Saturday 13th November 2021, Itchington Holt - Local Score Event including Tony Haw Trophy,
Click HERE for a PDF of the results.
Organiser's comments: (Tom Jeffries)
A classic day in the picturesque woods of Itchington Holt; overcast grey skies with a little mizzle reminder to all that Autumn is here, fantastic leaf colours on the trees and plenty of leaves to run through too. The woods were at their runnable best for this score event with 53 competitors.
8 Runners scored the maximum score available of 270 and no penalties the fastest Male and female runners were Ben Windsor in 28:29 and Kirsten Strain in 38:56.
My thanks to John Smith for planning the Tony Haw Score event and control placement, Bruce Bryant for coordinating the maps and Clive Wrench for general assistance on the day and supervising the start. As ever Karin Kirk was on hand to guide any newcomers and encourage them to go further and have a go. Final thanks to; Richard Gardner, Barry Elkington, Bob Brandon & Mykyta Chubynsky for collecting the controls in afterwards.
Lessons learnt from a first-time organiser of an SI event with pre-entry;
- Remember to print a start list before you go to the event! Fortunately, I had time, pen & paper to copy down a start list direct from the Fabian Entries list off my phone screen!
- Level D events with Pre-Entry – Very hard to know who is out on the course and there is no simple safety check to account for all runners. I simply crossed people off my start list as they returned, but I didn’t know if they had started in the first place!! Yes, the SI Check Box knows, but I did not have the means to interrogate it.
- Pre-Entries via Fabian the individual can select their affiliated club regardless of being an actual member or not. Karin was excited to think OD had new members, until she realised, they had selected OD as it was an OD event and should have selected INDependent instead!
Lost property – A red pair of Innovate trail shoes left in the car park, now with Mel Elkington.
Planner's comments:
Planning a score event in what is a quite small area was an interesting challenge. After discussions of a few options, the "turn it over when you are good and ready but you can's turn it back" seems to have worked quite well, and was relatively easy to explain. I think only one car managed to convince themselves that it was an odd/even event. Most of the controls were on the first side to give a traditional score experience, and then there was a good run around the wood on the reverse.
My thanks go to Bruce Bryant, who updated the map, and provided a quality finish to my somewhat rough initial course. He also repatriated the control circle which had migrated to the wrong side of the map.
This was only my second attempt at course planning, so I was happy with the way it turned out. If anything, the course could probably have been a little longer as 8 competiors completed within the time limit.
John Smith