Inadvertant cheating on ISSOM

[Simon E]

The point I was making was that in situations where the passibility is simply down to mappers/planners discression (no restriction from land owners, not dangerous, less than 2m, but possibly difficult for some people), then the threshold for what is passable is getting lower due to people mapping for the increasingly aged and un-athletic British Orienteer.

Do you see what we are talking about?

We may now be violently agreeing. I am trying to put the point of view of the competitor looking at the map. ISSOM may say all sorts of things about how you come to a decision on how a feature is represented. However this means that essentially anything could end up mapped as impassable, regardless of what it might look like in the terrain. This becomes a real problem when features that are physically "crossable" for some or even all competitors end up mapped as impassable. The planner and controller need to be particularly careful at this point.

I'd personally disagree with the theory that runnability is being systematically "dumbed down", although ISOM does require this to happen!

524 High fence. A boarded or wire fence higher than ca 1.5m, not crossable to the average orienteer.

[graeme]

We may now be violently agreeing.

Hardly violent. We're now onto page 9 and there's been no suggestion of disagreement about what competitors are meant to do. As the title says, its about how the mapper and planner can best avoid inadvertant cheating. In particular, how best to mark something which is physically crossable as legally uncrossable. ESOC tried using purple "do not cross" lines across gaps - an allowed solution under ISSOM, but one which doesn't seem to have been especially effective.

[Snail]

I'm not a fan of mapping all "must not be used" areas as olive green, particularly where this may confuse the competitor. At present olive green can, and is, used equally for not-to-be-used gardens, shopping centres, roads, buildings etc. This can make the map very difficult to interpret - particularly at race speed - and can actually make it more likely that someone will accidentally transgress...

Better to map it as it is, and then use the (ISOM) out-of-bounds overprint, even if not strictly ISSOM.

[mharky]

This is the best solution for the competitor, as it allows the to correlate the map with the ground. However, ISSOM dictates that olive green be used with the purpler OOB stripes only for last minute corrections. Similarly, it states that any normally passable features (fence, wall etc.) that are strictly impassable for the event should NOT be marked with the thick purple line, but rather with the impassable symbol for that feature.

One of the many floors of ISSOM.

Simon, would you map run-in tapes?

[70plus]

One of the many floors of ISSOM.

You mean flaws?

[Roger]

Stripes (either black or purple) show up badly on small or thin areas. The solid olive-green or green-black colours are better, but in my opinion should be at least 1mm in each direction to give the competitors a fighting chance of identifying the colour and hence that the area is forbidden or impassable. Which means that those 1m wide flowerbeds should be distorted so that they appear to be 5m wide.

Uncrossable gates or fences across narrow gaps need a similar length of the 'uncrossable' symbol, for the same reason.

[Simon E]

Simon, would you map run-in tapes?

I'm not quite sure what you mean. The run-in itself is likely to be marked using a dashed purple line (marked route). Any problems about possible crossing of run-in tapes during the race need to be planned and controlled out before the race.