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.