finished the race as per my standing policy of never DNF/DSQ in a race I started intending to finish, but this one was over long before the finish. There were allegedly other mis-hung controls that I simply didn't notice because I stumbled onto the control and punched without incident....

I had briefly considered protesting the race, and maybe someone should have.

Pretty sad, folks.

In retrospect it would have been better to skip this race entirely and save a bit more energy for the sprint later in the day and the classic the following day....

For the above....

COC Sprint.

This one can more closely be referred to as a championship race.

Brilliant course, map was quite good (no issues that I noticed with respect to field checking). Probably the print quality of the trails in the ISSOM symbology was a bit lacking (either the symbol came out too thin or unclear) - this is common in forest sprints, as demonstrated in discussions about the WOC2005 sprint map elsewhere.

Anyway, it was fun to race.

Start delayed by 90 minutes or so, but expected due to the late finish of the middle distance.

Unfortunately, there were SI problems - not all units were activated at the beginning of the race, but were for the later starters - definitely unfair. And not being able to generate a results list (it's already 3 days later and still no results up) is a bit of a problem.

With the splits provided, however, you could tell who was ahead of whom since the printout included a listing of your actual time plus some sort of constant (about 5 hours and 10 minutes).

My own race was decent, solid. Small losses on #3 and #14, plus small route choice loss on #9. Caught and passed both Will Hawkins and Brian Graham, and finished hard.

Based on the splits, Mike S beat me by about 30 sec, and Brent was about 15 seconds ahead of me. John F was somewhere in and around Mike's time. I didn't get to compare splits with the other guys, but it should be possible for the organizers to un-f$%k the results enough to post something soon.

However, infinitely more enjoyable than the middle distance. And kudos to Nick Duca for setting a great race.

For the above...

Sprint - Course 3 - Splits