Score Events

I had a good run recently beating a few people who I would normally lose to. Well, that’s not true actually because I didn’t run at all. In fact I walked the whole way – and yet I still beat lots of people I who I would normally lose to.

So how did this happen?

The first thing to know is that it was a one hour score event and the second was that there were two maps: on one side was a large area of Salisbury Plain (at 1:10,000) and on the other a very small urban area at 1:2000 (it was a mock-up of a German village built by the army for training purposes).

I made the decision even before we started to spend most of my hour in the village whilst most other people (runners) went off around the Plain for half an hour or so and then finished in the village. Now unusually, on this event there were 75 controls of which 47 were in the village whilst only 28 were on the Plain. Still with me? To make matters even more exaggerated, 123 points were on the Plain in an area that was about 1.5km squared, In the village were 256 points in an area about 450m squared. And it gets better: another 11 controls were within 200 metres or so of the village.

So to sum up:

About 62 points were scattered across a large area of Salisbury Plain.

51 points were just outside a village

256 points were inside a village about 45 metres long.

And ALL of this information was on the map very clearly

You would think that only very stupid people would go for the 62 points, but many of the people who went for them were far from stupid. So what happened?

Well firstly, hats off to the planner who took the start away from the village to persuade people to go there last. (The finish was in the middle of the village). Secondly, the vast majority of competitors just did what they always do in a score event and ran off, working things out as they went which turned out to be completely wrong in this case.

So, how should you approach a score event?

The first question that I always ask myself with a score event is “Do I think that I might be able to get all of the controls in the hour?” If it’s possible then you have a simpler job of just finding the best way to do that, bearing in mind that it may turn out that you can’t get them either because you mis-estimated or perhaps because you made an error and lost time.

If you know that you can’t get them all then you need to decide which to go for and which not. There are a couple of calculations that you need to do here, how far can I run and what are the values of the points. Usually, of course, the higher valued controls are a long way away or maybe nearby but difficult. If this is the case, then a route which works its way out to the farthest points and back is usually the best strategy. It’s a good idea to leave a few near the finish in case you get back early.

Another calculation of course is “What is the penalty for being late back?” or even “Is there a penalty for being late back?” If no, then your best strategy is just to get them all and return back late.

As you are heading back towards the finish, you also need to have a plan-B in case you find yourself running short of time – a way that you can use to cut a few corners and get back quickly so that you won’t have too many penalty points. But penalty points are not to be avoided at all costs. It may be that by collecting a control at the end you gain more points than you lose, but you always have to consider here that you might not find this last control in which case you will have incurred penalties with no benefit.

You’ll see therefore that the amount of work that you have to do BEFORE YOU START is considerable. In fact more than you can reasonably expect to do, but you still have to make an effort; 20 or 30 seconds is probably more than you need (unless like the above event you find that it’s seriously lop-sided) and it’s time well spent. Even if it’s a mass start and everyone else is running off, you would be well-advised to have a quick look at the whole map. You also need to reappraise the situation several times during the event – usually I would aim to do this every 15 minutes in a score event, but possibly every few minutes towards the end.

Another thing that you might like to consider is which way to set off. Usually there’s a clockwise or anti-clockwise route. Various things can help determine this: Which is the trickiest area of the map ? You may know this from previous runs there or simply by looking at the map. My preference if possible, is to get the tricky ones early but not first. I don’t want to do them at the end when I’m tired and possibly panicking but I’d also rather have a couple of easy ones to get me into the map.

It’s also worth considering which way most runners start; if you go the same way, you may get an advantage early on while if you go the opposite way you may get an even bigger advantage later in the race as they show you where controls are by running out of them.

And finally one last tip that I thought was very obvious until I heard several people talking about it at the end of this race – take a stop watch and start it at the start of the race. It might seem obvious but if you don’t you may well end up being early and missing the opportunity to collect more controls or worse be late and lose all of those points you took an hour collecting.

And now the admission: At the event above at which I did so well, I clearly made all the right decisions – I chose the right controls, found them well and judged it to perfection. Yes, that is all true - but for all the wrong reasons! I was injured and decided to walk around so couldn’t go very far. I decided to get a few on the Plain but to be honest I found walking there just a bit boring, so I headed off to the village. I’d already decided that I would spend most of my time there, not for any strategic reasons, just because I thought it would be more interesting. When I got there my aim was to go to every control in there, just so I could see it all, it was only about then that I realised that this was where all the controls were. I then really enjoyed my walk around, even stopping to take photos on the way around. With 5 or 10 minutes remaining, I thought I might not be able to collect all the controls in time, but decided I would get them all anyway because it was fun – if I was going to be late I wouldn’t care. In fact I got back with about 15 seconds to spare and so I had the perfect run  - not bad for someone who was walking.

Which brings me to the final point… in score events, it always helps to be lucky!

Map Reading on the Run – A way to start

I was taught early on in my orienteering life that reading the map whilst running was a really good thing to do – and it so obviously is. If you don’t believe this, the next time you go for a run with someone, let them keep running while you stand still for five seconds. (Five seconds is not a long time to stand and read the map). After your five seconds are up, start running as before and just look how far you are behind. That’s a lot to catch up. It is very easy to stop to look at the map for five seconds several times on a single leg. It is easily possible to spend much more than five seconds standing looking at the map. This can add up to several minutes very easily. This is why reading the map whilst running is very important.

But it’s also very difficult – especially in rough terrain.

I was having this discussion with a fellow orienteer the other day (having beaten him mostly because he kept stopping) and was thinking about what to do about it. I’ll come back to this whole topic of map reading on the run in a later blog, but I think that the easiest way to start is to try and look ahead at just one thing. Before you arrive at any control, decide which way you will leave it. Don’t hang around at the control flag. As well as wasting your own time, by the way, you’re also making it easier for your rivals by advertising the flag to them.

So, at some time during each leg decide on the way out; this decision can take several forms: you might just say to yourself “run north” or it might be “run uphill” or perhaps “continue along the path”. If you like you can say it out loud before you punch, and do what you say. You’ve now saved 5 seconds per control. If there are 24 controls, you’ve saved 2 minutes. Easy. Give it a try.

50 Shades of Green

I went to an event earlier this year (I’ll not say where) and had a pretty good run. Nothing spectacular but probably about what I usually do. It was spoiled of course by a couple of errors and the largest was when I took a direct route rather than running around the path.

On the map it looked the best route but when I got there I found it to be much “greener” than I expected.

At the finish I found myself talking to the mapper (and planner, I think) and said that I thought that the block that I ran through should perhaps have been green rather than white. His response was interesting: “well, there aren’t really enough shades of green for this map”.

I had a think about this and wasn’t really sure what to make of it. Was the map correct? More importantly, I thought about how I could have dealt with the map better. In fact when I looked at the map there were about 7 or 8 different screens used including hatching for undergrowth but excluding olive green for a settlement. And he was right; there were many variations of runnability in the area probably more than the 7 or 8 for which they had different greens. So maybe, the map was OK, the block that I had run through was not really that runnable but it was certainly better than some other areas that I’d visited.

So what’s to do as a competitor?

Well the first thing is to remember that there is no absolute truth about maps and especially about vegetation. Vegetation is probably the most difficult thing to map and the thing that changes the most, so always be prepared for it not being perfect. It is also the feature which changes the most – in some cases it grows up in the summer and dies back in the winter, in other cases it just keeps growing.

Secondly, be prepared to change your mind if, when you get there, the vegetation is not what you expected from looking at the map.

Thirdly, try and understand what the mapper was thinking when he drew the map. (This applies to everything, not just vegetation, more of that in a later blog). Whilst I’m pretty sure that this block of forest shouldn’t have been white, it’s easy to understand why it was mapped that way, once I thought about it.

Fourthly, have a look at the area as you pass through it. There may be a chance before you get to the start, and there certainly will be as you run around your course. Think about whether you would have mapped this part of the forest greener or whiter than the mapper did. It’s likely that he/she will have been consistent with their definitions of the vegetation even if they disagree with your definitions. So if they are mapping blocks greener here they will probably also be mapping it greener over there.

But fifthly remember that it may not be consistent; there are lots of reasons for this: one area could have grown more than another, one area may have been updated more recently than another or perhaps different mappers may have been used for different areas. Of course these things shouldn’t have happened but we all know they do.